"Playfully referencing film noir and Looney Toons, The dark years presents a multi-textured portrait of a country in crisis and offers astute insight into our own interesting times"--Container. "Episode 1 of The dark years begins at the end of the roaring '20s in the newsrooms of the Toronto Daily Star, a big city newspaper whose popularity comes from its appeal to "the little guy." Reporters at the Toronto Daily Star shed light on "the dark years" by collecting stories and anecdotes from the ordinary people who lived through the daily hardships, humiliations and hungers that defined the Great Depression"--Container. "In the second episode of The dark years, the Toronto Daily Star sees its subscriptions rise during the worst years of the Depression. In 1933, the Daily Star grabs more readers by following popular stories with wide appeal. But because of spending cuts, the newspaper almost misses out on one of the biggest stories of the decade: the birth of the Dionne quintuplets in 1934. Luckily, the Daily Star reporter Gordon Sinclair and photographer Fred Davis manage to take us just outside the small town of Callander, Ontario, to meet the famous newborns of a poor farming couple"--Container. "The threat of fascism looms in this final hour of The dark years. As the year 1939 approaches, newspaper owner Mr. Atkinson, a pacifist, comes to accept the inevitability of another war in Europe. Reporter Matthew Halton finds himself in Munich in 1938, amidst Hitler and other European leaders, and it is then that The Daily Star really mobilizes its war coverage. The miniseries ends tensely with the Great Depression suddenly over, "simply on account of the war" and dark years potentially leading to even darker ones"--Container.

Color animation with black and white newsreel footage.