One of the most innovative shows on Quebec television is a bromance, a comedy about two guys in their 30s who are breaking down barriers on the frontier of the two solitudes.

Ces Gars-là, featuring comedian Sugar Sammy and actor-director Simon-Olivier Fecteau, follows the pals through sexual conquests and mines the deepest recesses of their one-track minds for material. In the end, they are often left relying on one another when everyone else has moved on.

The roles are semi-autobiographical and each episode is premised on something that actually happened, however small that kernel may be. Sugar Sammy (Samir Khullar), the Indo-Canadian funny man, plays up his unhealthy relationship with his parents and his playboy ways. Fecteau, the straight man, brings the emotional baggage of a 10-year relationship that ended badly; his character can't make a clean break from his ex. The show, which began its second season this week on V-Télé, is almost Seinfeldian in the way it explores the minutiae of the mundane.

But the revolution is not in the show's content. Rather, it is its novel portrayal of a phenomenon unique to Quebec's largest city, one that hasn't been reflected before on Canadian screens.

The characters will start a sentence in French and finish it in English. It may be the other way around, or a question may come from Shakespeare with Molière giving the reply. Often, sentences are punctuated with curses in either official language.

The end result is something like the film Bon Cop, Bad Cop, except that it's not premised on stereotypes about crazy Quebecers and anal anglos.

The show's backdrop is unmistakably Montreal, as is the language. The vast majority of Canadians — and even many Quebecers from other regions — would likely struggle to follow its beat.

“Our show isn't something that's trying to be different for the sake of being different. It's reflecting a reality that not only exists, but that has existed for a while,” Sugar Sammy said in an interview.

“There are people out there who consume culture in English and in French who live in Montreal. There are people who will watch the hockey game in French and then will watch House of Cards on Netflix. It's not unrealistic for that to exist here.”

Being true doesn't make it any less controversial. Rising levels of bilingualism in Montreal are the common scourge of sovereignists and language advocates who fret about the disappearance of French in Quebec.

Sammy's success as a fluently bilingual entertainer has only made those threats more real because he is also an unapologetic federalist.

One of the most memorable scenes from the first season occurs when Sammy discovers a girl he has fallen for is a militant separatist and he must choose between breaking the law to promote the cause and breaking the girl's heart. He chooses Canada, saying: “I'll always remember you, Mélanie. Respect you? No. But I'll remember you.”

The pro-independence Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste accused the comedian late last year of “spitting in the face” of francophone Quebecers with an English-language subway ad for his standup show asking for a complaint to the province's language police as a Christmas gift (an enraged lawyer fulfilled his request). A few weeks later Sammy was rattled by a death threat phoned in before a performance in Sherbrooke.

“I know it's a delicate subject and I know some people in Quebec have very strong political opinions, and for sure I can understand those people who might feel strongly about those types of jokes, but I don't get it when people get really mad,” said Fecteau, who also directs Ces Gars-là. “I think it stays on the funny side. It doesn't go on the dark side.”

But it does touch on a cultural peculiarity of Quebec society, he admits.

“It's the only place I know where you feel awkward when saying you're a Canadian. . . . Just saying who you are can create a discussion and that's an odd thing for a country, for a province.”

Sammy's allegiances have resulted in accusations he is trying to erode francophone identity, using humour to bore into people's brains.

“There's someone who wrote to me the other day saying, ‘I know that the Liberals and Harper are bankrolling all this propaganda that you're sending to us in Quebec,'” he said. “I'm like, ‘The Liberals and Harper?' It's comedy, not magic.”

But the goal of his comedy is to get a laugh, not to bate the audience or get a rise. It was, after all, a conscious decision to conquer the province when he could just as easily have continued performing across Canada and internationally. That decision has meant accepting that the characteristics that give him his niche — his Indian heritage, his mother tongue and his political leanings — are the same things that draw the critics.

“With any society it's very sane. It's good to have that balance, having different points of view discussed not only in the political realm but also in the arts,” he says. “I come from a certain point of view and I don't hide it. And for me, just being someone who says that he loves being a Montrealer, being a Quebecer and being a Canadian, it provokes certain reactions.”

If the success of his bilingual standup is a sign, many Quebecers find more humour than harm in his shtick. The performance is now in its third year and is slated to continue through the summer of 2016. And it is probably safe to say that if the routine had bombed, the franglais TV script for Ces Gars-là may never have seen the light of day.

But it's no sure thing that Quebec's more staunchly francophone networks — TVA and Radio-Canada — will one day follow suit. For one, the CBC's French sister station is mandated to preserve and promote French. But for many Quebecers the idea of a flourishing joual, a French-English stew, is a sign that the end times are at hand.

“I think it bothers some people that the reality is becoming more and more bilingual in Montreal,” says Fecteau. “I'm glad our show does it and . . . we don't even do it to be provocative. We just do it because it's like that.”