Set in the fictitious town New Bedford, Ontario, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Wind at My Back was a one-hour episodic program chronicling the ups and downs of the lives of the Bailey family as they endured the hardships characteristic of rural Canada in the 1930s. Loosely based on characters, settings, and locations created by Canadian novelist Max Braith­waite (best known for Who Has Seen the Wind, which was adapted into a successful Canadian film) in his book Never Sleep Three on a Bed, among other 1930s­ set fictions, the program's narrative structure turned on relationship between the various generations of the Bailey family and the other residents of New Bedford.

     The story begins as Honey Bailey's husband, Jack, dies suddenly, causing Honey to lose her home and the family business. Her domineering mother-in-law, May Bailey, matriarch of the town's wealthy mining family, is unsupportive, takes custody of Honey's two boys, "Hub" (Hubert) and "Fat" (Henry), in the family man­ sion, and sees that Honey's baby daughter, Violet, is sent to live with distant relatives. Eventually remarrying, this time to school teacher Max Sutton, Honey manages to forge a new life for herself in New Bedford, a town dominated by the influence of her late husband's family.

     Just as Road to Avon/ea did, Wind at my Back constructed a predominantly nostalgic world, not simply through costume-period depictions of family struggle during the Depression, but also through the evolving children's relationships (particularly Hub and Fat) to their elders and their gradual transformation by the later seasons into boys maturing into adolescence, providing further avenues for exploring the coming-of­ age themes so common to family entertainment of this kind. The Depression-era setting provided many opportunities to celebrate family bonds and community spirit by confronting characters with difficulties that were only satisfactorily resolved with the help of kin or community. Family crises intertwined with the presence and influence of other citizens of the town (Ollie Jefferson [Neil Crane], owner of Jefferson's Garage, and Archie Attenborough [Richard Blackbum], who ran Stutts Pharmacy, for example) and in certain instances with larger social issues . Like The Waltons before it, Wind at my Back created a liberal-humanist view of the world in which the global financial crisis of the Depression provided a suitable backdrop of difficulty on which was painted a warm canvas of cross­ generational familial and community struggle and co-operation.

     Wind at My Back can be seen as a representative example of the recent  successes of state intervention in the Canadian television industries. Produced by a private production company, the program  was made in association not only with the CBC, the national broadcaster, but also with the participation of several of the nation's industrial incentive programs for television including the Canadian Television Fund (a partnership between the Canadian government  and the Canadian cable television companies), Telefilm Canada's Equity Investment Program, the Canadian Television Fund's License Fee Program, and the Government of Canada Film or Video Production Tax Credit Program. Through these  various  instruments of incentive, the Canadian government has largely achieved the goals of cultural policy. as  programs such as Wind at My Back illustrate. by creating indigenous. relatively popular. nationally specific entertainment programs. and the goals of industrial policy. by generating capital, contributing to the es­tablishment of a sufficiently large and capably trained workforce for the specialized needs of television pro­duction, and creating exportable, internationally sal­able cultural commodities.

     The series and the Christmas special have been rerun on the CBC, and the series ran on Encore's WAM! Channel in the United States and Disney Channels in France and Australia.