"I had to run it by my priest and make sure it was okay," explains Chris Kramer, the 29-year-old Calgarian who eventually did take the part in The Collector, a new hour-long supernatural drama produced in association with CHUM Television, which premieres tonight on the Space channel.
"We all have tough choices to make," says Kramer, who now sees the show as a blessing in disguise, one that saved him from a purgatory of slinging hot wings and beer at the Cactus Club in Vancouver.
"Morgan is a damned soul," Kramer says of his character, who makes a second deal with the devil to help his "clients" seek redemption. "He wants to help others avoid the same mistake. And because he's still alive, hope does exist."
Could there be a similar hope for the survival of Canadian drama now that CHUM has seen the light?
Yes, CHUM Television, the same Canadian broadcaster that sold its soul for Star Trek syndications and feasted on the four-hour spoils of Trista and Ryan's wedding is now expanding it commitment to presenting more homegrown drama in primetime.
Is redemption possible? There are many who believe it so.
To help boost international sales, CHUM has committed to an unprecedented 88 episodes and approved a healthy budget of $1.4-million per episode, slightly higher than the average ($1-million) cost of most Canadian dramas. The series was entirely financed within Canada and is set in Vancouver.
"I think they will be a huge player in the future as other networks bow out," says Julia Keatley, the Vancouver producer who created the recently cancelled Cold Squad series for CTV and is now working with CHUM on Godiva's, a new comedy-drama set in the world of the restaurant industry.
In addition to The Collector, Godiva's and its continued support of independent Canadian feature films, CHUM also has hands in Terminal City, a new 10-part miniseries produced by Vancouver's Crescent Entertainment, in association with The Movie Network and Movie Central. The company is also co-producing six new made-for-television movies in partnership with the Victoria office of Brightlight Pictures as part of its 2002 Drama Initiative, which teams emerging Vancouver Island-based writers and directors with established producers. And coming soon to a theatre near you, the made-in-Canada MuchMusic Movie.
"This is a new direction," says Diane Boehme, CHUM's director of independent production, who says there's no point in following the trend of creating new Canadian reality shows, as all the other national networks are now doing, when CHUM can easily buy the most popular shows from Americans.
"We've always had big commitments to Canadian drama, but we've mostly concentrated in sci-fi," referring to the company's financing of such shows as First Wave, Dead Man's Gun, Lost World and Earth: Final Conflict.
"Unfortunately, it's a genre that tends to be demeaned by the media. I don't think most people are aware of how active we've actually been."
CHUM is still committed to the shoot-'em-up and sci-fi niche genres in which they've made their mark, and are in fact currently involved in a new South African action-adventure co-production called Charlie Jade for next year. But as the company grows, Boehme says it is trying to expand its mandate with Canadian shows that have mass appeal.
"We're making shows that we hope will appeal to a wider demographic. The Collector is not necessarily a show that will appeal to the highbrow tastes of some critics, but it's a broadly appealing show that is extraordinarily well made. It's more speculative fiction than sci-fi."
This latest leap into drama is one of the most significant changes in a company that is rapidly acquiring new stations and redefining itself as a national network that has matured since the early seventies when Moses Znaimer's original Toronto-based station revolutionized television with a mix of independent movies, urban lifestyle programming and cheap local news.
"We're bigger than we used to be and it's allowed us to do more creative things," CHUM CEO Jay Switzer told The Globe and Mail in April, just after the company had made the deal to purchase Calgary's Craig Media (still pending regulatory approval).
"We've never been large enough to support and finance a visibly set-in-Canada dramatic series like The Collector, a show by Canadians, for Canadians. Every actor, director, writer and location on that show is Canadian."
Switzer, who was CHUM's vice-president of television programming before he became president four years ago, has actually long preached the gospel of promoting homegrown Canadian drama as a means of survival for Canadian broadcasters.
"The renting of U.S. programming will, six or seven years from now, not be a business we can rely on as much," Switzer told The Hollywood Reporter two years ago. As he then explained, Switzer believes the Canadian business model of sucking up U.S. network fare and using the profits to cross-subsidize money-losing Canadian shows will eventually break down in the digital world when U.S. studios will stop licensing their shows to Canadian middlemen.
It was about the same time, two years ago, that Switzer approached Keatley at the Banff International TV Festival and asked her to present him with the idea for a new series.
"He said he'd always been a fan of Cold Squad," Keatley recalls. "But he wanted a show that would hit the 18-to-25 demographic -- and wasn't a cop show."
She came up with Godiva's, which she wrote with Michael MacLennan from Queer as Folk. She describes the show, which will be set in Vancouver's trendy Yaletown neighbourhood, as "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll in the restaurant industry".
The series, now being cast in Toronto, was originally slated for 16 one-hour episodes, but only received funding from the Canadian Television Fund for six. Keatley, who likens the series to an HBO production, isn't too disappointed. She'd rather trim the show than retool it as a movie of the week, as the CTF committee had originally suggested.
"A lot of people have asked me why I would take this to CHUM instead of someone else. I had a great relationship with CTV, but this is a show that really suited CHUM. They're willing to take risks with language and the edgy sort of things that Canadian broadcasters talk about doing, but really don't.
"They really believe in this project," adds Keatley. "CHUM has been huge supporters of independent feature film in this country. And I thinking they're bringing the same enthusiasm to their new flagship prime-time programming."
As a Vancouverite, Keatley appreciates the fact that CHUM was involved with the West Coast film community long before they had stations in the region and regulatory commitments to keep. "It strikes me as a much more honest commitment," she says.
Of course, CHUM isn't just upping its drama content for purely altruistic reasons. Boehme firmly believes that shows such as Godiva's and The Collector will be able to make the money.
" The Collector is eminently exportable," Boehme says of the series, which is produced by Larry Sugar of Vancouver's No Equal Entertainment. "There are deals already in place and deals that are coming."
While some might wonder what distinctly Canadian elements might be brought to bear in a show about a damned 14th-century monk, Sugar, who has previously worked with CHUM on Dead Man's Gun and First Wave, doesn't apologize for the show's popular appeal or lack of parochialism.
"I don't think you have to tell a story about a Canadian to be uniquely Canadian. Unless you're telling a story about Nanook of the North, I don't think any show is uniquely Canadian."
Alexandra Gill