Traders sprang into life in 1995 through the kind of Coriolis effect that generates destructive out-of-season storms, messy foreign wars, and Canadian television series. Rumour has it that Jim Sward, vice-president of Global TV in Toronto, had survived some form of high-level financial hullabaloo and found it so fascinating that he announced his desire to put on the fall schedule a television series set in the world of high-finance. Several production companies leapt into the ensuing horse race and commissioned scripts.
Global picked one of Atlantis Films' pilots which featured a lot of long silky legs exiting limousines, coitus on mink furs, erotic innuendo across boardroom tables, etc., sort of a Melrose Place meets Dallas. Then Global changed its mind or threatened to change its mind or somebody thought it might change its mind and Seaton McLean, then the television czar at Atlantis, tossed the script to me to see if I'd do a rewrite. I told him I was not interested in doing a melodramatic, soapy sex series and executive producer Alyson Feltes seized her heart (I'm pretty sure it was her heart but I was trying not to look) and declared that neither was she. We moved forward on the assumption that Traders should be powered by cases, like a law show. Only instead of court cases, they'd be financial cases. That decided, I took a whack at writing the pilot.
Which is when I discovered why the previous writer had preferred sex and skullduggery. Traders was not a good idea for a television series. The concepts are abstract rather than dramatic and the people you're writing about are, in the main, a bunch of greedy, materialistic money-grubbers. You've got a bunch of millionaires winning and losing big whacks of money. What audience is going to care? Answering that question became the bête noire of Traders story-meetings and as a result the series went through writers like the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan went through extras.
And, of course, there was Global's decision to run our show against the number one show IN THE WORLD because, as they said, year after year, "Nothing else does quite as well against ER as you do."
I also think that's why the show turned out rather well.
That and the fact that we didn't really have a lot of money or time. An American prime-time network show works on a budget approaching $2-million per episode and is shot in eight to 12 days. Traders was shot for substantially less than $1-million per episode on a six-day schedule until season three, when we expanded to a comparatively leisurely seven-day shoot.
So, to recap the advantages Traders enjoyed: a bad idea for a series, plus too little money, plus too little time, and a time slot with too few viewers left over.
Suddenly, everybody had to be very good at their jobs. Who could afford a new set? The old Tech War set was brilliantly converted into an investment bank. A six-day shooting schedule left no time to get all the coverage a prime-time hour really needed, so Alyson Feltes came up with what we optimistically called "shakey cam:" a kind of swooping, hand-held, cinema-vérité look which obviated the need for separate close-ups. (On our bad days we called it pukey cam.) Of course, this exciting and kinetic form of shooting taxed directors and camera operators to their limits, forced editors to make coherent what might otherwise look like a chaotic jumble, and required the sound department to work magic.
The early reviews of Traders cited the big budget look of the show and the American pacing. Some even called the show glitzy and glossy. We didn't know whether to be pleased that we'd fooled them or annoyed that they couldn't see the miracles being wrought week by week.
We were also forced to adapt the pace of writing in order to deal with the exigencies of budget and time. We couldn't afford a lot of location shooting which meant shooting the bulk of each episode in the bank. Worse, we were writing about millionaires, so if we went home with them, their homes had to be magnificent. Also, the stories had to take place within three script days because that's how many changes of wardrobe we could afford. From the beginning, Traders'look, feel, and execution was more a reaction to outside cost factors than due to a creative spark.
That's why we had to have the best actors in the country working on the show.
Our stars: Sonja Smits as Sally Ross, Bruce Gray as Adam Cunningham, David Cubitt as Jack Larkin and Rick Roberts as Donald D'Arby carried our A stories. They had to wade through jabberwock as incomprehensible and arcane as the most esoteric science-fiction. And they had to do it while hitting a huge number of marks, during scenes much longer than average because we didn't have time to set up the camera and lighting any more than we had to. Six, eight, or 10 page scenes were not rare. This is roughly like asking an actor to emote while running the marathon.
Our B stories were almost always carried by Patrick McKenna, brilliantly cast as edgy pit boss Marty and the actors who played the pit-traders: Chris Leavins, Ron Gabriel, David Hewlett and Kim Huffman. Imagine Star Trek set in the engine room with Scotty. The pit traders constantly had their eyes on shifting, meaningless numbers, computer screens, tapes, telephones, shouting into headsets, seldom allowed to see the light of day or interact with people other than themselves. Not only that, but the B stories are where we carried the bulk of our comedy. My God, the brilliance of these actors! Funny, touching, kinetic week after week, in the same environment, talking about commodities and options and puts and stocks as though they mattered. And somehow they persuaded an audience that all that arcane mish-mash did matter.
Even more amazing, in the rare silences, in their sideways looks, in their reactions, these actors did the impossible: They made us love these greedy sharks, to see what fears and vulnerabilities lay behind that greed, what psychology it was that made money matter so much to them.
Every time the writing on Traders was praised, I knew in my heart it was the actors who deserved the credit.
One of the writers on Traders once referred to the Picasso Effect the series enjoyed, to whit: This stuff is so complicated that nobody wants to admit they don't understand it, ergo, they have to say they like it or risk looking like fools. Unfortunately, the Picasso effect didn't wash with our Deep Throat's and technical advisors. They vetted every script, sometimes arguing over our heads, sometimes agreeing unanimously that we were complete fools. I have never dreaded anything like I dreaded getting notes from our consultants.
Alyson Feltes and I both left Traders after the third season. I left because I was drained. I had no more ideas for financial stories. I knew the characters had lots of mileage left in them but I, like some of the actors, was hearing the siren song from Los Angeles. I never saw the show after that, mostly because I couldn't imagine the party going on without me.
I think Traders was part of a continuum of Canadian television and I think we did our part to push the envelope a little. It wasn't rosy-colored pastoral visions of the past, it was urban and sharp-edged. It didn't depend on the Great Canadian Silence but rather portrayed us as ambitious, grasping, verbal and at the centre of world. It didn't depend on vistas of natural beauty and it didn't pretend to take place on Wall Street or, worse, in some geographically amorphous Nowhereland.
There's something profound about the particular obstacles facing a television show which shape its eventual character. Traders obstacles were quintessentially Canadian in nature: lack of money, time, and the conflicted motivations of Canadian networks who, in their heart of hearts, as business people, would rather run American shows. And since our obstacles were tough and Canadian, so was our show. Hart Hanson wrote the pilot for Traders and won a Gemini Award for best writing in a dramatic series for Traders in 1997. He was co-executive producer, with Alyson Feltes, for the show's second and third seasons. He moved to Los Angeles from Toronto in 1998 and currently is a writer for the CBS series Judging Amy .