When CBC executive Rae Hull sent out a call last May asking producers to pitch ideas on a new daytime soap, she was cautiously hopeful she'd get some nibbles.
A month later, she was neck-deep in submissions, 359 in all, that poured in to her Vancouver office, from each major Canadian city as well as a number of smaller locales including Stillwater, B.C., Moncton, and even a last-minute entrant from an expat in Duluth, Ga.
"I must admit looking back, it reminds me of the frenzy of cramming for exams," says Hull, who along with a small team read each proposal, all of which had to fit her criteria: great scintillating stories about real Canadians in a modern Canada, which means more than a bunch of white folk having affairs, keeping secrets, or backstabbing each other in Days of Our Lives-style perpetuity.
Since late June, Hull, who is senior director of network programming, has managed to whittle down the hundreds of pitches, first to 12 in July, and then to six at the end of October.
The finalists live on opposite coasts, with a few in-between. They're comprised of seasoned TV-makers and enthusiastic first-timers. And these multiracial, multicultural dramatic serials are sexy, flirtatious, serious, issue-driven stories -- and all distinctly homespun.
They defy easy classification, but after glancing over the synopses of the half-dozen finalists, the end result is a cross between Coronation Street meets Desperate Housewives in say, Red Deer or Stillwater, with a smattering of every ethnic clan imaginable thrown in.
"I can tell you just about every nook and cranny of Canada is crammed into these files," says Hull, who plans to pick the final two contestants during the week of Dec. 6. That pair will then be sent away to make pilots (for which budgets have not yet been assigned) before a winner is finally picked.
"It's a bit like Canadian Idol," muses Ira Levy, whose Toronto-based Breakthrough Films is pitching a soap called The Regency. "This would have been a great reality show [for the CBC]" he quips. "We keep saying, win or lose, we should have been filming this stuff."
William Davis (best known to audiences as the mysterious cigarette-smoking man of the hit series, The X-Files) says he and his partners also believe a monitoring of this pick-me, pick-me process would have made riveting TV.
"They'd call us by conference call to tell us if we'd made it through to the next stage," says Davis, whose daytime drama is called 49th and Main. "And we'd invariably leap for joy or burst into tears.
"I don't see why the CBC didn't televise this process. We've called it Survivor from the beginning, and every time we made it through a call, we'd say, 'We're still on the island!' "
Davis, who is working with his personal partner Barbara Ellison and Raging Ruby Pictures, describes 49th and Main as something "like a United Nations conference with all representatives in attendance -- every day." One of its central characters is the young Dr. Cedric Ferreira, an Indian, who was born in Africa but attended one of the top boarding schools in Britain. He comes to open a medical practice in a downtown Vancouver neighbourhood, but then opens his mouth "and sounds just like Hugh Grant," says Davis, chortling.
Levy's Regency soap is based in Victoria, and he describes it as "a Grand Hotel meets Mohammed Fayed. We basically took the seven vices and wrote a drama around it.
"It's the story of a dynamic South Asian immigrant tycoon from East Africa who acquires a white-world 19th-century hotel in Victoria, and transforms it into a hip, entertainment centre of Global-fusion culture."
The other finalists include Changing Germain, from Dream Street Pictures in Moncton, which is set in a historic street in an old working-class neighbourhood of Saint John. "It's a place where a steady influx of 'folks from away' are transforming the street, but it remains a place where everyone knows your name -- even if they can't pronounce it," explains Dream Street's Rick LeGuerrier.
Toronto's Protocol Entertainment made the final cut with a soap submission called Beaumonde Heights, about the lives, loves and trials of a group of people who live and work around a strip mall of the same name.
Another East Coast/Toronto group proposed North/South, a racy half-hour drama about four diverse families in Halifax embroiled in class warfare in the volatile construction industry. A Toronto team is pitching Power and Pride about two Toronto family dynasties, one South Asian and the other blue-blood WASP, who control the city's biggest brokerage houses.
Hull says the 359 concepts revolved around everything from a stretch of highway, a blueberry farm, a car, a bank note, a psychiatrist's couch as well as in hospitals, hotels, hair salons and hostels.
"It was both amusing and heartening to see all the slices of Canadian life that were revealed. One thing I can tell you -- Canadians certainly have lively imaginations when it comes to the number of places, and occasions, where one might have sex," adds Hull. "It is a cold country after all. And that's all I'm saying. . . ."
A half-hour daytime drama is a first for the CBC, whose next-best-thing in a similar genre was Riverdale, which aired early weekday evenings, from 1998 to early 2000. Hull insists this project is different, however, from anything the CBC has tried before. "With Riverdale, the CBC really put one toe in the pond. It ran two episodes a week. This time, we're jumping in with both feet, running multiple weekly episodes, over a good chunk of the year.
"Obviously we'd love to have a Canadian Coronation Street, partly because of its loyal audience but also because it's another way of revealing a people and a country to itself."
So instead of the Coronation crowd recounting the day at the Rover's Return Pub, this cast could presumably solve life's troubles over a pint at Vancouver's Jolly Alderman, Victoria's Sticky Wicket Pub, Toronto's Wheatsheaf, or the Seahorse Tavern in Halifax.
Jokes aside, though, Coronation Street has been such a loyalty leader with audiences that the CBC moved it this fall to 7:30 p.m., four days, plus added a Sunday omnibus from 8 to 10 a.m.
At their best, Hull says daytime serials are highly addictive forms of entertainment. "We'd love to have a big, loyal Canadian audience watching Canadian drama in the afternoon. It's a captivating way of reviewing Canadian stories. Plus, these dramatic serials, with great numbers of episodes attached to them, are great training grounds for the next generations of actors, directors and writers."
LeGuerrier, and his business partner at Dream Street, Tim Hogan, say Changing Germain has been challenging and exhilarating to tackle. "Here's a street, Germain, in a city that has seen it all," says LeGuerrier. "Some of the buildings are in ruins, and others are gentrified. Right away, we knew we could tell a story from a class perspective. There are lawyers and doctors living here, as well as crack houses and street people. That allowed us to create 'the stew.' The CBC wants these soap operas to reflect Canada as it exists now. Not the Canada of the 1950s, which was predominantly white, but the 2004 face of Canada."
Hogan adds that their soap is gritty, with a healthy dose of the requisite sex and drugs. "We have created 23 characters. And our submission to the CBC includes a chart detailing who is having sex with whom. And let me tell you, it has a lot of arrows," says Hogan. "Six months ago, this project didn't exist. Now we have two full scripts and material for a full, 65-episode year.
Adds LeGuerrier: "We've become so caught up in Changing Germain that we've sketched out the next 25 years of our main characters."
Davis says he and his partners have also developed 20 to 30 characters, and written three episodes, including the pilot. He's got his fingers crossed that they emerge as one of the two finalists.
"If we're not on the island, we will certainly be disappointed because we really feel we've got something," he says. "But, even then, we'll try to find some other way to make use of this material. Because we love it. And we believe it's good."
Gayle MacDonald