For a man whose television show has been kicked around and cancelled, Chris Haddock is in remarkably good spirits.
He arrives in good cheer for a breakfast-time chat and tucks into eggs Benedict and hash browns with relish. In fact he asks for hot sauce to accompany it. This Canadian has not been beaten down by the bizarre and brutal world of American network TV.
The last time I met Haddock we sat down about 50 paces from where we're now having breakfast. That was last July, and the man who had created and guided Da Vinci's Inquest into a long-running hit for CBC in Canada was about to launch a career on American prime time. The show he'd created, The Handler, had a well-known lead in Joe Pantoliano (who'd just been nominated for an Emmy for The Sopranos) and CBS had given the series a Friday night, 10 o'clock, timeslot.
After a strong start in the ratings last September, The Handler got a full-season order of 22 episodes from CBS. Then the ratings sagged. Two weeks ago, CBS reversed its decision and committed to only 16 episodes. The show will air for the next few weeks, but production has ceased. It's cancelled.
"We were having a production meeting and I took a call from the head of the studio [Viacom, which produced The Handler for CBS]who, I thought, was calling about some script notes. I thought we were going to have an argument about the script. But he said the show was, to all intents and purposes, cancelled.
"I wasn't that surprised. Now I'm relieved. Running a weekly, hour-long show is like sprinting and juggling at the same time. You can't see more than two feet in front of you. Now it's over, I've reached the goal line and it feels good."
What happened to The Handler -- a crime drama about a group of undercover FBI officers who are "handled" by the Pantoliano character -- is what usually happens to darker, more difficult network shows. Everybody who felt they owned a piece of it -- the networks, the studio, the writers, the actors -- had a different opinion on where it should go. The network wanted not only good ratings but a specific audience of both men and women in certain age groups and income brackets.
The Handler kicked off with exceptionally good ratings. About 12 million Americans watched it during its first few weeks. (About 30 million watch CBS's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the most successful hour-long drama on American TV right now, but 12 million is excellent for a show airing on Fridays at 10 p.m.) Then it seemed to settle at about seven million, before NBC moved its Third Watch show to Fridays, in competition with The Handler. The ratings sagged. That's when the tinkering started.
"I really tried to be collaborative with CBS, "Haddock says, "but points of view on the show were coming from everywhere and coming around the clock.
"It never really became an irritation for me, because I was willing to learn. It wasn't like I was being slapped upside the head every day. You get this thing up and running and then you look at it to see how you can fine tune it. That's fine.
"But the missing ingredient is patience. We were told that because the actors were playing different characters every week, the audience couldn't settle in and make a link with them. So we tried something different. Then we were told that the stories were too dark, so we made it lighter. The thing is, you start to do that and then you don't see the effect until it's on the air weeks later. The show was still trying to find its tone.
"We knew that by January, the numbers for the month would decide our future. The numbers weren't great, but, when we did the math, we figured out that the show was still making money. Now, the weird thing is that after it's been cancelled, it's still on the air and the numbers have gone up. We'll be on through the February sweeps as far I know."
Haddock says he has no real regrets. In fact he's not willing to say that he'd never do an American network show again.
"If I made a mistake, it was that I should have battled harder for the original concept of the show. It implied a much darker world. The pilot established a mood and we never got to sustain that mood. It was subtle, and it wasn't only about cops, action and crime-fighting. Down here, everything is melodrama. The writers want to write big action scenes and the actors want more violence and big moments."
Canadians who know Haddock's work from Da Vinci's Inquest know that action and melodrama aren't his true style. Da Vinci's Inquest manages to cast a spell by draining out the melodrama and telling its stories with a quietly natural, hypnotizing rhythm. It's socially aware and intelligent TV storytelling.
"God bless the CBC," Haddock says now. "They're good people. On Da Vinci, we do it and deliver it. There are no notes from the network, no interference. There's trust."
Haddock also says that part of the problem with running The Handler was his lack of experience in the rough waters of L.A. He surrounded himself with several Canadians who had written and produced on Da Vinci, but he was also obliged to hire a team of actors, writers, writer-producers and others he didn't really know.
"I think I pissed off some agents in this town, but I was looking for people who were in tune with me. I have to tell you, there were times when running The Handler was like being in charge of a kindergarten school."
He has only praise for Joe Pantoliano, while acknowledging that the actor known as Joey Pants can be a manic, intense individual to work with. "Joe is a very, very good actor. I'm not going to say anything bad about him."
The original concept for the show was to have Pantoliano as the lead and then a changing array of actors around him. But as Haddock brought the show closer to CBS's demands, it became a series with the same group of actors every week, all of whom had to be used in some way every episode.
"That doesn't really serve the characters," Haddock says. "The network wants a standalone episode every week instead of ongoing storylines. That's the economics of the business here. And it becomes really hard to develop characters in an organic way. I like to stick in the tendrils of a storyline and watch it grow. It's how Da Vinci developed.
"You can do good work in standalone episodes of a one-hour TV drama, but it's very, very difficult. And if you add the fact that it's really difficult to do dark stories on American TV right now, plus the network's concern about numbers and demographics, and you've got something that's terrifically unwieldy."
Undaunted, Haddock is going to have meetings in L.A. about his options and put The Handler behind him. "I always looked on it as a learning thing. Obviously, the network and the studio had a different stake in the project. I learned a lot."
Before The Handler went into production last summer, Haddock had seen this season of Da Vinci's Inquest through the planning and writing process. Now he's going back to Vancouver to plan the seventh season. "One thing that came out of this was some perspective on Da Vinci. It's a good show, in touch with the place where it is created and developed, and Nicholas Campbell is a brilliant actor."
The next Haddock venture that Canadians viewers will see is the TV movie The Life, (co-written with Alan Di Fiore, one of his main writing partners on Da Vinci, and one of the Canadians he brought to L.A. for The Handler) which will air on CTV this year. It's about cops working the beat in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He's also been talking to CBC about doing something different. All he'll say is, "It's a period piece, about the Depression."
He's far from beaten down by his experiences on The Handler, but he brightens even when he talks about the CBC. "While I was down here, CBC people would phone regularly. They'd say, 'When are you coming home?' They're interested in a long-term relationship with me, and I appreciate that."
So, after sitting down and recounting all the problems he experienced with The Handler, Haddock leaves as cheerful as he arrived. He's in great shape, and it's clear that the cancellation of The Handler is America's loss and Canada's gain.