Television Series

From pitch to production

Spacemen in tights; undersexed and overwrought lawyers; a musical, dysfunctional family; the life and times of an orphaned girl. Sound familiar? Yep, this is the stuff of successful television series. And, once upon a time, each and every one was a pitch (‘There’s this spaceship which forever orbits the earth, and the captain is a devilish lad in leotardsÉ’).

The motivating desire for success, fame and money is obviously common ground for any series creator, but the methods by which each program gets to air are as varied as the programs themselves.

There are several primetime Canadian drama series on the go now. Here’s how a few of them got off the ground.

Due South

as the story goes, Alliance Communications ceo Robert Lantos and then-cbs head Jeff Sagansky got together for lunch and bantered about a concept that was good for both the Canadian and American markets. They talked about Crocodile Dundee and came up with the idea of a displaced Canadian, a good guy who brings his own set of rules with him to the u.s.

Two years and one two-hour pilot later, Alliance has begun production on the $1.5 million-per-episode Due South. cbs licensed the pilot and has opted for eight episodes of the series. It’s the first time a Canadian series has gone to American network primetime.

Paul Haggis and Kathy Slevin, executive producers of the show, came up with the idea of a Canadian Mountie teaming up with a Chicago cop. Alliance developed the pilot with funding from cbs, the CTV Television Network and various government agencies.

There is a buzz out there that Due South is a high-stakes gamble, but Steven DeNure, senior vice-president of creative affairs at Alliance, says that is not the case. ‘People are saying that we have got a big risk on our hands, but they are wrong. Yes, the two-hour pilot (at a cost of $5 million) was a risk, but it was a calculated risk that created an awareness and an appetite for the series.’

DeNure says the series is not a huge financial gamble for the company when balanced against international sales of the show. He confirms Alliance has begun presales for Due South in Europe, but will not comment on secured deals.

The Due South model is packed with advantages, says DeNure, and the high licence fee paid by American broadcasters is at the top of the list. Creative control is no different, he argues, whether a network has a 30% or 80% investment in the project. ‘If anything, we are making the series with creative input from two broadcasters instead of three. And what we are doing is managing to satisfy broadcasters in Canada and in the u.s., and in other countries as well.’

Robocop

when Brian Ross, president of Skyvision, secured the tv series rights to the feature film Robocop from Orion Pictures in the spring of 1993, he decided to take the syndication route. Ross says syndication is attractive because of its low-risk/high-order balance.

Ross says the trick to winning the rights to the series over mighty Fox Television was ‘absolute perseverance, and the smaller the company, the better. We can put more time and effort and be in (the owner’s) face all the time. You tailor your package to the needs of the owner and that’s where the diligence and homework come in. You have to find out who the owner is and get to know them. And you have to show them how much effort you are going to put into making their title a successful series.’

While money is imperative to play the game, it’s ‘how you creatively deal with the rights owner’ that sets the bidders apart, says Ross.

Skyvision put up the money to buy the titles and financed development until broadcasters came on board. Ross won’t reveal any purchase figures, but the first season of series has a budget of $36.5 million.

Ross says a Canadian broadcaster (ctv) didn’t come onside until four or five months after Skyvision had bought rights to the series, but internationally, broadcasters signed on almost immediately: ‘Before anyone saw a frame of film, half of the budget was raised on foreign presales.’

Ross doesn’t see any pitfalls in the syndication model for developing a series. ‘There is always risk, but it is less in syndication than in network deals. And we have tenfold the creative control because we are not dealing with a network. The owner of the title doesn’t have input creatively, they have consultation rights.’

The second season of Robocop should be headed for production any day now. Meanwhile, Ross is busy bidding on two new titles out of Los Angeles.

Road to Avonlea

when Kevin Sullivan, president of Sullivan Films, tapped into the Lucy Maud Montgomery stories of Anne of Green Gables in 1985, he picked a gem which has thrived for nearly a decade. Sullivan first produced nine hours (two miniseries) of Anne of Green Gables for the cbc at a cost of $8.3 million.

He says he came up with the idea for a continuing series, Road to Avonlea, ‘primarily because we had such an overwhelming response to the Anne series from around the world. It was an unusual circumstance because there was an existing market that wanted to see more.’

Sullivan Films initially financed the development of Road to Avonlea. In 1989, cbc and Disney came on board, pretty much simultaneously, as coproduction partners.

‘There wasn’t a tremendous amount of development,’ says Sullivan. ‘We acquired some literary material and developed an initial season of 13 episodes, relying on the characters in the books. ‘

Sullivan says it would be hard to top cbc and Disney as partners.

‘We were fortunate because cbc and Disney’s audience focus was identical. It’s very hard to find producers with the same focus. I think it’s one of the biggest problems facing Canadian tv producers. In some ways, if you can collaborate with an American broadcaster, it can be easier because it’s hard to get international coproduction partners who have the same focus.’

Road to Avonlea has commitments for two more seasons (six and seven) at a budget of $16.6 million per season.

When discussing the life of the series, Sullivan steers away from money and emphasizes the creative. ‘The success of a series has less to do with financing and more to do with characters and casting. Ultimately, you are faced with how good the characters are and how well can you can bring them off the page.’

Sustaining a series from one season to the next requires a tremendous amount of audience research, says Sullivan, whether it’s analyzing what pleases your committed viewers or what turns off the ones you only reach occasionally.

Next, Sullivan is looking into developing Blythes of Ingleside, a spin-off featuring Anne’s daughter Rilla, as a possible replacement for Avonlea.

‘A successful long-running series reaches a zenith in which everything is humming, but then every series will atrophy. We are thinking that maybe this series has had a healthy run,’ says Sullivan. He says it’s too early to talk about Ingleside, but he is in discussion with cbc and Japanese distributor Shochiku-Fuji.

Sullivan says he wouldn’t recommend the Avonlea model to another producer because it is such an unusual situation. ‘You couldn’t repeat it. It was a very unusual method, having a series produced as whimsically as it was. The commitments were immediate and that’s not how it often goes. We had the best of many worlds.’

Destiny Ridge

steve Ord, director of production business affairs at Atlantis Communications, says the advantage of the Destiny Ridge model is low risk with no financial investment from the company aside from the purchase of distribution rights. An added bonus this season, he says, was finding a way to finance the primetime series primarily with Canadian dollars.

Atlantis and Great North Productions are currently in production on season two of the Rocky Mountain dramatic series, working with a budget of $9.1 million or $700,000 per hour.

For the first season, CanWest Global and ard in Germany were the primary presales for the $10 million-plus series. This time around the German investors are out of the picture.

Both seasons are 100% Canadian productions; the German connection was not a treaty coproduction deal but a presale with ‘significant benefits,’ says Ord.

Although Destiny Ridge received broadcaster commitments without a pilot, it was a one-off, one-hour drama, High Country (set in the mountains), that initially got the ball rolling. Larry Raskin, Jeremy Holt, Daphne Ballon and Seaton McLean are credited with having spawned the idea for Destiny Ridge – lots of spectacular scenery and a few snazzy characters.

CanWest Global and ard made it clear they were interested in a series that focused on the Rocky Mountains, and the development team at Atlantis got to work.

Atlantis is doing some fine-tuning of the show this season. It has raised the budget primarily in Canada, using money from broadcasting licences, tax-shelter financing, private funds, Atlantis Releasing and government agencies. Telefilm’s investment in the first season was $4.5 million, and this time around it’s $4.15 million.

Without the German influence, the creative has changed drastically on season two. The new Destiny Ridge may be summed up as sex and more sex in the mountains. The German actors, such as Elke Sommer, are gone too.