Canadian stories that

can play anywhere

Had things turned out differently, he might now be the star of his own investigative news series, The Bernie Zukerman Show. Instead, he pursued a career behind the camera and became one of Canada’s most successful dramatic television producers.

While writing his bar exams after graduating from law studies at Osgoode Hall in Toronto, Bernard Zukerman decided a career in the courtroom wasn’t for him. Global Television had just started up a hot new consumer affairs show, The Bernie Braidman Show. Now that looked a lot more interesting.

Zuckerman made a cold call to Global. They tried him out writing a few items for Bernie Braidman, and the next thing he knew he was hired as a cohost of the show. But he quickly discovered being in front of the camera was not his forte.

So he moved into documentary production, first with the CTV Television Network’s W5, followed by a five-year stint with The Journal’s documentary unit at cbc.

‘Doing documentaries was a great background for me; it rooted me in character and story and gave me a maturity before I decided to give drama a try in 1986,’ says Zukerman.

From the very beginning he had a strong sense of story. The first project he developed was And Then You Die, a two-hour movie on the underworld for cbc directed by the late Francis Mankiewicz. It did very well and he started to believe he might have a knack for this sort of thing

‘I love storytelling, I have a nose for interesting stories. I figure if they interest me they will interest a broader audience. That formula seems to have worked. It takes so much time and effort to produce these films – you want your stories to say something about the society and world that you live in. All my stories are Canadian but the themes are universal that could play anywhere.’

Next came the movie Skate. It was Zukerman’s first pairing with writer Suzette Couture and it won a Gemini for best tv movie. That was followed by The Squamish Five and another Gemini.

Then came the 1989 miniseries Love And Hate, also with Couture. It was the first non-American-produced film or miniseries to run on a u.s. network, nbc, and it represented not only a big break for Zukerman but for the future of Canadian production..

After Love and Hate finished number one in the ratings for the week, network executives finally had to admit their audiences obviously didn’t care about the country of origin for good quality drama. The floodgates were open.

Conspiracy Of Silence, his next miniseries with Couture (1991), won yet another Gemini and sold to another u.s. network, this time cbs.

In 1993, Zukerman produced Dieppe, directed by John N. Smith and written by John Krizanc. The miniseries for cbc is in the running for 11 Geminis, and has a very good chance of winning for best dramatic miniseries – it’s the only nominee in the category.

‘Dieppe was something I had always wanted to do,’ says Zukerman. ‘I’m a great believer in Canadians always telling their own stories and letting this generation know a little bit about our history. What interested me most about Dieppe was that the true story had never come out. No one really knew why these 5,000 troops were sacrificed, yet it was a seminal event in Canadian history.’

The political furor that followed the broadcast of The Valour and The Horror ‘didn’t deter me, it just made us be more careful,’ says Zukerman. ‘Even though we had the support of the Dieppe veterans from the beginning, it was also controversial in its own right, given the different portrait painted of Lord Louis Mountbatten.

‘I love the fact that there is now a new generation that knows this story. So often we glamorize wars and what soldiers go through, (but here) you see the reality and the horror of war, which Dieppe definitely was. Dieppe is ultimately an antiwar film.’