Dr. Robert Gardner is a professor of media writing and chair of the School of Radio and Television Arts, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto.

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‘Drama is comedy without the jokes. It’s all about structure.’ Not a bad line from part of a team of writers who struck me as hybrids. Phil Bedard and Larry Lalonde are two 39-year-old Canadians writing a series very definitely in the American mode.

They look younger than their years, even though they’re rumpled and touching into exhaustion. They are quick to point out, though, that ’39 would be old in the States.’ In Canada, they’re still kids, and they have the quirky sense of humor and informality that proves it. At Paragon, working on Forever Knight, a gothic tale about a vampire’s quest for mortality, they’re like youngsters at a perpetual Halloween party.

Bedard and Lalonde started out as standup comics in Montreal in the ’70s. An irreverent comedy series for radio won an actra award and identified them as ‘guys who could write.’

They’ve had stints with Royal Canadian Air Farce, My Secret Identity, Dracula: The Series, Katts and Dog, and, in 1992, they landed an assignment with Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, a series they coproduced.

The experience at Kung Fu and Warner Bros. was a bit of a trial. Says Bedard: ‘Nothing was ever done on time. Sometimes you’d be given a scene to write and you didn’t even know the context of the episode. Some episodes would be as much as 10 minutes short, and they’d have to be filled.’

Lalonde puts it this way: ‘Television writing is often ‘contained panic,’ but there was nothing ‘contained’ about that particular experience.’

Now they’re writing and producing on the third season of Forever Knight, budgeted at $1 million per episode.

In the American system ­ by virtue of their age and experience ­ they’d be show runners. We ended up talking about this at some length.

What you have to realize (and this is where the Canadian system has really gone wrong), is that everyone on an American show is a writer; all the way from the neophyte (likely in his/her early 20s), up through the story editors, the producer, the executive producer, and above. They all know a good script.

That’s not true in Canada. Writers form a sort of perpetual ‘peon’ class. They seldom, if ever, move up the ranks. As a result, Canadian executives are likely to dress well, ‘give good meetings,’ and they know the jargon, but they’re at a loss when it comes to evaluating a script.

The Americans ­ for all our tendency to think of them as Philistines ­ have a profound respect for the writing process. That’s why the ranks of the production companies, at the highest levels, are suffused with writers. Think of James L. Brooks, Larry David or Diane English.

Bedard and Lalonde are Americanized, too, in the way they understand the system.

Forever Knight is shot in a former factory up by Eglinton Ave. and the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto. The sets ­ the vampire’s lair, a morgue, a police station, a bizarre nightclub, and a rat-infested basement ­ all exist in huge work spaces filled with the noise of a clanking air-conditioning system. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve seen in l.a., but it d’es approximate the huge back lots at Universal and elsewhere.

Bedard and Lalonde are housed in an office with a garish color scheme. Two computers sit on their desks. The lights are dim and the room has the look of a den.

They like working on Forever Knight because it is so much less ‘scattershot.’ I took that to mean that, as writers, they have more control and that the executive producers are script literate.

In this environment, they can prepare scripts ­ still under enormous time constraints ­ that will adhere to a structure and a concept they completely understand. They talked about how they could write in such a way as to maximize the budget and make the best possible use of the available sets.

The show’s executive producers, in valuing the writers, have created a process that is creative yet orderly.

Sometimes, in Canada, a type of high-level tension and disorder is seen as a necessary part of the act of producing television. The really experienced people in the States would find that attitude baffling. South of the border, a show that’s been around for a season or two has the precision of a Normandy landing. It struck me that Bedard and Lalonde, as show runners, are emulating the best of the American process.

Part of the problem with any tv show is that they often get picked up by a network late in the day. And then the scripts have to be written at incredible speed. (Apparently, that was part of the problem at Due South, where Bedard and Lalonde picked up a writing credit. The show suffered from an off again, on again syndrome that caused some problems for the writers.)

But even Forever Knight is facing this difficulty in the current season. Because of delays in the pickup of the show, they couldn’t start shooting until July for a September startup. Says Lalonde, ‘Lead time is everything.’

Forever Knight, which runs on ctv and is distributed in the States by Screen Gems, has become something of a cult favorite. The early shows struck me as over the top, but recent productions have found a shape and a style that is somewhere between a cop show and a gothic adventure.

Bedard says one of the problems they faced with the show was determining ‘exactly what it was about.’ Apparently, Jim Parriott and Jon Slan, the executive producers, kept asking, ‘What is the show attempting to say?’ By that, they meant, ‘What aspect of human nature are we talking about?’

Bedard and Lalonde were struggling to base the show in some type of reality. In a sense, the vampire dimension of the series is being pushed further and further into the background.

The show deals with a soul trying to achieve mortality and peace. It’s not enough to have bats and bloodŠthat will only take you so far. The series has to be about the human condition.

I asked the writers if the series has assumed a shape that is roughly the same from week to week. I’ve found that writers never like to admit this, but when pressed there is always an admission that a show which has been around for some period of time has a roughly similar structure.

We moved to a blackboard in the office to sketch out the show’s essential shape. For example, there are usually four acts. For the uninitiated, an act is bracketed by commercial breaks. (Sometimes, in American distribution, there might be five acts, but that’s an artificial and arbitrary editing job over which the writers have no control.)

An act has a regular number of scenes (or beats). In each act there will be a ‘flashback,’ which serves as a type of subplot to the main action of the teleplay.

The four flashbacks are linked thematically and normally provide the hero with some recalled information which permits him to solve his current dilemma.

Often, once the step outline is prepared outlining all of the action of the show, the writers will start with the act break (or the break to the commercial) and work backwards.

In addition, Bedard and Lalonde will often divide up a show. One will write the first half of the episode, and the other will work on the latter half. Then they’ll switch and rewrite each other’s material.

If this strikes the observer as terribly mechanical, I can only tell you that every experienced writer I’ve talked to in l.a. and Canada will instantly recognize this as a necessary element in any tv show. The underlying shape is almost inescapable. The trick is to be creative and original within the confines of this tiny prison.

Bedard pointed out that although the overall shape of the show is a ‘very tight structure,’ the design ‘isn’t written anywhere.’ There is no bible for the show. It’s in the heads of the key people.

Bedard and Lalonde work with the show’s executives to write and rewrite the material in a collaborative process which, again, mirrors the way the Americans work.

Since the structure of the series is known intimately by the participants, pitching a show becomes an exercise in shorthand.

Lalonde says last year they wanted to do a show on a near-death experience. If they were to pitch that show, it would go something like this: ‘The hero has a near-death experience. That crisis takes him back, in his imagination, to the past and the first time, as a vampire, he almost died. He has a chance to die ­ something he has sought all of his existence. The show deals with why he chooses to remain alive even though he is cursed to live as a vampire.’

So here they are with a structure that is roughly similar from show to show, with a prescribed number of beats or scenes, a prescribed number of flashbacks, a finite number of standing sets, combined with location shooting and special sets.

They, along with a cadre of freelancers, all write the scripts and then executive producer Parriott (like his counterparts in the u.s.) will review the scripts, suggest changes or mark down ‘db’ ­ do better). Bedard and Lalonde agree that Parriott’s instincts are pretty infallible.

If Canadians truly understood the process, they would be full-fledged show runners. In the States, they’d already be training a bunch of 20-year-olds to crunch out the words and the situations. Their proper role would be to mold and refine the scripts in a type of apprenticeship we’ve never had the sense to emulate.

It’s clear they love their work. But they say that a writer has to have a thick skin. Scripts are rewritten more than they’re written. That’s part of the game.

Essentially, Bedard and Lalonde, two funny and gifted guys from Montreal, have been allowed to stay in the sandbox long after their friends have headed off to a much overrated ‘maturity.’ I suspect they like it that way. They’ve developed a skill and a craft that our industry desperately needs if it’s to play in the big leagues.