Montreal: In Misguided Angels, two screw-up angels are demoted to Earth until they can re-earn their wings by helping wayward, unsuspecting mortals. Fox Family Channel has ordered 26 half-hour episodes of the show, and a second sitcom, Big Wolf on Campus, both produced by Telescene Film Group.

The series comes in at over us$350,000 an episode and is the creation of two former Montrealers and the series’ co-associate producers, Rob Baird and Kelly Senecal. Typical of Canadian writers, the comedy duo’s career is a classic famine-to-feast yarn. With not much happening at home, the pair took off for l.a. where they’ve quickly caught on, scoring work on the pilot for Fox’s The New Addams Family. Their major coup of course has been the successful pitch for Misguided Angels, which in its written form was all of two sentences long.

Kevin Farley (3rd Rock from the Sun), who replaced Steve Monroe (who must have gone back to heaven), and local actor David Lipper (Dante’s Peak, Family Matters) play the mismatched angels, shacked up in a seedy motel. Maxim Roy (Love and Human Remains) is their sexy angel/monitor charged with ensuring the boys don’t mess up, and Terry Simpson (The Hunger) and Pauline Little (The Education of Little Tree) are a quirky garage mechanic and his wife. Caroline Ambrose is a hell-sent seductress determined to keep the probationary angels permanently out of heaven.

Directors signed to date include Marc Voizard, Jim Donovan and Marc S. Grenier. David Blanchard is the production designer and Claire Nadon is the costume designer. Rene Verzier is the shoot’s dop and Andrea Kenyon and Associates is the casting agent.

For the current season, Michael Yudin, exec vp, Telescene Entertainment, New York, says Telescene is Fox’s sole independent drama supplier.

The house has three other series in front of the cameras – the sitcom Big Wolf on Campus, the erotic TMN-The Movie Network/ Showtime anthology series The Hunger ii, and the second season of Student Bodies, syndicated in the u.s. by Twentieth Television and seen in Canada on ytv and Global.

Both Misguided Angels and Big Wolf on Campus are distributed internationally by Fremantle Corp. The Action Adventure Network pilot/series Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde seems likely to go soon, apparently on location in Montreal, while another aan project, Monster Smasher, has been pushed back to spring. A third entry, Lost World, recently wrapped in Australia.

Misguided Angels’ exec producers are Telescene president Robin Spry, Paul Painter, Bob Altman and Yudin.

*Back to Sherwood

Another Montreal production licensed by Fox Family Channel – and by cbc, Radio-Canada and itv in the u.k. – is Back to Sherwood, a retelling of the classic Robin Hood saga, but with a twist. In this Prisma Productions family adventure series the Robin in question is actually ‘Robyn,’ a 16-year-old Canadian girl.

Prisma president and series exec producer Claude Godbout successfully pitched the show to Fox Family at mip-tv. ‘It’s a Back to the Future concept,’ he says, ‘about a young girl who lives in Montreal and is an descendant of Robin Hood, and through magic, finds herself (in late 12th century) Sherwood Forest.’

Set in both the present day and medieval times, the storyline has Robyn and her band of Young Outlaws fighting injustice as they try to rescue her famous forebearers from the clutches of an evil sorceress. The concept originated with Winklemania of London, u.k., a merchandising company.

Cast includes 18-year-old Montreal actress Aimee Castle as Robyn, Andrew Walker, Ruby Ann King, Alexa Dubreuil, Adam Frost, Anik Malem as Brenan the sorceress and Larry Day as the good Guy De Gisborne.

Thirteen half-hour episodes are being shot on 16mm film over 52 days from Oct. 5 to Dec. 22 at a cost of $500,000 per. Locations include a studio facility in Ste. Basile, Que., and New Glasgow, Que. which stands in for Sherwood Forest. Another 13 episodes are planned for summer ’99, says Godbout.

Roger Cantin and Rodney Gibbons are directing. Paul Risacher (Anna Banana, The Big Garage) is story editor. Daniel Jobin is the dop, Louise-Marie Beauchamp is art director and Francesca Chamberland is the costume designer.

Back to Sherwood exec producers are Godbout, Marie-Claude Beauchamp, Joanne Forgues, Phil Meagher and Ellis Iddon, the latter two credited with the original series music. Godbout and Madeleine Henrie are producing. The exporter is Jacques Bouchard’s DramaVision.

In development news, Godbout says Prisma is preparing a four-hour drama coproduction with Radio-Canada and the People’s Republic of China as well as two international doc series, The Odyssey of Food and The Science-Fiction Chronicles.

*Les Weekends de l’ONF

The latest in documentary and animation productions from the National Film Board’s French Programme will be showcased at the second edition of Les Weekends de l’onf, Nov. 6-22.

The annual production retrospective unspools at Cinema onf and is the occasion for the industry and public to meet with the more than 30 filmmakers whose works are on the program, says the French Programme’s director general Doris Girard, who is also the event’s prime instigator.

Highlights include the two opening night films, Co Hiedeman’s tender stop-animation story Ludovic (The Snow Gift) and Stephane Drolet’s Oumar 9-1-1, a doc about an indispensable West African car mechanic.

Also screening are Andre R. Lavoie’s L’Affaire Dollard, an inquiry into the death of the now celebrated Dollard des Ormeaux, blown to bits trying to kill Iroquois in 1660, and Maurice Bulbulian’s 143-minute chronicle of the Ditidahts people of b.c., Chroniques de la Nitinaht.

Carole Poliquin’s Turbulences, an examination of the unprecedented influence of financial markets on society, coproduced by Isca, and Monique Leblanc’s Cigarette, a road movie/doc about the anti-smoking hordes, are also on the program.

Also on the ONF Weekend agenda are Lara Fitzgerald’s Memoire Moire des souvenirs, a profile of feminist writer Helene Cixous, coproduced by Films aux Bords de l’Abime; Jonny Silver’s L’Heure zulu, a profile of Derrick de Kerchove, director of the University of Toronto’s McLuhan Culture and Technology program, coproduced by Mediatique; Bruno Baillargeon’s Le Prix de la vie, a reflection on society’s attitude to aging; and Georges Payrastre’s Le Troisieme ciel, a one-hour doc about the experiences of an entrepreneurial Chinese immigrant family in Vancouver.

The Nov. 22 closing-day program includes Nicole Gravel’s Victorin, le naturaliste, a portrait of pioneer Quebec botanist Frere Marie-Victorin, and the Jacques Leduc feature film L’Age de braise, coproduced with Productions du Lundi Matin and starring French actor Annie Girardot.

Other filmmakers on the Weekend onf program include Manon Barbeau, Marie Brodeur, Bettie Arseneault, Diane Chartrand, J.C. Coulbois, Helen Doyle, Louis Fraser, Jean-Pierre Gariepy, Nicole Gravel, Lina Morecco, Rene Sioui Labelle and Nicole Zavaglia.