One-hour dramas are king. At least that’s what ctv’s Bill Mustos says, in response to the broadcaster’s recently announced 2000/01 schedule and as a rebuttal to Global Television spokesperson Doug Hoover’s earlier rant on the prevalence of the sitcom.

Heading up ctv’s coming schedule on the Canadian new drama front is The Associates, a one-hour dramatic series, produced by Alliance Atlantis Communications and exec produced by Alyson Feltes, that chronicles the stormy and bizarre experience of a group of legal neophytes. Scheduled for mid-season, the new series replaces canceled one-hour series Power Play and The City.

With Power Play, Mustos, vp dramatic programming, says, ‘When Pearson [International] pulled out, the show became unfinance-able.’ And where The City’s concerned, he says, ‘We realized we were lost between two worlds…hockey fans perceived it as a relationship show and audiences who would watch relationship shows perceived it as sports.’

Crime series Cold Squad, however, returns for its fourth season, and the one-hour drama series Little Men along with the mystical Twice in a Lifetime are back for second seasons.

SteelString, produced by Whiz Bang Productions and starring Paul Gross (Due South), who is also attached as producer, is another one-hour drama series which was set to air in the new season. But because Gross is tied up in his role as Hamlet in Stratford, shooting is not set to begin until next year and an air date is expected sometime in 2001.

The 2000/01 sked boasts 114 hours of Canadian drama, including movies, an increase of 17 hours from last year. In dramatic series alone, ctv will air 94 hours in the coming year, up 13 hours from last.

The ctv Signature Presentation, established in 1997 as a $6-million fund for new Canadian programming that deals with provocative social issues of national importance, this year includes two new mows: Lucky Girl is a Triptych Media/aac coproduction about a Canadian teenage girl’s gambling addiction, and Blessed Stranger: After Flight 111, produced by Halifax’s Big Motion Pictures, is the story of two strangers brought together by the Swissair Flight 111 tragedy in 1998.

CanLit and CanMillionaires

CTV Canadian Literature Initiative, established in ’97 to bring CanLit to the screen, continues its mystery franchises with Shaftesbury Films’ mows The Wandering Soul Murderers, A Colder Kind of Death and Torso: The Evelyn Dick Story, all scheduled to air in February. Wild Geese, produced by Sarrazin Couture Entertainment and Bradshaw MacLeod, is also part of the initiative.

Nuremberg, starring Alec Baldwin and Christopher Plummer, is the broadcaster’s sole miniseries. Produced by aac and based on the book Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial by Joseph E. Persico, the two-part, four-hour series recreates the infamous war tribunals – marking the first time a non-fictionalized account of the trial has been adapted for tv.

In other ctv firsts, the broadcaster makes its foray into primetime animated series with Nelvana’s Committed, arriving mid-season.

And ctv will be the first conventional broadcaster to pick up the award-winning, sex, drugs and violence-driven series The Sopranos, which it will air, in a two-week blitz, against cbc’s extended Olympics programming – bare breasts and all, confirms ctv exec vp Trina McQueen.

In other programming news, ctv has Pamela Wallin hosting Who Wants to Be a Canadian Millionaire in September. The one-hour special, which could become a series, confirms Mustos, will be produced by the team behind its u.s. counterpart, in the original New York studio with the same format. The Canadian version will, however, pay out in Canadian tax-free dollars and the questions will be tailored to the show’s exclusively Canadian contestants.