Production is well underway on Global Television’s headlining, one-hour Canadian crime series, Blue Murder, coproduced by the Gemini Award-winning Barna-Alper Productions and North Bend Film Company.

The new 13-part series, shooting all over Toronto July 31 to Dec. 12, chronicles the efforts of a special team of big-city police investigators to solve high-profile, politically sensitive crimes.

Maria del Mar (The Practice) plays a tenacious former undercover cop called to head the special investigative team. She oversees a brash and headstrong investigator played by Joel Keller (The Hanging Garden) and his longtime partner, a cynical, off-centre homicide cop played by Jeremy Ratchford (Unforgiven).

Mimi Kuzyk (L.A. Law) also stars in the series, which is set in Toronto and loosely based on some of Canada’s most volatile murder cases, including the story of a boy who jumped off the Bloor viaduct, as well all the politicking and bureaucracy involved.

‘We are looking to give viewers a good, solid, compelling mystery, week in week out. If some interesting social and cultural milieu gets explored in the process, so much the better,’ says executive producer Laszlo Barna.

Blue Murder, budgeted at just under $1 million an episode, is produced by Norman Denver (Due South) and co-created by executive story editor Cal Coons (Day Pass) and co-executive producer Steve Lucas (Major Crime) of Toronto-based North Bend.

Directors on the series include such Canadian talent as Stephen Williams (Milgaard), John L’Ecuyer (Saint Jude), T.W. Peacocke (Drop the Beat), Larry McLean (Relic Hunter) and Tim Southam (Tales of Teeka).

Writer and story editor Jill Golick (Shining Time Station) is also attached.

The series will go to air in January.

Alliance Atlantis has international distribution.

*More docs from Paradox

Paradox Productions is in discussions with Granada Media International to develop and distribute three documentaries.

The first, which is headed into production in January 2001, is Bawdy and Soul, a feature-length documentary on ‘the new sacred prostitutes.’

Today people are looking to obtain higher spiritual levels through sex and these sacred prostitutes fill that need with such eastern disciplines as tantric sex, Wicca and Chigung, says director and Paradox principal Christa Schadt.

The doc, budgeted at $550,000 (with Granada providing 29% of the financing), will shoot in Canada, the u.s. and likely Europe as it chronicles the lives of four modern and highly educated woman who define themselves as sacred prostitutes.

Company principals Joel Awerbuck and David Hallam are producing, with David Ostriker and John Drury, Granada’s head of factual programming, exec producing.

Cutting Edge: the Swiss Army Knife in Action is a one-hour doc produced in association with Toronto-based Top O’ The Mast Productions that explores the role of the Swiss Army Knife – its history, how it has saved people’s lives and what it represents to people who have taken to collecting them.

Awerbuck and Hallam will produce the one-off, with Schadt likely to direct.

Finally, Talk to the Animals is a one-hour doc that looks at people who claim to talk to animals, including animal psychics and scientists who are developing strategies to communicate with animals.

Seen through the eyes of Bob the dog, the doc will be shot in California, Canada and Europe, and will be directed by Schadt and produced by Awerbuck and Hallam.

Other notable projects in development include Hot Stuff: Becoming a World Class Firefighter, a six-part, one-hour doc on the lives of the Brampton, Ont. Fire Department’s world-champion, six-man Fire Fighter’s International Combat team. The film will follow the men as they gear up for the annual competition that brings together North America’s finest to compete for the world championship.

Revel Nation is a 26-part, half-hour series that travels to 26 of the world’s weirdest festivals, including Amaranth Yatra, an Indian celebration 12,000 feet in the Himalayas; Gynaecocracy, a festival in Greece in which men and woman switch roles; and the Vegetarian Banquet for Monkey in Thailand, a huge dinner thrown for 600 monkeys.

The idea, says Schadt, is to have three or four small production teams set up in countries all over the world to document the events and send the footage home to be edited. The series is budgeted at roughly $100,000 an episode.

The company is also in early development on its first animated series, King Argon, created by Willard Kitchen, and plans to make its foray into dramatic features with a couple of scripts it recently optioned.

Meantime, Schadt is at the Amsterdam Forum, Nov. 27-29, as part of an Ontario Film Development Corporation mentorship program that sent five documentary filmmakers as observers representing Canada.

*AAC shoots Famous Jett Jackson movie

Alliance Atlantis has gone to camera on The Famous Jett Jackson – The Movie, an mow for Family Channel and Disney Channel in the u.s.

Based on the series, now in its third season and for the first time airing in Canada on Family, the movie stars series principal Lee Thompson Young as Jett Jackson, a 16-year-old superstar who yearns to live a normal life.

Kevin May is producing the film, with writer Bruce Kalish and director Shawn Levy exec producing.

The film also stars Lindy Booth (Relic Hunter), Nigel Shawn Williams, Kerry Duff and Gordon Greene.

Calibre Digital Pictures (an aac company) and C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures are handling the visual and special effects.

AAC Kids holds worldwide merchandising and distribution rights, excluding the u.s., where Disney holds all rights.

The film is shooting in Toronto Oct. 30 to Dec. 1. *