As if Ken Finkleman wasn’t busy enough, the writer/director/producer/actor will again have to find time in his jam-packed daytimer to sit in on this year’s Gemini Awards – where his most recent project, the six-part limited series Foreign Objects, is in the running for best dramatic series.

It has been six years since Finkleman’s CBC series The Newsroom made him a name with Canadian TV audiences. And since then the Winnipeg-born filmmaker has remained the auteur-in-residence at the national broadcaster, following the satirical series with other short-run shows such as More Tears in 1998 and 1999’s Foolish Heart. He recently wrapped a Newsroom TV movie and has even found the time to take a run at the U.S. market.

Foreign Objects, produced by Rhombus Media and airing on CBC last September, follows a documentary filmmaker (Finkleman) through six half-hours exploring complex human issues. Among the more than 200 speaking parts are Arsinee Khanjian (Ararat), Don McKellar (Rub & Tug) and Colm Feore (Trudeau). He had roughly $2.5 million to work with, about the same as his last two projects.

This could be Finkleman’s fourth Gemini, following writing and directing wins for The Newsroom and Foolish Heart. Here he shares his thoughts about getting serious, his shot at another win, and the knuckleheadedness of American network execs.

Foreign Objects is less comical than your earlier work like The Newsroom. Why so serious?

I think it’s good to expand one’s vocabulary and try different things. I think that’s important.

Do you want to keep going in that direction? To be a ‘capital-S’ serious filmmaker?

I can jump around from one form to the other. But I think to survive with any kind of longevity in this business, without becoming a complete hack, you either have to redefine yourself or your material. As you go through this business you pick up filmmaking skills…that lend themselves to other ideas you might have. So all of a sudden you have these skills as a director, so why not do it?

Are we talking about storytelling or purely technical skills?

Storytelling skills are harder to explain. Those are things you sort of internalize. But there are equally important technical skills – how to open a scene, how do you introduce a character.

What’s the appeal of writing a limited series of half-hours like Foreign Objects as opposed to a traditional sitcom?

Well, when you’re the only writer it’s hard to turn out 22 half-hours a year for five or six or seven years. My only experience with a genuine series was The Newsroom and two things happened. I ran out of ideas after 14 shows and I got bored. So I quit. But I like half-hours because I like short stories. They generally have one idea instead of the twists and turns…of a novel. Short stories are straight lines. Those are the stories I like the most and I think in Foolish Heart and Foreign Objects I saw some of the best like that.

But they don’t get as much airplay.

Oh, they just get buried. I think the CBC played The Newsroom once and then they repeated only six of the 14 shows once and that was it.

Isn’t that frustrating?

I have a feeling there are reasons, but I don’t know why. I think when they replayed them in the summer that kind of bothered me because it’s such a dumping ground for TV shows.

Your name has been attached to many Geminis over the years. Are you at the point now that people expect your projects to get a nod?

I guess if I have a show out there and the show is well done one would expect to at least get nominated. Whether you win or not is a different story. But I don’t know what people expect. I think on this run of Gemini Awards I can look at certain elements of Foreign Objects and say, objectively speaking, that some elements deserve to be nominated. The cinematography was fantastic and Colm Feore was brilliant.

You recently pitched a show to NBC.

Yeah. They didn’t pick it up….It’s a high-risk business.

So why do it? If you don’t like sitcoms?

For the money. The only shows for writers in comedy are sitcoms. The Osbournes isn’t a show for writers. Fear Factor isn’t a show for writers. Survivor isn’t a show for writers. The dramas are shows for drama writers, but comedy writers, the only thing they have are the half-hours. And those are dinosaurs. They still consider the sitcom to be their core programming for primetime for some strange reason. But it’s completely dead.

Would you try again?

I don’t know. I would never work for a network again. But maybe if I came up with something that seemed reasonable for HBO or Showtime or FX. I just don’t mix with them. You get into shows with networks and you end up talking to executives and it’s like talking to a wall. They say things like, ‘We want this character to be nicer.’ They actually said on my half-hour pilot that my character, the main character, wasn’t smiling enough.

Did they have someone counting your smiles per minute?

I have no idea. But they actually said it.

And you said?

I said I don’t smile.