Despite their brush with funding disaster earlier this year, Semi Chellas and company have just wrapped season two of The Eleventh Hour and gone to post in anticipation of a January debut on CTV. The drama, about investigative reporters, got off to a rocky start last season – what with low ratings, a misfired marketing campaign and the CTF meltdown – but its cocreator is optimistic that the second go-round will improve on the first.

The next 13 hours will be ‘more kinetic, less passive,’ says Chellas, by nudging the focus off the newshounds and onto their subjects. A host of guest stars including Jennifer Dale, Tom McCamus, Gordon Pinsent and Matt Frewer will make appearances and each ep will open with a grabby prologue, a la Law & Order, she says.

Creative producer David Wellington shared the director’s chair with Kelly Makin and others this season, and Malcolm Cross is the new DOP, taking over for Steve Cosens. Seaton McLean stepped in as exec producer for the departed Anne Marie La Traverse. Chellas exec produces with Ilana Frank and wrote or cowrote half of the new scripts.

Eleventh Hour got a booster shot at this year’s Gemini Awards – winning best drama, best actor and best supporting actor – and Chellas says the new season’s ad campaign should be more on-the-mark. What few ads CTV ran last year were thought by many to be for an actual news show.

Each ep was shot for somewhere under $1 million, with help from Alliance Atlantis, Telefilm Canada, CTF, the Independent Production Fund and the CTV licence fee. Eleventh Hour will share its Sunday 10 p.m. timeslot, on a rotating basis, with Nip/Tuck, The Sopranos and Cold Squad.

Sex in this City

Her ride on the Sex in the City gravy train will be over by early next year, but Kim Cattrall seems already to have her exit strategy in place. The London-born, Canuck-raised star recently broke ground on her own company in Toronto, Fertile Ground Productions, and will soon start work on the 90-minute special Sexual Intelligence for HBO, Discovery Canada and the U.K.’s Channel 4. The sex-ed doc will shoot in locations including Cyprus, Turkey, London, New York and Toronto, with Cattrall as host.

Local producer Amanda Enright has come on board to launch Fertile Ground although her prodco AJE Productions is not attached. AJE recently delivered 13 half-hours of the landscaping series Room to Grow to CanWest Global and Prime.

Prime Time

Summerhill Entertainment has also had good luck with CanWest Global. The Toronto prodco was recently tapped by CWG-owned Prime for two series, while the second season of its sports talker Out of Bounds has been picked up by CH.

Producer Alison Reid will go to camera in January for the five-month shoot of Divas on a Dime – a 13 x 30 series about discount shopping and trade secrets of the beauty biz slated to air sometime in 2004. Shooting will cover Toronto and perhaps New York and L.A., with help from the Prime licence fee and tax credits. Casting is now underway for a pair of hosts.

The company is also finishing delivery of Antique Hunter, another 13 half-hours for the senior-aimed specialty that follows ‘picker’ Rene Huard on antiquing jaunts around the East Coast, Toronto and upstate New York. The series debuted in early October with a significant push from Prime, and delivery will wrap before the new year, says Summerhill exec VP Lee Herberman. Ross Peebles produces.

Meanwhile, Out of Bounds, the first season of which aired on Men TV and Fox Sportsworld Canada, has crossed over to conventional TV. CWG’s CH arm picked up season two, 65 halfs, of the talk show, following production by Kim Saltarkski at a downtown Toronto pub.

Puppets Who Cuddle

It’s not official until CBC completes its financing for next season, but the net has ‘made it clear’ that it wants another season of the preschooler puppet show Nanalan’ – and producers/cocreators Jason Hopley and Jamie Shannon are writing and prepping to shoot another 15 half-hours in January. CBC bumped its first order of 13 up to 15 so that the show would fit evenly into its weekday schedule, and is expected to do the same for season two.

Nanalan’ follows a young and, er, green toddler through her daily adventures at her grandmother’s house, accompanied by a dog and a friendly neighbor. Hopley and Shannon make the puppets, and work them for the camera along with puppeteer Todd Doldersum. Jack Lenz of Lenz Entertainment exec produces.

The Nanalan’ characters first appeared in the late ’90s in a 72 x 3 series of shorts on YTV, for which Hopley and Shannon are also developing the series Weird Years, about the growing pains of a 12-year-old boy. They’ll deliver a bible and character sketches in the new year to Peter Moss, EVP of YTV parent company Corus Entertainment.

Miss Behaving

The first project out of Toronto’s Never Never Productions has gone to post and, by perhaps February, 13 half-hours of the sketch comedy Listen Missy will debut on W Network. The series shot over the summer and fall around town and features local cutups Lisa Merchant, Diane Flacks, Kathryn Greenwood, Janet VanDeGraaff and Jennifer Baxter.

The series is modeled after Kids in the Hall, using both single-cam skits done on location and more elaborate, multi-cam scenes shot at CBC, according to producer Andrew Barnsley. The show was created, written and is exec produced by Jane Ford (Broadside), Barnsley’s partner at Never Never. Flacks (Broadside) doubles as story editor. Michael Kennedy, Andrea Dorfman and Richard Mortimer took turns at the helm.

S&S Productions, makers of An American in Canada and The Red Green Show, also exec produces. Each ep runs roughly $200,000, backed by W and the CTF’s LFP.