Toronto: It’s not every day you see a bear trying to have sex with a cheetah – on her desk. And, until recently, a pack of randy, anthropomorphized cartoon animals was probably the last sort of thing you’d expect to see from Toronto’s Associated Producers – a prodco that made its name in the ’90s by turning out high-end documentaries on such not-at-all sexy subjects as biblical history (The Exodus Decoded) and killer viruses (The Plague Monkeys).

But the new watchword at AP is ‘diversification,’ and the company is now at work on some decidedly genre-bending TV shows, including Once a Week, an adult-aimed half-hour comedy about cartoon animals and their sex-therapy sessions.

The one-minute screener shows an animal couple – she the high-powered yuppie, he the ursine blue-collar boyfriend – trying to tryst during a lunch break.

‘It used to be you made only one thing or another. Gardening shows or politics or whatever. Really specialized,’ says AP principal Simcha Jacobovici. ‘We’re pushing in a new direction.’

The series for The Movie Network and Movie Central is penned and voiced by comics from The Second City – including Steven Morel, Carolyn Taylor and Louis-Charles Pearson – and is expected to shoot next year, using motion-capture tooning by Gravity Visual Effects.

Gravity and Imarion Post Production are doing CG for several new AP projects, and have been involved since early development, says Jacobovici, noting, ‘There’s no point pitching something if you don’t know if anybody can afford it.’

The shop is about to hand in the first 26 half-hours of Yummy Mummy, a similarly hip-aimed parenting show, starring former MuchMusic VJ Erica Ehm. The Life Network series, produced by Alyse Rosenberg, Jennifer Horvath and Ehm, again makes use of CG effects, this time by creating elaborate backdrops and props. AP is also developing a CG toon for CBC called Time Travel Kids.

Meanwhile, Jacobovici is hosting and producing 26 half-hours of his pet project The Naked Archeologist, an offbeat science show for VisionTV, and will soon deliver the documentary Natasha International, a look at the international sex trade for CBC and Channel 4.

AP has been lying low since the departure of Jacobovici’s partners Elliott Halpern and Jack Rabinovitch in late 2001, a split that opened the door for Martin Keltz, former president of Scholastic Productions, who joined in 2002. Jacobovici credits Keltz and longtime AP producer Ric Bienstock for much of the coming production phase, which next year will turn out some 30 hours of programming. The last AP production phase, three years ago, made six hours.