Steve ‘Red Green’ Smith has hung up his duct tape and said so long to Possum Lodge. With 300 episodes under his tool belt, the veteran comedian ended his 15-year stint as writer, producer and star of CBC’s The Red Green Show when the final episode taped late last year. It airs on April 7.

‘I didn’t want The Red Green Show to be one of those TV series riding it out way past their peak,’ says the 60-year-old Smith, who was recently named to the Order of Canada. ‘After you have been around for a long time, you owe it to everybody else to get out of the way.’  

Red Green also airs on more than 80 PBS stations. The series finale will see Red create his ultimate invention, a perpetual motion machine, while his nerdy nephew Harold gets married.

‘I wanted to give a sense of closure without an absolute finality to it,’ says Smith. ‘So it isn’t like everyone dies or we blow up the lodge, or it was all a dream.’

Smith – who runs S&S Productions out of Toronto with his brother David Smith – says it was his decision, not the CBC’s, to pull the plug.

‘They [CBC] didn’t fight me. I think they thought there would be reunion shows and specials, but that isn’t going to happen,’ he explains. ‘I can’t end the series and then agree to do some diluted version of it.’

And yet, he is currently developing a half-hour animated series, Planet Harold, based on the character played by Patrick McKenna.

‘Harold is a teenager and the only student going into grade 10 in the Possum Lake area, so it is cheaper to bus him to the city than hire a teacher,’ explains Smith of the premise. ‘Much of the show takes place during the school day among his group of friends.’

McKenna and Smith will voice Harold and Uncle Red, respectively. All the other characters will be new creations. S&S recently delivered a 3D animated demo, produced with Toronto’s Elliott Animation, to CBC.

S&S has other irons in the Ceeb fire. In May, it will shoot a $500,000 half-hour sketch comedy pilot featuring Toronto troupe The Atomic Fireballs, and is developing Fallen, a half-hour dramedy from writers Sheila McCarthy, who plans to star, and Brendan Howley.

The company is also making a second season of Sons of Butcher for Teletoon and is hoping for a second order of Street Eats, which spotlights ethnic eateries around Toronto, from Sun TV. It is also developing three more satirical History Bites specials for History Television.

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