Christina Jennings headed into the biggest TV series premiere of her long production career feeling the pressure.

On June 4, all eyes were on the 10 p.m. primetime slot when The Listener – the Shaftesbury Films drama about a telepathic paramedic that’s made and set in Toronto – bowed in simulcast on NBC and CTV. The Craig Olejnik and Colm Feore-starrer also airs Thursday nights at 7 p.m. on Space, with a Saturday night repeat. The Listener bowed in March on Fox International Channels in 180 countries worldwide.

But however many opportunities the Canadian drama has had to gain traction with audiences out of the gate, Jennings knows the Peacock network is where her drama needs to put up the big numbers. ‘For sure the pressure’s on,’ the Shaftesbury topper says.

And the pressure’s building. It turns out The Listener bowed on NBC opposite game one of the NBA finals on rival ABC. Pro basketball’s marquee event tamped down the Canadian drama’s 9 p.m. first episode audience to 5.2 million, or a 1.5 adult demo rating, while episode two at 10 p.m. posted 5.3 million viewers, or a 1.4 share.

That’s well short of the 10 p.m. summer bow of 8.13 million CBS viewers for Avamar/Pink Sky Entertainment’s Flashpoint on July 10, 2008. Over on CTV, the first episode audience of 1.1 million viewers on June 3, out of simulcast with NBC’s airdate, is comparable to the 1.11 million viewers that tuned into CTV’s premiere of Flashpoint last year.

As The Listener’s summer run on NBC at 10 p.m. Thursday kicks into gear, Jennings knows U.S. network TV is a marathon, not a sprint, and Shaftesbury, NBC and CTV will need to keep building the audience going forward.

But Jennings also has a warning for the Canadian industry: whether or notThe Listener succeeds in U.S. primetime, Canada has too few showrunners to fuel its drama-making machine going forward.

After all, The Listener needs to maintain the winning streak for Canadian dramas in U.S. primetime begun by the success of CBS’ Flashpoint, another CTV series. ‘Whether Flashpoint had gone first, or we would go first, or anybody, the bottom line is what we’re trying to prove is these (U.S./Canadian coproduced dramas) aren’t flukes, that this is actually an incredibly smart way of doing business,’ Jennings explains.

CTV’s The Bridge and Global Television’s Copper have since crossed over to U.S. primetime, and FremantleMedia is

shopping another upcoming Global drama, The Dealership, stateside.

Whether the U.S. audience numbers for The Listener soften or strengthen in the next few weeks will have a huge bearing on whether more Canadian dramas get U.S. network deals, and with that increased production and marketing budgets and better access to international sales.

At the same time, Jennings doesn’t

see the current Canadian-American

collaboration on TV dramas going away anytime soon. ‘[Canadians and Americans] can co-develop shows and coproduce shows that will work in our respective markets,’ Jennings says confidently.

She anticipates U.S. networks will soon develop series with Canadians, and not wait to view ready pilots as they do now. ‘We’ve already had some of those meetings. There’s no reason why you only go in one direction,’ Jennings says.

She adds the U.S. networks may even send their own ideas north across the border for dramas to be coproduced with Canadians. ‘You could have a series that could come the other way, that Fox would bring to us, and we would take to CTV, and allow them a say in the creative. That’s not far off at all,’ Jennings says.

But what does concern the veteran Canadian TV producer is a lack of showrunners to drive the current trend towards North American-produced dramas. Jennings welcomes the return of CTV, Citytv and Global back into the one-hour drama game after they earlier left that business to cable and pay-TV channels The Movie Network and Movie Central. During that absence, she contends, a number of skillful Canadian showrunners trekked south to Hollywood.

‘A huge number went and are now running among the best shows on TV,’ Jennings notes.

And in their absence, Canada wasn’t doing enough to train the next generation of showrunners. ‘So if you talk to producers and broadcasters here, they’ll say we have a shortage of showrunners. Our success has happened so quickly, we haven’t had time to train up.’

In the near future, talent in Canadian story departments will move up to showrunning positions for the first time. Jennings insists that move up the ranks can’t come too soon. ‘That’s the next thing we’ve got to do. We have writing, directing and acting talent, but it’s the showrunning talent we need,’ she argues.