Ahead of this weekend’s Toronto Screenwriting Conference, Playback caught up with 19-2 showrunner Bruce Smith. Prior to his gig with 19-2, Smith was showrunner on CBC and White Pine Pictures’ Cracked, and a writer on John A: Birth of a Country, The Sleep Room and Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story. He was also a writer/producer on Durham County. 

PB: What are some of the challenges you encountered when adapting a French-language series to an English-language version?

BS: Finding what the soul of the show is, and then transforming that not only into a new language but, in particular, into a new cast. Another challenge is to let the process happen as you would for an original show. Filmed drama is a living thing that evolves as it gets made.  We have to make sure we allow the full creative process to happen for the English show, not try and make a copy of the French one.  Although they generally have the same names, the French and English shows are not about the same characters. Even when they go through the same things, they’re different people and will have different reactions, different baggage to carry forward. Those differences accumulate over time. On 19-2 we started out very close to the original, but by now we’re making a completely different show. To me that’s a sign the process is working.

PB: What are some of the benefits of adapting an existing series for a new market?

BS: First and foremost we get the benefit of hindsight. We get to see what worked and what perhaps didn’t going from page to screen in French. That’s an enormous insight.  Sometimes we decided to go in completely a different direction, other times we chose to make a larger investment in something that we loved from the original series, for instance to turn a beautiful but isolated scene into the culmination of an arc. Maybe most important, in this instance, the original series was excellent. It set the bar high and put the pressure on us to live up to it. That was a real gift.

PB: Can you tell us a bit about what the pitch process was like for 19-2? How did you sell the broadcaster on the series?

BS: I came on board when the original producers brought the idea of an English version to CBC. From the start the show had some huge advantages – it was a massive hit in Quebec, a proven ratings winner, with a look and an emotional intensity that made it stand out immediately.  However, it also faced some significant obstacles in English.  Firstly it’s not a procedural, it’s about patrollers not detectives, and they don’t generally solve crimes. Secondly it’s set in Montreal, where policing is done mostly in French. For the first issue, doing a cop show without a murder-of-the-week, we could hold up the proven success of the original to show how it would work. For the second problem, our proposal was to use the traditional Hollywood approach to foreign languages – we’d magically translate for the audience. We’d simply make the language issue disappear, like a WW2 movie set in Paris. In the end CBC didn’t pick up the show, but the pilot they greenlit gave us the proof that our approach could work in English and helped us find a home at Bell.

PB: You have worked on miniseries/MOWs as well as series in a more traditional format like 19-2. Do you prefer working on one over the other? What are some of the perks and drawbacks of either format?

BS: Both formats are wonderful in their own ways and I love them both but to be frank, I focused on long-form projects while my kids were young but always intended to return to series television. It’s my great love.  The hours are brutal but the rewards are unparalleled. The longer the arc, the bigger the thrill for me. There is no equal to a serialized dramatic show. In that respect 19-2 is really not a traditional TV format cop show, because the characters don’t reset, ever. In 19-2, everything we do on the show is carried forward. The characters change enormously over time. That’s what’s so addictive about the show for me. And rare.

PB: What advice would you have for any up-and-coming screenwriters?

BS: Get it off your desk and out into the world. Find a way. Write a play and produce it yourself. Put together a table read and hear how your scenes come off the page.  In drama, writing ‘the end’ is actually just a beginning.

The Toronto Screenwriting Conference will be held on April 11 and April 12 at the Daniels Spectrum.