Toronto: You wake up one day, in what appears to be a hospital bed, and that’s about all you really know. Nothing else. Your name, how you got there, anything about the woman who claims to be your wife – not a clue. You’re tabula rasa on all of it.

Now what?

That is the gist of what happened to CFL star Terry Evanshen after a car wreck wiped his memory clean in 1988, and The Man Who Lost Himself, the CTV MOW now shooting at Sarrazin Couture Entertainment, is the story of his recovery.

But it’s not a ‘this happened and then that happened’ type of story, says exec producer and writer Suzette Couture. ‘The theme is, who are we if we don’t have our memories? When you’ve lost all memory of your previous life and you don’t know who you are, are you the same person? What is the soul? What is character?’

Couture wrote the script from the June Callwood book of the same name, with Evanshen, now a motivational speaker, as a consultant. Pierre Sarrazin also exec produces.

The project is shooting until July in Hamilton, ON, making use of its Ivor Wynne Stadium, and on a farm in nearby Cambridge, ON. Helen Shaver (Just Cause, The Outer Limits) directs David James Elliott (JAG) as Evanshen and Wendy Crewson in the familiar role as his worried wife. François Dagenais (Cirque du Soliel: Fire Within) is DOP.

It is budgeted at $4.2 million, with help from tax credits, CTV’s Heroes, Champions and Villains stream, and from U.S. broadcaster Lifetime. It is expected to air in the fall.

It should be noted that another sports hero, also named Terry, is getting the MOW treatment for CTV via Shaftesbury Films, which will soon wrap its life story of Terry Fox, starring Shawn Ashmore (see below).

Sarrazin Couture, meanwhile, has also signed Jerry Ciccoritti to direct the coming-of-age feature Wrestling with the Past, expected to shoot next summer, and is prepping Doomstown, another CTV MOW, for an August shoot under writer/director Sudz Sutherland. Doomstown is the partly true story of a young guy – the as-yet-uncast ‘Jedi’ Barrows – caught between the police and a gang of thugs when his best friend is murdered. It is set in Toronto’s notorious St. Jamestown neighborhood and budgeted at $3.9 million.

‘It’s told from inside the community,’ says Sarrazin. ‘It shows the struggle to lead a decent life.’

And the name? Jedi? Might not a certain sci-fi filmmaker – never slow to enforce his copyrights – have a problem with that?

Yes, they might have to change the name, says Couture. ‘We’ll call him Mickey Mouse,’ she says, and laughs.

Couture is, on her own, also developing MOWs for CBS and Lifetime but can’t yet get into the details, she says.