The focus groups have spoken. The life of Jane Black appears to be funny, well plotted, populated with strong comic characters and, on the whole, is likely to click with its target demographic. But the title character needs some work.

At least that’s the upshot, according to Anne-Marie Varner, head of Canadian production at Global, who put the half-hour pilot The Jane Show through some rigorous audience testing after it aired in December.

‘They felt there were a lot of very strong characters, but… what they’d like to see is more of the Bridget Jones style of storytelling. Jane has to have more backbone,’ says Varner. Also, the camera has to stop jumping around so much.

The would-be series stars comic Teresa Pavlinek as a thirtysomething Toronto singleton and is one of three new shows to come out of Global Labs, the network’s newly revamped development shop. It has been operating quietly since the summer, working hand-in-glove on the Jane pilot with Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films, on the teen drama Falcon Beach with both Toronto’s Insight Productions and Winnipeg’s Original Pictures, and on War of the Wheels, a new spin on car renovation from Toronto’s Breakthrough Films & Television, which aired on Feb. 12.

The Labs is a loosely defined project – modeled on a similar setup at Fox – with no set budget, steered by Varner, programmers Don Gaudet and Adam Ivers, and former Fireworks exec Adam Haight. It is looking to pilot four or five titles per year, with a lean towards lifestyle and dramas and, to hear Varner tell it, is part of a serious effort at the network to get behind some better Canadian-made shows.

How? By turning out American-style pilots, putting the results under the microscope of execs and focus groups, and fixing any problems before (and if) they go to series.

‘What we’re trying to do is incubate some quality Canadian programming, in particular drama,’ for the main network and its sister channels, says Varner. ‘Our focus is going to be on quality, not so much quantity. From here on in we’ll be looking at drama very seriously.’

Not the sort of talk producers have come to expect from Global, which has been accused of putting only a halfhearted effort into its domestic shows, such as the border-straddling Zoe Busiek: Wild Card or the budget-conscious Train 48. It seems the network is trying to change its rep and gain some viewers in the process.

‘If we’re going use our airwaves well and our schedule well to enhance our position in the marketplace, we can do that with our Canadian productions,’ says Varner.

This comes just a few months after a management purge at Global that ejected its two top programmers, including Varner’s predecessor, Loren Mawhinney. Varner says there is no connection between the two, noting that the Labs effort was already underway by that time, adding only, ‘What’s past is past.’

It has long been argued that Canada needs to make more pilots if it wants to make better programs. CBC has been known to test-drive new shows, as with last month’s Getting Along Famously and, so far, producers are happy with what they see at Global Labs.

‘There are less financial difficulties with a pilot if you know it’s going to go to air,’ says Breakthrough’s Jim Erickson, the point person on War of the Wheels. ‘You learn so much more doing a pilot about what you do and don’t need.’

The hour-long show pits two teams of gearheads against each other in a race to overhaul two beat-up clunkers – a sort of competitive Pimp My Ride. In that case, Global took the idea to Breakthrough, knowing that Erickson has been keen to develop more lifestyle shows, and watched as he ran with it.

‘It’s great to work with a broadcaster who knows what they want,’ to avoid the guesswork of pitching, he says, adding that the development led to a more polished and road-worthy pilot. The competition segments, similar to those of Survivor, were tweaked and he broadened the show to include different types of cars – musclecars, motorbikes, compacts and such. ‘The idea is still changing,’ he says.

Global wants to turn out shows quickly and, in the case of Falcon Beach, used its pilot program to shake the long-delayed series out of its development doldrums. The teen-aimed drama had been in development as a series for some time, after being caught in the CTF shortfall of 2003, but got a shot in the arm when Global asked for a pilot, according to producers Kim Todd and Shannon Farr.

The two-hour pilot aired Jan. 29 and is again being considered for a full series. ‘We’re developing new scripts in anticipation, with our fingers crossed,’ says Todd.

Shaftesbury principal Christina Jennings is also upbeat. Three sets of writers are now revising the bible for The Jane Show based on the feedback from the pilot, and the company will put in for full series funding at CTF in March, looking to shoot in the summer. The show was originally pitched to Shaftesbury by Pavlinek and others.

‘What’s interesting about this model is it allows pilots and series to work in the summer,’ says Jennings, rather than wait through a year or more of funding cycles between pilot and series. ‘I can’t tell you how positive I am about this.’

Jennings recalls that, last year, other producers were surprised to learn that Global – thought to be all but completely out of production – was funding a pilot. ‘People were really shocked,’ she says. ‘I do think that last summer there was a shift at Global, for sure.’

Global chipped in about two-thirds of the pilot’s $300,000 budget, the rest coming from Telefilm, Shaftesbury and deferrals. The network is also looking at a one-hour drama by Shaftesbury, says Jennings, and recently picked up its science-gone-mad series ReGenesis, which just finished its debut run on The Movie Network/Movie Central.

-www.canada.com/globaltv

-www.shaftesbury.org

-www.breakthroughfilms.com