Could an edgy show with lots of sex and swearing, ample nudity and four really hot women help boost homegrown television? Two of the country’s top producers think so and have come together on a gritty, new HBO-style comedy that has helped repatriate Canada’s newest comedy talents.

After producing successful Canadian series such as Due South and Night Heat, Robert Lantos took a decisive step away from TV in the late ’90s to focus exclusively on features. Now he is breaking his own mandate to executive produce G-Spot, a half-hour comedy series that focuses on its main character Gigi, a Canadian actor struggling to make it in Hollywood. Eight episodes, coproduced by Lantos’ Serendipity Point Films and Barna-Alper Productions, both of Toronto, will air on The Movie Network and Movie Central in spring 2005, with second window going to W Network.

‘I was absolutely determined not to come anywhere near television again. [But] this show is in a whole other galaxy. I don’t know of any show, Canadian or otherwise, that goes where G-Spot goes, which is why I ended up allowing myself to get dragged back into television,’ says Lantos.

In the final stretch of six weeks of principal photography, which started Aug. 23, the G-Spot cast and crew are settled in a west Toronto studio where they have designed a set that looks almost exactly like the L.A. home where series writer, executive producer and star, Brigitte Bako, actually lives.

It takes a lot of plastic palm trees to shoot Toronto for L.A. and Bako struggles to avoid them as she walks off set slightly less than gracefully in the platform heels that are part of Gigi’s costume. While Bako may not share her character’s taste in shoes, that is where the differences between them end.

Girl power + Larry David

The series, which Bako says blends the girl power of Sex and the City with the comic sensibilities of BBC’s The Office and the autobiographical flair of Curb Your Enthusiasm, is largely inspired by her own life experiences as a Canadian actor trying to make it in Hollywood.

‘I was truly astonished by the quality of the writing and just the sheer courage of it,’ says Lantos, who knew Bako in the early ’90s when she appeared in I Love A Man In Uniform (distributed by Lantos’ Alliance Communications) for which she received a Genie nomination in 1993. ‘[Bako] is so unbelievably honest and self-deprecating and full of humor about herself. That is the biggest strength of the whole thing. It’s a one-of-a-kind piece that is sort of reality posturing as fiction.’

Bako boarded a bus in Montreal 17 years ago and headed south of the border to pursue acting. Her career took off quickly with a small role in New York Stories (1989), directed by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. But then Bako decided to take a role in the soft-core porn Red Shoe Diaries, which became the albatross of her personal and professional life for years before becoming fodder for the G-Spot scripts.

‘I drew on everything that was completely tragic in my own life,’ says Bako. ‘The stuff you think never could have happened actually did, and the parts that are more believable… that’s the stuff I made up.’

In one scene, for example, we find Gigi in the tub, fine and dandy for a series with ample nudity, but, add a snake and a bottle of Vaseline into the mix and it becomes a little less believable. Bako swears the scene was inspired by something that actually happened to her while shooting a bad horror movie about poisonous snakes.

The strength of the scripts, according to Bako, is that despite the series being set in L.A., the characters are very real, very flawed and easy to relate to.

‘The dialogue is completely real. This is the way women talk to each other, and even though it’s set in L.A., it’s not a glamorized version of life there at all,’ she says.

While series costars Heather Hanson (Sleeping Dogs), Kristin Lehman (Lie with Me) and Kimberly Huie (The Paradise Virus), who play Bako’s best pals, may engage in everyday dialogue, their appearance is anything but ordinary.

‘We have tremendously identifiable characters who are also really hot,’ says executive producer Julia Rosenberg. ‘All the women [who see the show] are going to want to be them and all the men are going to want to boink them.’

Portraying Canadian actresses trying to make it in Hollywood is not exactly a stretch for the G-Spot gals, all of whom are Canucks with L.A. addresses who have been repatriated by the series.

Before sitting down to pen G-Spot, Bako’s previous writing credits consisted solely of school essays and a personal journal. She says people were really shocked to discover that she could write comedy.

‘I’ve been bludgeoned and murdered in most of my movies, so for anything funny to come from me was a strange concept for most,’ says Bako, who has appeared in horror movies such as Paranoia (1998), Sweet Revenge (2001) and Wrong Number (2001).

The first-time writer’s work was not only good enough to attract Canada’s foremost feature producer, but one of the country’s top television producers as well. Looking for a television partner, Lantos went to longtime friend and colleague, executive producer Laszlo Barna, whose Barna-Alper also produces the sex-themed series Show Me Yours, as well as award-winning Canadian series such as Da Vinci’s Inquest.

It only took a quick read through Bako’s scripts for Barna to understand Lantos’ enthusiasm for the project.

‘Part of it is that [Bako] knows the world she’s writing about. But that alone doesn’t qualify you to write brilliant scripts the first time out,’ says Barna. ‘[Bako] is absolutely a one-of-a-kind, unique voice, but above all she’s an incredible comedian with a huge sense of timing.’

Producing G-Spot as a wholly Canadian series, according to Barna, is important in a country where many of the greatest comedy talents have headed south.

‘So much of the comedy community in the U.S. is Canadian. This show absolutely has the same Canadian sensibilities, but what’s different about it is that it’s being financed out of Canada. For once we’re keeping the talent at home,’ says Barna.

And the series did garner interest from people in the States looking to partner on the show, but Bako and the producers made a conscious decision to keep it Canadian in order to maintain creative control, and avoid having to produce a successful pilot before pursuing the series, which is the rule of thumb in the U.S.

The show’s raunchy, sexy edge made it a good fit for principal broadcasters The Movie Network and Movie Central.

‘[Having] the pay channels TMN and Movie Central behind us honestly garners the kind of freedom that you might find on HBO,’ says Barna. Both channels are about to launch another prestige series, the science-themed ReGenesis from Shaftesbury Films (see story, p. 16).

While he is thankful for the creative freedom afforded by Canadian broadcasters, Barna says that budgetary constraints remain a constant issue.

‘We have a great budget, but it’s not great enough,’ he says. ‘If Six Feet Under were made in Canada, it would be called One Foot Under. That’s the challenge of producing in this country, trying to make a Six Feet Under without a shovel.’

-www.serendipitypoint.com

-www.barnaalper.ca