The train is crowded today, like it is every day, so the publicist, two PAs and I have to sit on the floor, squished and out of sight up against one of the doors. Outside it’s dark and fake street lighting is flashing past while, a few feet away, two camera operators and a sound man are trying to bend into the right shape – anatomy be damned – to get a shot of two commuters who are arguing over a frozen turkey.

It is one of the last scenes in the Thanksgiving Day episode of Train 48 – the daily Global series about, well, about people making small talk on a train. Pete, the heartless yuppie, has just offered to donate an obscenely huge butterball to the food bank where Dana, the do-gooder, volunteers. But he wants $10 to recoup his loss. They argue while, in the next pod of seats, another four characters are making poultry-themed decorations out of construction paper.

The take ends when someone accidentally swears.

Global won’t say how much it spends on this show but, looking around the north Toronto soundstage, it must be peanuts. Less than peanuts. Peanut shells. There’s only one set – this bland interior of a commuter car – few props, no scripts, and little in the way of lighting, sound, costumes or crew. It makes Trailer Park Boys look like Lord of the Rings.

And yet this set will turn out 130 TV hours before its first 12 months are up, bringing some 200,000 viewers every weekday to Global’s 7 p.m. timeslot if the current ratings hold. Not bad, all things considered, although it trails the 470,000 eTalk Daily brings to CTV in the same slot. The show is now in its first full season, and producers hope its summertime audience will follow the lives of Dana, Pete, Randy, Liz and the rest through the fall and winter.

Critics say Train 48 is ugly, gimmicky and a shortcut to meeting Cancon requirements, but published reviews, even those from outside the CanWest Global gang, have been kind, applauding its ingenuity and its mass production of topical, all-Canuck entertainment done on-the-cheap with no public funds.

They have a point, especially about the money. As public coin dries up and international markets fall apart, shows the world over are polarizing into the ultra-expensive and infra-cheap. Some think Canada should turn to the latter. Maybe Global and its partners at Toronto’s Protocol Entertainment are on to something?

‘Sitcoms aren’t working anymore and the networks know it. Reality is also going out, but this melds the two,’ says Joanne Boland, who plays Dana.

Like the Australian show Going Home, from which Protocol bought the formatting rights, characters on Train 48 mostly talk about their lives and current events. Each ep is shot, edited and aired in one day; a ‘gun to the head’ schedule that starts every morning at 6 a.m. In lieu of a script, each of the 10 regulars gets a rough outline, maybe a page, of what’s on his or her character’s mind for that day, and has a brief meeting with that day’s director. Shooting starts at 7:30 a.m. Meanwhile, a second team, headed by another director and showrunner, are writing the outlines for the following day. The teams take turns writing and shooting.

‘What we’ve done is taken the [Australian] model and added more comedy. Going Home is more serious,’ says Duncan McKenzie, who exec produces with Eric Lunsky, Comweb Group’s Paul Bronfman and Protocol’s Steve Levitan. No one on Train likes the word ‘reality’ – the preferred buzzword is ‘instant drama’ – and they’re equally squeamish about ‘soap opera’ despite the similarities. If it’s a soap, it’s more of the Coronation Street variety than that of Guiding Light, they say.

Most scenes are done in one or two takes, and are immediately run upstairs for editing. ‘The show is almost edited as we’re shooting,’ says McKenzie. ‘We’re timing every second so before it goes up we know where we are exactly. It’s just a question of assembling it in the right order.’ Shooting wraps shortly before 1 p.m. and the finished ep leaves the building via satellite at 5 p.m.

It might not look pretty, but Train’s makers are proud that they do so much, so fast. Director Jane Thompson points out that an hour-long drama can take six days to shoot one episode. Here, that same time buys three times as much.

Thompson and the other helmers – Ron Murphy and Penelope Buitenhuis – get to focus on the performances of each actor, while leaving the technicalities of camera work to the crew. ‘It’s moving too fast – you really have to trust the camera operators. They’re right on the set. I’m off, so I trust them,’ Thompson says. And the cast is happy because Train is basically a daily, paid improv class. ‘What actor doesn’t want to be in a show that’s all about character?’ asks Raoul Bhaneja, who plays Pete.

And the writing? Thompson says one of the biggest misconceptions about Train is that there are no writers. ‘That’s the writing department over there,’ she says, pointing to a large, although unoccupied, cluster of desks. ‘There are four writers plus two showrunners. That’s a big story department. It’s probably more writers than The Eleventh Hour.’ She’s right, it has five. ‘I think of other shows I’ve worked on’ – Cold Squad, Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy – ‘and this is as big a writing department as I’ve ever encountered.’

The writing is also more challenging than it seems, says McKenzie. ‘It’s actually quite a tricky form. You’re not creating plots or dialogue the same way you would for other TV.’ Scenes have to be sketched out with enough detail so that they unfold naturally, but not with so much that they lose their spontaneity. ‘It’s quite a delicate balance.’

-www.train48.com

-www.protocolent.com