A sign of what Canadian tv writers hope is a new trend in homegrown television production, Traders screenwriters Alyson Feltes and Hart Hanson have been given the brunt of creative control over the Atlantis Communications-produced series.

To the local screenwriting posse, it seems a bit of Nirvana, this adopting of the American model which sees the writer/producer wielding significant power on set. But Feltes, executive producer, and Hanson, coexec producer and head writer, make the point that writing fiction based on fact comes with its own unwieldy limitations, particularly when the subject matter is stocks and bonds.

‘Sometimes I watch er and I think God, if we could just have a body,’ says Hanson.

‘I swear to God, we’ve had act endings where a character says, `I have a file,’ and we’ve had action sequences that involve opening a file cabinet. It’s all paper.’

Two years ago, Feltes and Hanson pitched and won the right to create and produce the series that CanWest Global president Jim Sward wanted; a primetime drama set on the trading floor, with a mandate to remain realistic and to reflect and often anticipate the stories that appear in the business section of the newspaper.

Given their ongoing creative licence, the writing team is meeting the broadcaster’s expectations. As Traders enters its third season (pseudo simulcast on cbc for the first time), they have freedom from Global to work without a show bible – ‘Bibles are bullshit,’ says Hanson – a setup which gives them room to juggle plot lines that springboard off the anarchic world of high finance. It’s a potential legal minefield which requires finessing on the writers’ part.

‘A show like Law & Order has a huge legal department,’ says Hanson, ‘and you can watch that show and say, `That’s o.j.,’ but we can’t afford for people to say, `That’s Peter Munk.’ We can’t afford the insurance premiums.’

The Global directive to almost anticipate events in the business community too comes with thorns. Case in point, a plot line for an episode last season was based loosely on Bre-x but melded with a completely fictional story about mercenary operations in foreign lands.

‘Suddenly that story actually started to appear on the business pages,’ says Feltes.

‘Same country, same mineral, and so we got a call from the lawyer saying, `Did you read this?’ ‘

Feltes says they try to protect themselves by making their plot lines more grand and farfetched. ‘But the business community keeps catching up.’

Hanson adds the art reflecting life interplay has been inverted four or five times thus far. They had a fictional version, for example, of the Nike/Bauer merger long before it happened. ‘We’re starting to think that we should write an episode about us getting really wealthy.’

So how do Hanson and Feltes develop the necessary audience empathy with the cutthroat main characters that will keep viewers coming back week after week? The rule is that each character must have at least two reasons for doing something, says Hanson. For example, when David Cubitt’s character is given the task of dismantling an airline, laying off all its workers and selling off the parts, he finds a way to turn the airline around and keep everybody employed.

‘But not because he wants people to be happy,’ Feltes chimes in. ‘It’s because he wants to show everybody that he has the skill to put it back together and take on Air Canada.’

Aiding and abetting the plot lines is a crew of ‘deep throats’ who work in the trading community and come to Feltes and Hanson with dirt – i.e., story suggestions. When vetting the resulting scripts, the six or seven confidants are a hard sell, particularly when the screenwriters fold a conscience into the characters’ motives.

Traditional cop, hospital or lawyer shows have characters whose job descriptions demand good deeds. A trader’s measuring stick of success is money. End of story. ‘When we moralize, they (the consultants) mock us,’ says Feltes, who has been at the helm of the show from its conception, and says that though most of the consultants they have worked with are lacking a social conscience they are never lacking in the brains department.

‘They’re urbane and really smart,’ says Hanson, a veteran writer of Canadian television with credits on Beachcombers, Road To Avonlea and North of 60. ‘In the tv business not everyone you run into is really smart.’

With cbc coming on board to broadcast the second window of Traders and thus adding more money to the production budget, Hanson and Feltes will have 22 episodes to push the evolution of Gardner Ross. As the program theoretically hits its stride this season, they will, like all good writers in Canada, wrestle with the temptation to write for American tv.

‘Whether to stay or go to l.a. is the first thing on Canadian writers’ minds,’ says Hanson. ‘I am constantly deciding whether or not this is the year I’m going to the u.s.’

But he applauds what he sees as a shift in the Canadian industry of giving writers more control of the shows they work on. ‘The people making the shows get to be in charge,’ says Hanson. ‘For a long time there were exec producers on Canadian shows who didn’t know how to make anything.