Another day, another announcement about Canadian-produced TV shows for the fall. Maybe the sky isn’t falling after all, at least not in Toronto.
The news comes from cash-strapped Canwest Global, which just launched the animated series Bob & Doug and has The Dealership and other projects in production for fall. Screw that $4.1 billion debt, let’s start makin’ some TV shows!
Global is joining forces with E1 Entertainment and ABC to produce Copper. The 13-episode police drama begins shooting in Toronto in June.
This one sounds a bit like Flashpoint meets Grey’s Anatomy. Copper is described as “a youthful, heartfelt, one-hour, character-driven workplace drama about five rookie cops plunged into the high stakes world of big city policing – a world where even the smallest mistake can have life-or-death consequences.”
Basically it is all about sexy young cops. “They’re kids with guns,” goes the release, “learning first hand the hardest kind of policing there is.” Yikes!!
We’re told that the series follows the young coppers right out of the police academy, “where they bonded together, fought together, drank together, worked together and slept together.” Geez–is it too late to sign up? Cuff me, cuff me!!!
Canadian Film Centre grad Tassie Cameron, who was showrunner for the first season of Flashpoint, is doing the day-to-day on this series. E1 are also the folks behind the upcoming CBS/CTV police series The Bridge as well as the highly anticipated new HBO series Hung. They also have the balls to admit that they do Testees.
Etan Vlessing at The Hollywood Reporter reports that Global picked the series up in February on the strength of a script and that Cameron and screenwriter Ilana Frank then pitched Copper to ABC, NBC, Fox, The CW and Lifetime in March. ABC, like other U.S. broadcasters searching for International partners to cut costs, stepped up and made the deal. The lead female officer–presumably nicknamed “Copper,” has yet to be cast.
This is the second spring in a row that an American broadcaster has teamed with a Canadian network on a Toronto-based cop show. If Copper can arrest anywhere near the number of viewers as Flashpoint, Global should be able to start paying back some of those banks.
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