CBC TeeVee & Me: Down East Edition

SOMEBODY, I'M NOT sure who, once pointed out that CBC has four distinct programming seasons: Summer, Fall, Winter and Hockey.

Well, CBC today announced the highlights of the big two of those seasons: Fall and Winter.

Besides returning shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie, The Border, Being Erica, Heartland, The Tudors, Dragon's Den, The Mercer Report and This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Canada's public broadcaster will be adding a figure-skating based reality series, and a spelling-bee like reality show. Also new is venerable CBC favourite Ron James, in an eponymously named sketch comedy show.

As for January?

Two new shows will premiere during the winter: 18 to Life, a domestic comedy about a couple who marry at 18, and Republic of Doyle, a one-hour, St. John's-set dramatic comedy about a dysfunctional father-son private investigator team.

I've been waiting for this official announcement to hit, cause now I can finally confirm the scuttlebutt that's been floating about for the last little bit. I'm very happy to be able to say that I've signed on to run the writing room on Republic of Doyle.

This is the project I blogged briefly about back in February, when I went out for a working weekend in St. John's.

Sometimes when a series gears up after a pilot there's an initial trepidation. Will it work as a series? Is it sustainable? I don't feel any of that going into Republic of Doyle. Allan Hawco, one of the show's creators and its lead actor, is a young actor who's already an old hand at the business. He's got smarts, passion for miles, and a clear, infectious sense of the show he wants to see -- and how he wants to see his city presented. It's a show that's pure entertainment, that's going to feel fresh and fun -- and it's going to be a love letter to St. John's to boot.

Even before I went to Newfoundland, from the very first meeting I had with Hawco and his producing partners John Vatcher and Rob Blackie, at an extremely generic Jack Astor's in downtown Toronto, my spidey sense said that these guys were kindred -- all looking to do a show that's work worth doing, and worth having a lot of fun doing it. Then Hawco and I sealed some kind of mojo-devil magic at one of the craziest nights I have EVER had at The Paddock.

Once I met Perry Chafe, Hawco's writing partner, and jawed a bit more with Malcolm MacRury, who helped them write the pilot, and we got down to breaking story, I started getting really excited. Anticipating a new show is kind of like falling in love that way.

So there it is. I've drunk the KoolAid. Harrrd. Next week I'm on a plane to St. John's, and hopefully, touch wood, all goes well, I'll be there most of 2009, doing the thing I love, and helping other people to do the thing they love. It's a good life, I think.

That's going to mean changes and evolutions not just for my life, but for this blog. No, in case you were wondering, I shall not miss being at the centre of the universe (note to the rest of the country: nobody in Toronto EVER actually thinks of the city this way.) I won't miss being far from the networks, or from the gossip. I won't miss the occasional sniff of toxic weirdness that seems to have crept out a lot more in the last month or two. But I will miss all my wonderful friends, and the streets I know so well. I'll have to sneak back for a weekend now and again. (As well, I'm working with the WGC to figure out the ways I can continue to discharge my Councillor duties.)

Your life prepares you for things in funny ways. I've been in this place before -- poised to go somewhere utterly new to write a chapter of a new adventure. For years now, I've harboured a kind of fascination for Newfoundland, that didn't just begin and end with The Shipping News. No, I've found myself drawn to myth like The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, the modern day movement of Michael Winter's This All Happened, the Iambics of Newfoundland...I've had a strange running series of books on my bedside table.

But to be so far away and so head-down-and-working means that, oh, say....CRTC...yeah, I hate to say it, but I can't see writing much of that up for the moment. Good thing you've got the WGC blasts and Kelly Lynne Ashton's Twitters and La Walton's ink reportage to fall back on.

I'm going to say right now that blogging's liable to be light for the foreseeable future. I've got to, first, do a thousand things to be ready to get out of Dodge, and second, immerse myself into getting stories into the pipeline. It's going to be more than all-consuming.

I can't say that there won't be craft dispatches along the way, maybe along the line of the kinds of things I wrote when I was working on the first season of the ex-show...but at the same time, I'm a big believer that the first impression you get of a show should be of the work itself. So you're not going to hear a lot about Republic of Doyle. Nope. Not til you see it in January 2010.

This is a chance to re-order certain attentions and patterns in my life, too. This blog hasn't been as fun for me to do for a while now. Maybe I'll have a chance to rediscover what was fun about doing it with a change of scene. To fill the gaps this summer, I'm going to be trying to wrangle other Canadian writers to take up a Dead Things Residency for a week at a time.

A bold experiment, I guess. See if it works.

In the meantime, I hope you'll all continue to come back here when there's something new, and that you'll continue to try and find the creative spark and courage in your own lives. Little Darling, I feel the ice is slowly melting. And over the last months, it really has seemed like years since it's been clear.

But now, here comes the sun -- and there's something new, and shiny, and wonderful to play with -- and new kids in the sandbox to dream with, too.

Can't. Hardly. Wait.