Roses are Wild

MY WELL-UPHOLSTERED behind hasn't even sunk into the leather before Amy Cameron fires off her first question:

"I have to ask you something right off the bat..."

Cameron is Wild Roses' co-creator. And right now she's hitting me with her best journo-stare. You can see those ink stained wretch bonafides bubbling to the surface like Alberta crude. I swallow, suddenly cotton mouthed.

Cameron's had quite a year, transiting from a career in print journalism by developing CBC's new chick-friendly "Don't call it Dallas" Tuesday night soaper with her sister Tassie, (Would Be Kings, Flashpoint) one of Canada's most sought after television writers. There's also the matter of the birth of her first child, which fell smack dab in the middle of pre-production for the show that became Wild Roses. Any number of writers will joke comparing the birth process to the process of birthing a series. If they did that in Cameron's presence, I imagine they'd get much the same kind of stare that I'm getting right now.

"I know how you felt about Cowgirls. [The show's title through pre-production and most of filming.] How do you feel about 'Wild Roses?'

Curses. She's read the blog. Time for the fateful choice. Canadian-friendly or Yankee-no-guff?

"I'm not crazy about it." (What can I say? I yam what I yam.)

She laughs. "Oh My God, you're impossible."

So. It's gonna be one of those interviews.

I kid. But there's definitely something odd in the air in this particular publicity session, conducted in the gallery of a chi-chi private club that couldn't be further from Wild Roses' Alberta vistas. It's more than two months before the show's January premiere. Cameron sits on a couch to my right. To my left, feet tucked up under her (in shoes that look like they cost more than my laptop) is Miranda de Pencier, Executive Producer of the show. Minutes before I sat down, two Media Profile publicists took pains to remind me that de Pencier is the co-creator of the show. Apparently there's a mistake in the kits. Okey dokey. Noted. Rounding out the group are Tom Cox, and Jordy Randall, the Alberta producers who already have a superficially similar show on CBC -- the Sunday night family drama Heartland. (Not to mention Tom Stone (Stone Undercover in syndication), a Calgary set show both were involved with way back in the early days of the decade)

We're all here to wrestle the spin on this Tuesday night show. Not an easy thing to do at the best of times, and not the smoothest tasks when it comes to Roses. First, there's the network's other "girls and horses" show. Then there seems to be a battle of the metaphors. In its releases, CBC plays up the show's "Shakesperean themes," which as far as I can tell spring from the fact that it's about two families...kind of like Romeo & Juliet. (Note to self: the more populist your show wants to be, the less you should compare it to Shakespeare.) Yet the one obvious comparison - Dallas - seems to elicit a gunshy response, almost like everybody's been coached to stay away from it. In subsequent interviews, Cameron will give up altogehter, telling Canwest News Service, "Hell, if it's anywhere close to being as successful as Dallas, I'm all for it. Call it the new Dallas -- I have no problem with that.''

The show's press release describes the show this way:

Growing up on the idyllic Rivercross ranch, sisters Lucy (Sarah Power, Random Passage, American Pie: Beta House) and Kate Henry (Michelle Harrison, Paycheck, Traveling) may not have agreed on everything, but neither could imagine a more beautiful place to live. When David McGregor (Gary Hudson, Dynasty, Smallville), cutthroat CEO of oil exploration company McGregor Strategic, decides Rivercross is his for the taking, Lucy and Kate will have to overcome a fierce family feud and an entire corporate empire just to keep their home.

So ... families, oil, horses, and skullduggery. May or may not be Shakesperean. Got it. So why is the vibe in the room so funky?

Part of the tension in the air might be the troubled development history of the program. The original pilot was extensively reshot, and a revolving door of writers and showrunners came and went through production. Production shutdowns, frantic last-minute rewrites and personnel changes -- this show had it all. Not to mention a -- dare I say it -- almost Shakespearean number of speaking parts.

de Pencier smiles and nods agreement -- the show was definitely a challenge. "I would say the biggest thing that we discovered is that we have a really big cast. We have eight leads and twenty, twenty-five..it's an awfully big show. We thought about getting rid of a few but we decided we wanted to give them all life."

Cameron adds, "At the beginning of the season, you're trying to add all these characters to your audience. And the first few scripts were tough. But now, writing the end of the season, we don't feel that way anymore, because we feel that some characters can step forward and take the lead, and then step back in the next episode. So now there's more of a flow."

To some extent, though, that huge cast really is inevitable, just a normal outgrowth of the scope of the program. "You've got rural and urban, the downtown landscape of urban Calgary," says Cox. "And you have to make sure that we're servicing both those characters." Randall agrees, "That's the dynamic at the heart of the show."

"We are shooting all over the place," says dePencier. "We have these two ranches, we are spread out. We're running around a lot every episode."

Though it complicated the production considerably, Cameron thinks that ultimately, the broadening of the show has helped it. "I think initially it was a bit more focused on the ranching side of things. There was a bit more of that wish-fulfillment thing of gorgeous women on horses and, you know, imagining what it would be like if I was a Cowgirl. And then realizing that we wanted to tap into that boomtown idea, and the characters dipping in and out of Calgary -- and then in the research of it we discovered that the world of Calgary was as interesting, if not more interesting than the world I created with Cowgirls. It was tricky. You can bite off more than you can chew But I think we've sort of figured it out."

Speaking of tricky -- how do you work in a maternity leave in the middle of getting a series going, anyway?

"It was really, really, really hard. It was not fun. I went back to work officially two months after having the baby. I will never forget this. I went into a CBC meeting ten days after having a C-section and was breastfeeding in the middle of the meeting. And I remember thinking, "I'm sure it's important that I'm here, but I gotta go home." Ultimately, I knew that was going to happen, the timing was really really terrible, but I wrote a detailed bible, and spent a lot of time telling everybody who would listen what I thought, and then the baby came and I said, "okay, it's yours!" and then I came back two months later and it was kind of fun to have people say, "okay, we think this might happen."

But was it a relief in some ways?

Cameron nods. "It's so nice when you've got these characters in your head for two years to be able to give that up and say, "okay, this can be somebody else's responsibility for a while because I'm going to go something a bit more important. I think in retrospect, the one thing I would have changed is I would not have named one of the characters the same name as I named my son. That I find confusing. And a little bit of a mindfuck."

"We were all there in the mucky muck, from the early days," says dePencier. "The bible was really solid, and we hired other writers and tried to keep the organic centre of it."

"We never would have planned it that way," says Randall, "but in a way, it's like the three of us got to adopt it. It happened at a natural time, when you're bringing in writers, you're bringing in Directors, and designers -- all these other voices are being added. And the process is speeding up exponentially. But I never got the sense that Amy was out of it."

And of course, at a certain point, the navel gazing of development has to give through to the shakedown of production anyway. "The actors and writers feed off each other," says Cox, "And the directors pick up on that."

Cameron thinks ultimately, the humor is the thing that's going to sell the show, especially when it comes to the show's n'er do well brother, Peter McGregor (Adam MacDonald), "In some ways, the looser it becomes, the better Adam becomes. That's the kind of thing that could slip easily away when you're doing a soap opera. It could go the way of the dodo bird. But luckily, we kept the humor. We kept the sense of fun."

After a solid premiere, which drew 627 000 viewers, retained most of its lead in and bested timeslot competitor 90210 on Global, it's possible that the ranch hands will be taking their shirts off on this one for sometime to come. Let's hope those numbers aren't as volatile as Calgary's oil prices.

Wild Roses airs Tuesdays at 9pm on CBC