Could an edgy show with lots of sex and swearing, ample nudity and four really hot women help boost homegrown television? Two of the country’s top producers think so and have come together on a gritty, new HBO-style comedy.
After producing successful Canadian series such as Due South and Traders, Robert Lantos took a decisive step away from TV in the late ’90s to focus exclusively on features. Now he is breaking his own mandate to exec produce G-Spot, a half-hour comedy series that focuses on its main character Gigi, a Canadian actor struggling to make it in Hollywood. Eight episodes, coproduced by Lantos’ Serendipity Point Films and Barna-Alper Productions, both of Toronto, will air on The Movie Network and Movie Central in spring 2005, with second window going to W Network.
‘I was absolutely determined not to come anywhere near television again. [But] this show is in a whole other galaxy. I don’t know of any show, Canadian or otherwise, that goes where G-Spot goes, which is why I ended up allowing myself to get dragged back into television,’ says Lantos.
Series writer, executive producer and star, Brigitte Bako says the show, which blends the girl power of Sex and the City with the comic sensibilities of BBC’s The Office and the autobiographical flair of Curb Your Enthusiasm, is largely inspired by her own life experiences as a Canadian actor trying to make it in Hollywood.
Bako’s career took off quickly with a small role in New York Stories (1989), directed by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. But then Bako decided to take a role in the soft-core porn Red Shoe Diaries, which became the albatross of her personal and professional life for years before becoming fodder for the G-Spot scripts.
In one scene, for example, we find Gigi in the tub, fine and dandy for a series with ample nudity, but, add a snake and a bottle of Vaseline into the mix and it becomes a little less believable. Bako swears the scene was inspired by something that actually happened to her while shooting a bad horror movie about poisonous snakes.
Costars Heather Hanson (Sleeping Dogs), Kristin Lehman (Lie with Me) and Kimberly Huie (The Paradise Virus) play Bako’s best pals. ‘We have tremendously identifiable characters who are also really hot,’ says exec producer Julia Rosenberg. ‘All the women [who see the show] are going to want to be them and all the men are going to want to boink them.’ The show’s raunchy, sexy edge made it a good fit for The Movie Network and Movie Central. ‘[Having] the pay channels TMN and Movie Central behind us honestly garners the kind of freedom that you might find on HBO,’ says Laszlo Barna, whose Barna-Alper also produces Show Me Yours, as well as award-winning Da Vinci’s Inquest.
http://www.serendipitypoint.com
Courtesy of our sister publication Playback (October 11)
