The strangest crime fighter on American TV this fall wears a bright red uniform, calls his police boss "leff-tenant" and battles street thugs with the impeccable manners and irreproachable ethics of a Boy Scout. When he was assigned to a tough neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, the first thing he did was memorize the names on all the apartment mailboxes so he could address the residents personally. "It only takes a little effort to be nice," he said.
Like Benton Fraser, the Canadian Mountie on CBS's new show Due South, Canada's TV industry has always been something of a fish out of water in the U.S. To be sure, American shows and movies are frequently shot north of the border, and TV stars from Michael J. Fox to Dan Aykroyd and Martin Short have came from Canada. But the xenophobic networks have always resisted Canadian programs; the few that travel south have mostly been consigned to cable, syndication and the late-night crime-time-after-prime-time ghetto.
This fall, however, Due South has broken the prime-time barrier. Produced by Toronto-based Alliance Communications, the series has done surprisingly well for CBS in the ratings (and even better on Canada's CTV, where it is the highest-rated Canadian show ever). The culture clash between a Dudley Do-Right Mountie (Paul Gross) and his streetwise partner (David Marciano) is so genially caricatured that it has charmed audiences on both sides of the border. "I think Canadians like the fact we're offending Americans, and Americans think we're offending Canadians," says creator Paul Haggis. "That's part of the fun."
Canadian producers are making other major inroads into the American TV market this season. Alliance has turned out four TV movies based on the popular Harlequin romances, which CBS scheduled opposite football on Sunday afternoons. In late November the network will air Million Dollar Babies, a two-part mini-series about the Dionne quintuplets co-produced by Toronto's Bernard Zukerman Productions and Montreal's Cinar Films. Unlike the few Canadian TV films that have run previously on the networks, this one was bought up front by CBS, and will air simultaneously in both countries. Even the projects headed for syndication and cable are becoming more impressive -- for example, the western series Lonesome Dove, a Canadian-American co- production being filmed in Alberta, and TekWar, a science-fiction series being produced for the USA Network by Toronto's Atlantis Films.
In the meantime, more and more U.S. shows are heading north to shoot; there, cheaper studio space and lower salaries (as well as a favorable exchange rate) can reduce costs by more than 25%. Thirty-six American TV movies and pilots and 11 series, among them ABC's The Commish and Fox's The X-Files, have been shot in and around Vancouver this year. In Toronto movie and TV production will bring in an estimated $292 million in 1994, up from $24 million in 1983. The city -- the third largest film-production center in North America after Los Angeles and New York City -- has been a stand-in for everything from San Francisco to Boston. Due South may be set in Chicago, but it too is shot in Toronto. The main problem is keeping Canadian flags out of the background -- and making sure the place is dirty enough. "Sometimes," says star Paul Gross, "they have to truck in garbage for authenticity."