Combine Emmy and Oscar winners, an “American Idol” finalist, one of the top names in screen entertainment, and a programming chief who has switched networks.

What do you get? A “Smash,” they all hope.

Some may see it as NBC’s answer to Fox’s “Glee,” but considering Steven Spielberg’s involvement as an executive producer — plus such talents as producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (“Chicago”) and composer Marc Shaiman (“Hairspray”) — the peacock network clearly is aiming for more as it debuts its own musical-drama series Monday, Feb. 6.

The backstage turmoil of launching a Broadway show fuels the program, with “Will & Grace” Emmy recipient Debra Messing top-billed as Julia, the lyricist and co-writer of a musical about legendary screen siren Marilyn Monroe. Christian Borle (Broadway’s “Legally Blonde” and “Mary Poppins”) is seen as her writing partner, “Idol” veteran Katharine McPhee as favored Monroe portrayer Karen and Oscar winner Anjelica Huston (“Prizzi’s Honor”) as the maritally troubled producer.

The series also has impressive guests lined up: In a rare television appearance, Uma Thurman does a multiple-episode arc as a movie star interested in playing Monroe, and Tony Award winner Bernadette Peters appears as the Tony-winning mother of another contender for the Monroe role, Ivy (Megan Hilty, “Wicked”).

Additional “Smash” regulars include Jack Davenport (also a Messing co-star earlier in the movie “The Wedding Date”) as the musical’s director, Brian D’Arcy James as Julia’s husband and Raza Jaffrey as the McPhee character’s politically connected beau.

“It’s been a dream, honestly,” Messing says of making the show. “The moment I finished reading the [pilot] script and put it down, I called my representatives and said, ‘I have to be a part of this.’ Cut to my being offered the part, cut to our doing the pilot and having the time of our lives with the most thrilling creative team. Now we’ve all picked up and moved to New York (where the series is filmed), and it’s been an experience that has far exceeded my expectations.”

The same goes for McPhee, who claims “Smash” is fulfilling any Broadway performing ambitions she has, at least for now. The fifth-season “Idol” runner-up recalls that when she first heard about the show, “I didn’t know if there would be a part for me, but I said, ‘There has to be a part for me!’ My then-manager quickly calmed me down by saying, ‘You’ve got some time, but we just wanted to let you know it’s in the pipeline.’

“Every six months or so, I’d think, ‘I wonder what happened to that pilot.’ It came up again last year, and I just couldn’t wait to get my hands on the script. I kept turning the pages, and I think the actual product turned out even better than what was written.”

“Smash” has had a longtime champion in NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt, who brought the project with him when he moved over from Showtime. He’s credited with having “developed” the show after the initial pitch from Theresa Rebeck (“Seminar”), whom Messing deems “a genius. I’ve followed her career as a playwright forever, but her voice and her command of all of these characters is astonishing.”

Columbia Records will release songs performed on “Smash” by McPhee, who also has a solo deal with the label, and others. Many are crooned at various Big Apple sites, prompting Messing to term the show “a love letter to New York. We’re allowed to shoot all over, from Harlem to Washington Heights to Brooklyn to SoHo to Times Square. It’s really been exciting.”

“Smash” was held purposely until midseason so it could be teamed on Mondays with the singing competition “The Voice,” which begins its sophomore season a night earlier, immediately after NBC’s telecast of Super Bowl XLVI. Declaring herself a “Voice” fan, Messing finds it “very encouraging” to have that show paired with hers. “I couldn’t think of a better lead-in.”

As someone of notable voice herself, McPhee also likes the scheduling. The opening scene of “Smash” is of her character auditioning, but she maintains that filming it didn’t give her any “American Idol” flashbacks.

“It’s funny, I never once thought about that. There are hundreds and hundreds of auditions I’ve been on, and obviously, that was one that people remember because it was broadcast on national television.

“Reality show auditions are a little bit different,” McPhee adds, “because they’re kind of made for television. The ones I’ve been on the past four or five years, trying to get acting jobs, were the references I used.”

“Will & Grace” was very much an ensemble piece for NBC, where Messing has returned along with fellow Emmy winner Sean Hayes (an executive producer of “Grimm”), alias Jack to her Grace. “Smash” is a much bigger ensemble situation, though, and the actress says that’s why she’s able to be in it.

“I did one hourlong drama (ABC’s ‘Prey’) before I had a child,” Messing says, “and before ‘Will & Grace,’ and just from that experience, I knew I wasn’t built for that kind of schedule. The balance of my personal and professional lives is something I’m always struggling to maintain. Originally, this was going to be a cable show with 13 episodes a year … so I was like, ‘This is perfect for me!’

“Then it moved with Bob to [broadcast-]network prime time, where it could potentially be 24 episodes a year. That made me very nervous, but luckily, Theresa is also a mother, and everyone involved seems to respect my concerns.” w

On Tuesday, Feb. 7, ABC premieres “The River,” a drama series starring Bruce Greenwood (“Star Trek,” “John From Cincinnati”) as Emmet Cole, a wildlife expert and TV personality who heads up the Amazon in search of something unusual. When he doesn’t come back for a long time, his wife, Tess (Leslie Hope, “24”), and estranged son, Lincoln (Joe Anderson), set off on a rescue mission, funded by Cole’s cagey ex-producer, Clark (Paul Blackthorne).

They find Cole’s boat, the Magus, but what they discover aboard it makes no sense, and it quickly becomes apparent that what Cole was looking for was no new species of bug, bird or four-legged beast but something far stranger and more dangerous.

The show is shot with a foundfootage format in the style of executive producer Oren Peli’s 2007 film “Paranormal Activity,” itself inspired by “The Blair Witch Project,” which was in turn inspired by reality television shows, such as the fictional “The Undiscovered Country,” with host Emmet Cole.

“The audience has been so embracing of the reality format over the last 10 years,” says Peli, “so there has been a resurgence of foundfootage movies that the audience has embraced, but there hasn’t really been any TV show that was scripted found footage.”

Although, says Greenwood, Cole’s show isn’t exactly cuttingedge.

“‘The Undiscovered Country’ is a very old-style show,” Greenwood says, whose career began on the Vancouver stage in numerous 1970s Arts Club productions. “The music that we use, the graphics, it’s antiquated. He’s in that old mode, but he’s also an anthropologist and a scientist, and he’s deeply involved in the preservation of all these things he holds so dear.”

“He’s this guy who believes deeply in his family and in showing people the wonders which are all around us, the flora and the fauna, the physical wonders of the world. And he’s in love with the idea of people becoming more attuned to their natural selves. That drives his love for his show and informs the way he teaches his son and informs the way he communicates with his wife. Ultimately, over the years, he’s come to understand that not everything is as it appears.

“His catchphrase, ‘There’s magic out there,’ slowly comes to mean, to him, more than just face value. The magic eventually means there really is something supernatural, otherworldly, out there. So he goes on this quest down the Amazon thinking it’s going to be a short trip, thinking he has a couple of answers, a couple of clues that are going to provide answers to the big questions, and he gets sucked in. The more he discovers, the more he realizes that nothing is what it appears.

“And there may be as much negative power as there is positive power, and that’s what he has to protect. When he gets in the thick of it, he realizes that he can’t bring back this magic, because it’s weighted as much on the dark side as on the light side. Now he’s still trying to figure out what it is, and how he can get out of its thrall and protect his family at the same time.

“He knows they’ve come after him, so he’s trying to keep them at arm’s length and trying to continue his quest.”

Hope, a world traveler in her own right, has a few theories about what’s going on up “The River” (actually a brackish estuary on the Hawaiian island of Oahu).

“Nothing is what it appears,” she says, “not the circumstances, not the characters. I can tell you that the deeper in we go, the more that crazy stuff starts to happen. The rules bend; they don’t break, they bend.

“There’s stuff out there that we don’t understand, that we don’t know about. I experienced that myself anyway in Hawaii. That place is rife with spirits and all sorts of stuff going on. I know that, without spoiling it, by the end of our first season, there’s that much stuff going on. The more that is revealed about these characters, the more mysterious they become.” w

For a northern people, Canadians spend a lot of time trying to deny the existence of winter.

As we see in “Life Below Zero,” rather than adapting to the season that defines us, we try to avoid it — or we complain about it. The one thing we don’t do is embrace it and live in it. We put up with it.

The documentary, airing Thursday, Feb 9, on CBC Television’s “Doc Zone,” compares the attitude toward winter of four famous northern peoples: Canadians, Russians, Finns and Scandinavians. And it turns out that Canada is the only northern nation that refuses to accept that it’s a northern nation.

“We’re one nation bound together by wind chill,” says Josh Freed, who wrote and directed “Life Below Zero.”

A journalist and filmmaker (“China’s Sexual Revolution,” “Where Did I Put My Memory?”), Freed knows winter. He has spent his life in Montreal.

“There was always a sense when I was growing up that we were proud of being winter people — because we couldn’t avoid it. You couldn’t hide from it.

“Now we have the ability to just hide from it completely. We have ceased to romanticize it.”

As the film shows, Canadians are “the world champions” of escaping winter. We fly south by the thousands to sit on beaches in Florida and the Caribbean. We build skywalks and underground malls and walkways so we never have to go outside.

“Technology has allowed us to just escape,” Freed says. “We have beach volleyball indoors. We have surfing indoors. We play hockey indoors now. The outdoor rink across from my house is empty because all the kids play at the arena.

“It’s so easy just to be indoors and forget winter. Technology has just overwhelmed winter.”

We can’t even stand looking at the evidence of winter. We’re positively brilliant at getting rid of snow. If there’s a world record holder for snow removal, it has to be Montreal, where the snow removal starts with the first snowflake and doesn’t end until there isn’t a snowbank in the city.

“If there’s a little bit of snow left, we get very upset,” Freed says. “The idea that Scandinavia actually tries to have a winter look!

“That’s why I went to the other countries. I wondered if we were alone in our desire to get rid of winter, to obliterate it.”

It turns out other winter nations don’t try to escape winter. They love it. Freed talks to Russians, Finns, Norwegians and Swedes and shows the ways they have found to build their cities to be enjoyed year-round.

Russians hold outdoor barbecues and dances, go swimming in frozen rivers, and eat ice-cream cones outdoors — in temperatures that would make a Winnipegger shudder.

Finns take a sauna, followed by a bracing roll in the snow. Swedes and Norwegians heat their sidewalks to make them safe for all to use year-round. But they leave snow on the streets and lawns to maintain a winter ambience.

“The Scandinavians continue to enjoy winter by making the outdoors more comfortable,” Freed says. “We don’t create winter architecture. It’s as if we long ago decided to ignore winter and not be comfortable outdoors.”

Freed says the effects of global warming, and that the season seems to be fading from our consciousness, raised the question of “the fragility of winter” as a season and as a concept.

“The winter identity we had in my youth was so powerful,” he says. “I sort of sense that it is slowly vanishing. And some piece of me felt somebody should do a film about us and winter and our love/hate relationship with it — while we still have winter.”

As the film shows, Canadians used to embrace the season, as the Russians do, with winter carnivals, outdoor skating rinks, ice palaces and sleigh rides.

“We used to live through it and romanticize it,” Freed points out. “It was part of our mythology. We believed we were the great people who could overcome any storm.”

Now, to a certain extent, we’ve become summer people trapped in a frozen hell, from which there are a thousand ways to escape.

“We’re bombarded by endless ads for packaged holidays. And so much television is set in California. The sun and warmth have somehow become good, and cold has become almost evil.”

Yet winter festivals are springing up in cities such as Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal. Others — such as Ottawa’s Winterlude and Carnival in Quebec City — are enjoying a rebirth.

“The whole country is beginning to have this renaissance of winter festivals in the last two or three years” Freed says. “There’s a sense that we’re forgetting to use winter as much as we used to.

“If it’s there, we should jump into it, as the Russians jump into it.” w

Going beyond just the horses to trainers, jockeys, veterinarians, shady quasi-criminal types and degenerate gamblers, “Luck” creates a canvas of intense desperation, burning ambition, devastating peril and staggering beauty, all set against the lush backdrop of Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif., near Los Angeles.

After a sneak preview that aired on Dec. 11 following the season finale of “Boardwalk Empire,” “Luck” – which pairs Milch’s acclaimed writing and storytelling with the producing and directing talents of Michael Mann (“Thief,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Ali”) – launches its regular run on Sunday, Jan. 29.

Dustin Hoffman tops the huge cast as Chester “Ace” Bernstein, a man with a questionable past who gets out of prison and embarks on a career as a covert Thoroughbred owner, with his loyal driver, Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina), acting as his frontman.

Ace is a careful, deliberate man who plays things close to the vest. For Hoffman, that came out of choices made in preparing for the role.

“It wasn’t a conscious decision,” he says. “What you’re wearing or not alters you. It doesn’t take much. You learn your lines, you’re told a few things. They say, ‘Do you ever wear your hair straight back?’ ‘No.’ ‘Will you try that?’ And Michael Mann says, ‘Hey, I like it with your hair straight back.’ ‘Let’s see what suit you’re going to put on.’

“He has an image of the character, and you’re going with that image. You learn the lines, then they just come out a certain way, and you’re altered.”

Among those followed on the backstretch are trainers Walt “The Old Man” Smith (Nick Nolte) – inspired by, Nolte says, legendary trainer Jack Van Berg – and Turo Escalante (John Ortiz), who has more than a professional relationship with his vet (Jill Hennessy). There are jockeys on the way up, such as Irish Rosie (Kerry Condon), and those trying to come back, such as Ronnie Jenkins (played by jockey Gary Stephens).

On the fringes of the track life are the degenerate gamblers, including one group – whose most socially adept member, Jerry (Jason Gedrick), also has a weakness for cards – struggling to find a way forward after a life-altering bet.

Although Milch has followed racing most of his life, owned Thoroughbreds and laid down more than a few bets, it took him a long time to get around to writing about it all.

“Certainly,” he says, “I had an adequate exposure to it. I did a lot of research, but the deepest truths of that world – I won’t say that they had eluded me, but there’s an expression, the ripeness is all, and I finally was ripe enough.

“These are not characters who let themselves be easily known, and a lot of them are composites. … It takes a little while for the world to fully declare itself, but I hope they will hang in, because it’s definitely worth the trip.”

For Mann, who’s more familiar with racing cars than horses, it was a foray into a new reality.

“The thing that surprised me the most,” Mann says, “was the first time I was in a vehicle, and we were doing a tracking shot, and I was three or four feet away from a racehorse going full out – and it’s stunning.

“David talked quite a bit about a sense of nature and the spirit of being that close, involving yourself with the animal, like a trainer does, like Escalante would do – but when you’re actually up next to what feels like a 1,500-pound jack rabbit, that’s a whole different thing.

“The athleticism of it, the spirit … it’s not like you have to encourage them to race; you have to repress the instinct to race. All they want to do is race.”

But these days, the slow romance of race day, with its long pauses and brief explosions of action, is fading in a world of instant gratification.

“The pity is,” says Nolte, “that horse racing is losing the imagination of the public. The mythology and the connection of man and horse is being lost. Gambling’s taken over. They want to turn horse-racing tracks into casinos.” W

Executive producer Brad Brough and host Daniel Fathers have 10 of them.

And in “Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All” – debuting Monday, Jan. 30,on Discovery Canada – they get to take the wind out of the sails of at least nine. The one who is left will likely become the single most insufferable person in the country.

“We’re talking about knowing it all – everything,” says Fathers. “And that includes knowing how to play the game of life.”

Fathers is a British-born actor who has appeared in such Canadian series as “Combat Hospital,” “Heartland” and “Flashpoint.” This is the first time he has hosted a show like this.

“The goal for me was how was I going to wrangle 10 of the most A-type personalities with the hugest egos in Canada without them right over me,” he says. “It was my job to learn the personalities of all the contestants.

“The challenge for me was basically me versus the know-it-alls for the whole season.”

The creator and executive producer of the show is Brough, whose credits include “Canada’s Next Top Model,” “The Week the Women Went” and “Patent Bending.”

It was on the last show that the idea for “Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All” was hatched. The build master – the guy responsible for constructing the strange gadgets created from discarded patents – was one of those guys who are as handy with their hands as their brains. Brough says he got to wondering “what it would be like to get 10 of these guys together in a space trying to solve the same problem.

“These are the kinds of guys who are really smart, really inventive and really problem solving. But they also like to be the voice of authority in any situation.”

That more or less describes the eight men and two women who are vying to be named king or queen of the smart alecks.

These people are so smart, so competitive and so aggressively pedantic that the title is all it took to get them into the game. That’s all the winner of this competition walks away with. No prize. No money. Just bragging rights.

Over the course of the show, the contestants will work as two teams to complete problem-solving tasks.

As with all shows of this sort, each week contestants will be weeded out until there are only two left standing, who will compete for the title.

The tasks are mostly weird challenges that often involve constructing something out of oddball materials or destroying something and seeing what is left standing.

Contestants will compete to build cardboard houses that can withstand a hurricane and control the hurricane that tries to knock them down. They will blow up trailers and compete to see how many of their little dolls can survive the blast. They’ll pack containers, build boats, perform feats of memory and compete for scouting merit badges.

At the start of the first episode, one contestant says he thought the show would be “one big trivia contest.”

“It’s not a quiz show, and it’s not a game show,” Fathers says. “The goal is to find Canada’s all-round Renaissance person.

“There were a few who were incredibly humble in their knowledge,” he says. “And we had to remind them that the goal was to win the competition, and not to be Mr. or Mrs. Nice Guy.” w

Art imitates life for Canadian Comedy Award winner Debra DiGiovanni, so the focus is on being unattached and 40-ish as she brings her “Single, Awkward, Female” act to Comedy Network on Saturday, Jan. 28.

“Every one of my friends is married, and my sisters are having their third and fifth babies, so I’m at this strange decade in my life,” she says.

“When you hit 40 and you’re still single, it gets weird. You make some decisions in your life and realize, ‘Hey, this is where I am going,’ and start finding reasons not to go to weddings.

“I’m very truthful onstage, so what’s happening right now in my life is what is happening right now onstage, too.”

DiGiovanni jokes about how most men prefer women more petite than herself, but a bigger factor may be simply that this rising comedy star spends more of her time onstage these days, and while male comics are often catnip for women, that’s not true for most female comedy performers.

“Never, ever have I been hit on after a show, and that seems to be mostly true of my girlfriends who are comics as well,” she says. “If a man has a good set, it’s get out of the way, because [women make] a beeline to them.

“I think with most guys [in the audience], a female comic who makes them laugh slides into the buddy zone and becomes someone they want to hang out with. There’s an aggressiveness about comedy as well that I think attracts women. Most men don’t seem to like a very loud woman who wants to be the center of attention all the time.” W

Executive producer Brad Brough and host Daniel Fathers have 10 of them.

And in “Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All” – debuting Monday, Jan. 30,on Discovery Canada – they get to take the wind out of the sails of at least nine. The one who is left will likely become the single most insufferable person in the country.

“We’re talking about knowing it all – everything,” says Fathers. “And that includes knowing how to play the game of life.”

Fathers is a British-born actor who has appeared in such Canadian series as “Combat Hospital,” “Heartland” and “Flashpoint.” This is the first time he has hosted a show like this.

“The goal for me was how was I going to wrangle 10 of the most A-type personalities with the hugest egos in Canada without them right over me,” he says. “It was my job to learn the personalities of all the contestants.

“The challenge for me was basically me versus the know-it-alls for the whole season.”

The creator and executive producer of the show is Brough, whose credits include “Canada’s Next Top Model,” “The Week the Women Went” and “Patent Bending.”

It was on the last show that the idea for “Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All” was hatched. The build master – the guy responsible for constructing the strange gadgets created from discarded patents – was one of those guys who are as handy with their hands as their brains. Brough says he got to wondering “what it would be like to get 10 of these guys together in a space trying to solve the same problem.

“These are the kinds of guys who are really smart, really inventive and really problem solving. But they also like to be the voice of authority in any situation.”

That more or less describes the eight men and two women who are vying to be named king or queen of the smart alecks.

These people are so smart, so competitive and so aggressively pedantic that the title is all it took to get them into the game. That’s all the winner of this competition walks away with. No prize. No money. Just bragging rights.

Over the course of the show, the contestants will work as two teams to complete problem-solving tasks.

As with all shows of this sort, each week contestants will be weeded out until there are only two left standing, who will compete for the title.

The tasks are mostly weird challenges that often involve constructing something out of oddball materials or destroying something and seeing what is left standing.

Contestants will compete to build cardboard houses that can withstand a hurricane and control the hurricane that tries to knock them down. They will blow up trailers and compete to see how many of their little dolls can survive the blast. They’ll pack containers, build boats, perform feats of memory and compete for scouting merit badges.

At the start of the first episode, one contestant says he thought the show would be “one big trivia contest.”

“It’s not a quiz show, and it’s not a game show,” Fathers says. “The goal is to find Canada’s all-round Renaissance person.

“There were a few who were incredibly humble in their knowledge,” he says. “And we had to remind them that the goal was to win the competition, and not to be Mr. or Mrs. Nice Guy.” w

Art imitates life for Canadian Comedy Award winner Debra DiGiovanni, so the focus is on being unattached and 40-ish as she brings her “Single, Awkward, Female” act to Comedy Network on Saturday, Jan. 28.

“Every one of my friends is married, and my sisters are having their third and fifth babies, so I’m at this strange decade in my life,” she says.

“When you hit 40 and you’re still single, it gets weird. You make some decisions in your life and realize, ‘Hey, this is where I am going,’ and start finding reasons not to go to weddings.

“I’m very truthful onstage, so what’s happening right now in my life is what is happening right now onstage, too.”

DiGiovanni jokes about how most men prefer women more petite than herself, but a bigger factor may be simply that this rising comedy star spends more of her time onstage these days, and while male comics are often catnip for women, that’s not true for most female comedy performers.

“Never, ever have I been hit on after a show, and that seems to be mostly true of my girlfriends who are comics as well,” she says. “If a man has a good set, it’s get out of the way, because [women make] a beeline to them.

“I think with most guys [in the audience], a female comic who makes them laugh slides into the buddy zone and becomes someone they want to hang out with. There’s an aggressiveness about comedy as well that I think attracts women. Most men don’t seem to like a very loud woman who wants to be the center of attention all the time.” W

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-‘MARK BRAND’

Gambling on the ’hood in Gastown

 Even if you’ve been in Vancouver only a short while, you probably know the city’s Downtown Eastside area, often spotlighted in documentaries and news programs to demonstrate some of Canada’s most glaring inner-city problems with crime and drug addiction.

But while others saw this zone primarily as a sociological petri dish of problems, visionary social activist and entrepreneur Mark Brand saw something else: a neighborhood worth saving. And he’s put his money, time and energy where his heart is, most recently in the high-risk renovation of the historic Save-On-Meats building, a project chronicled in “Gastown Gamble” Wednesdays on OWN Canada.

“I moved to Vancouver around 2006, and the Downtown Eastside at that point just fascinated me, strictly from sort of a social aspect,” Brand explains. “It played a large part in my life in the last five years, in terms of where I lived and where I worked. Gastown itself has had this amazing history of highs and lows. There’s not a lot of density as far as people living there, but it has this wonderful feel and history and character. It’s one of the few places in Vancouver that hasn’t been developed heavily.”

But it was the residents of Gastown, not mundane real estate factors, that propelled Brand into tackling the Save-On project, as he calls it. “It’s one of those unique aspects of the neighborhood that inspires you so that you want to work harder,” says Brand, who also owns and operates several other businesses in Gastown. “It’s such an incredible blessing to be able to work there in the Downtown Eastside and then witness good change, if you know what I mean.”

Brand says he envisioned the renovated half-century-old diner and butcher shop as a lynchpin of a broader revitalization dream, a building that would be a tribute yet also something far more basic: a home.

“We wanted to make this space somewhere you could come and eat and frequent with dignity regardless of your station,” he says. “That was the most important thing to me. I wanted to make sure that it was comfortable for all ages and all people from all neighborhoods, essentially. Functionality was important, of course, but I really wanted to make sure it didn’t intimidate people who knew it before but also be inviting to people who never had been there.”

Reaction to news of the project was mixed. “People were actually quite nervous for me, but also what it was going to give to that block,” Brand says. “I think people took a harder look at me in general as a businessperson and wondered what my real motivation was. I had to answer those critics and also proponents of the neighborhood for the entire time we were building, in person. It was a wonderful experience. When you take on a task that you really, truly love, it’s a great thing.”

As Brand and his team were about to start work on the Save-On project, former CTV programming executive Louise Clark approached him about documenting the work in a series by Lark Productions, her new company. Brand agreed, but laid down some strict ground rules. “I said, ‘There can’t be any exploitation. There can’t be any script, and we need to have final say about what is going on if we are going to do this,’ which was very arrogant on my part because them wanting to do this to begin with was very flattering,” he recalls. “But, my major concern stays with the neighborhood and how it is portrayed.” W

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-‘GERRY DEE’

Art imitates life in Dee’s new classroom comedy

 Gerry Dee went back to school for his comedy – as a teacher. The stand-up comic taught for years in a Toronto private school before turning to comedy. Now he’s back in class but still in comedy with “Mr. D,” which recently began airing Mondays on CBC Television.

“Mr. D” is based on Dee’s early experiences in the classroom. He had studied kinesiology and physical education and then found himself history and geography – courses he says he felt completely unequipped to handle.

“I’m not a really well-read person,” he says. “I was always a Coles Notes person. I never really got into reading books. I’m too ADD. And here I am, teaching subjects that really require a lot of based knowledge on stuff. “I actually thought I was doing a good job, but when I look back, it was probably horrific.”

In “Mr. D,” he plays a character not far removed from his real-life experiences. He’s a teacher who thinks he’s popular with the kids, but they really don’t care one way or another. And he’s teaching social sciences, a subject he knows almost nothing about.

The show co-stars Jonathan Torrens (“Trailer Park Boys”) and Booth Savage as the vice principal and principal, respectively. The supporting cast includes Bette MacDonald, Naomi Snieckus, Wes Williams and Mark Little.

As for the students, all but one are played by first-time actors from the Halifax area, where the show is shot. “The students we got we would put up against any Hollywood kid actors,” Dee says. “They were unbelievable.”

Dee is new to acting himself. Born and raised in the Greater Toronto Area, he grew up in a family where the main obsessions were sports and musical theater. “My mother’s side and my sister had some dancing and acting, and brother and my dad’s side had the athleticism,” he says. “Luckily, I think I got a bit of everybody’s.

“I used to sing ‘Evita’ with my sister … and then I’d go play hockey with my brother.”

He played varsity hockey at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and was a good enough golfer to compete on a national level. He still plays with a 5 handicap. After university, he went to work as a teacher in Toronto, spending 10 years “embedded” in the education system.

For half that time, he moonlighted as a stand-up comic until, in 2003, he felt confident enough to quit the day job and try his hand in Los Angeles – a year after he became the first Canadian in almost three decades to win the San Francisco International Comedy Competition.

He says he never saw the move into comedy as much of a risk. “I always could have gone back,” he says. “I tell young comics this all the time: ‘Get a day job.’ It’s not a realistic goal to be a kid and think, ‘I’m going to be a comic.’ ”

Until a couple of years ago, he, his wife and two daughters divided their time between Toronto and Los Angeles. “I don’t want to raise a family in L.A.,” he says. “I’m very happy and proud to be Canadian. When I left L.A.,that was what I said: I’m just going to go back where I love it and try to make it here.”

 Since he came back, he has been moving into TV and film. He had a bit part in “Trailer Park Boys: The Movie” in 2006. Now with “Mr. D,” he has two TV gigs – he also appears on The Score as “Gerry Dee: Sports Reporter.” W