How Lark Productions’ Erin Haskett is bringing Canadian-style law and order to TV screens around the world | Canada Voices

The puck luck has been heavily on the side of Lark Productions in recent years.

At a time when the TV industry has been in a downturn globally, the Vancouver-based TV company has become a prolific producer of homegrown procedurals, with three police or law shows on the air at once, on three different broadcasters.

But sometimes a shot comes at you that you don’t expect.

On the night I meet Lark president Erin Haskett for dinner and an interview in Toronto, the Season 2 premiere of Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent – the hit spinoff of the enduring American franchise she’s in town from the West Coast to work on – is suddenly facing fierce competition for Canadian eyeballs in its new 10 p.m. time slot on CITY-TV.

Purely by happenstance, the show’s sophomore bow will be going up against the Canada-USA final of the 4 Nations hockey tournament (which 6.2 million fired-up, American-anthem-booing Canadians end up watching live).

But in between bites of steak tartare (recommended by Law & Order star Aden Young), Haskett seems completely sanguine about the situation. This, even though it will surely lead to the episode not getting the same attention its series premiere did a year earlier. Back then, 1.1 million tuned in to watch right away – an astonishing number for linear television these days.

“Yeah, there’s a little event happening tonight,” she says, with a small sigh. Within seconds she’s smiling, however.

“Overnights don’t mean anything any more.”

Television is now a long game, with performance over seven days and returning viewers mattering more in the short term, and the long tail of engagement mattering even more for procedurals since streamers have discovered that case-of-the-week cop, law and doctor shows can top the charts decades after their debuts – if their characters are compelling enough.

It’s a game Lark has been playing perfectly.

In addition to Law & Order Toronto, the company currently has its fourth season of Family Law, an offbeat comedy-drama made with Calgary’s Seven24 about a dysfunctional family of Vancouver lawyers starring Jewel Staite and Victor Garber, running on Global.

And the second season of its Allegiance, a police drama starring Supinder Wraich as a Punjabi Sikh officer in Surrey, B.C., who is sometimes skeptical about her own force, wrapped up on CBC this week. (That’s a show that got a notable bump in viewership from sports, according to Haskett, when Canadians who flocked to CBC Gem to watch the Paris Olympics last summer stumbled upon it.)

Lark’s simultaneous success with these lower case law and order shows – all of which have sold internationally and are bringing in revenue to fuel development – would be notable at any time for a television producer in Canada. But it is particularly so during a period when the industry has been contracting both internationally, as the peak of so-called “peak TV” has passed, and domestically, as the funding model for homegrown shows is becoming increasingly precarious.

In the past two years, global TV and film production has fallen by 20 per cent, according to a recent report from industry research company ProdPro. Lark has swum against the current, doubling in size to 18 staff. (Each hour of drama shot in Vancouver, Surrey or Toronto employs a further 250 to 300 people).

“There’s no magic recipe,” Haskett says.

But there is a clear base upon which her company’s growth has built.

Lark was founded in 2010 by veteran producer Louise Clark. She quickly brought on Haskett, who was working mainly in film, as the second employee. Clark had an eye toward Haskett eventually taking over, which she did in 2016.

Key to the company’s birth and continuing strength is that Clark, who had worked on hit shows such as Corner Gas and Flashpoint, had a connection to an executive who was then president of NBC’s international studio. The American company provided backing to help start Lark and, in 2014, (NBC) Universal International Studios purchased what Haskett calls a “significant minority stake” in the Canadian-controlled company.

While the studio has not been involved in financing or distributing all of Lark’s shows (it has a first-look deal), Haskett says the partnership helps her and her colleagues keep tabs on trends in global markets during a time when producing a show filmed solely in Canada is almost impossible without international partners.

The biggest part of Lark’s ability to get shows made, however, seems to boil down to Haskett’s own skills as a producer.

These go beyond knowing how to stretch a loonie and put as much of a small budget onscreen as possible, to interpersonal abilities that are immediately apparent when you speak with her and see how she easily she gets on a person’s wavelength with none of the brashness of old-school producers.

Those who work with or for Haskett describe her as having the ability to talk both the language of business, which is necessary in dealing with other producers and networks, and the language of creatives, who are, at heart, more interested in character and storytelling.

Beth Iley, Lark’s newly hired vice-president of international series development who previously worked at Amazon MGM Studios, says this is clear in the way the company’s productions have been “network agnostic.” (In addition to working with Corus, Rogers and CBC, Lark recently had the CTV reality show Farming for Love, based on an international format.)

“Erin and everyone at the company is really savvy about listening to the needs of networks and really finding a creative way to deliver that,” Iley says. “You can have a great idea, but you need to know who to take it to and how to sell it.”

Allegiance showrunners Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern say Haskett talks about art and craft in a way that really stands out in her field. “It really is a very precious and rare thing,” Morgenstern says.

As an example, the two point to the content and delivery of her notes – often a tense moment between producers and writers where different styles of communication come into conflict.

Ellis, sidestepping a question about bad notes he’s personally received, gives an example of the nonsensical one that an executive, according to legend, gave a writer on the 1960s CBS comedy My Favourite Martian: “A Martian would never say this!”

By contrast, Haskett’s notes tend to be about how to make episodes more rooted in the voices and perspectives that make them unique, according to Ellis and Morgenstern.

In that case of Allegiance, that has meant asking how the case of the week reflects what its lead character, Sabrina Sohal, is going through internally, with a question such as: “How can we ground this more in Sabrina’s point of view?”

Looking forward, Haskett, a cinephile who went to Vancouver Film School and credits her creative collaboration skills to her studies at the Canadian Film Centre, wants to bring that deeper level to premium dramas. Lark Productions had and continues to have a stream of development aimed at cracking that prestige universe.

Haskett has plenty of war stories about the times Lark was a crossbar ricochet away from landing a deal to make a $10-million-an-episode series with a major streamer (her shows generally cost less than half that) – including one involving a Canadian novel that she outbid Hollywood stars to get the rights to adapt and had signed up an Emmy-nominated showrunner to work on.

But Haskett doesn’t want the specifics to go in print because the opportunity could come back.

Indeed, the future is particularly unclear at the moment on Canadian television. Will the Online Streaming Act deliver a boost to the industry when money is scheduled to start flowing later this year – or will it be a drop in a leaky bucket?

Will CBC/Radio-Canada be defunded – or have its funding doubled – after the next election?

And then there’s the trade war between the United States and Canada (and, well, everybody else).

Haskett wonders whether there won’t be some opportunities to arise out of the heightened tensions. Perhaps Canadian creatives working in L.A. could be wooed to return home. “Is there an opportunity to bring them where they could come and run a show in Vancouver or Toronto or Winnipeg or Calgary, where they want to be with family or tell that story?”

Making things in Canada has always interested Haskett and is part of the reason why she pivoted to television.

“I wanted to live and raise a family and be in Canada,” says the married mother of one preteen. “It’s a different lifestyle to live here and to choose to live here – maybe harder in some ways the way things get financed, but I kind of felt like everybody goes to Hollywood.”

People in the industry are glad she stayed.

“Everybody wants to work with Erin,” says Tassie Cameron, the showrunner for Law & Order Toronto – a job she had to write an audition script for to win the role, despite the fact her company Cameron Productions is the local producing partner on it. “You’re only as good as the writers that bring you projects and as the broadcasters that trust you with them.”