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The decision to pick up Sullivan’s Crossing wasn’t a huge departure for the CW; romantic, field-good series like Hart of Dixie, Life Unexpected and Everwood have long been hallmarks of the network. (And it doesn’t hurt that its two stars, One Tree Hill‘s Chad Michael Murray and Gilmore Girls‘ Scott Patterson, are longtime fan favorites).
Still, the show was immediately labeled as a cheap import because it first launched in Canada in March, where it became CTV’s highest-rated drama launch on over two years. It is produced by Reel World Management in association with CTV with Fremantle as global distributor. It’s from Roma Roth and Christopher E. Perry, the team behind Netflix’s Virgin River.
“We have to be entrepreneurial. We can’t just write a $10 million per-episode check for a show with some dragons in it,” President Brad Schwartz said during the upfronts in May. He added the show wasn’t any less expensive than licensing a new series from a third-party studio. “I don’t differentiate homegrown from acquired. We’ve picked shows we think have a chance to do well. … Every single show we acquire, we do because we believe in it, and we do a deal [with the producers] to be involved in creatively going forward.”
The show’s launch Oct. 4 was underwhelming: only 494,000 total viewers in L+SD. But if the runaway success of Virgin River on Netflix — another show based on Carr’s novel — is any indication, the only way is up for Sullivan’s Crossing, which follows a star neurosurgeon (Morgan Kohan) who returns to her bucolic home after a scandal rocks her world in Boston.
Here, showrunner Roth talks about the show’s budget, why she thought Sullivan’s Crossing would work, and why TV execs has sometimes been too quick to write off romance stories.
DEADLINE How you felt when you first heard that CW was picking up the show?
ROMA ROTH Fremantle, our wonderful partner who was handling the sales, let us know about that. It’s a dream come true. To have a network show from somebody who was born in London, Ontario, Canada, that’s something in my wildest dreams I wouldn’t have thought was possible. And I’m just very excited that it’s happening. Part of the strategy and the structure of the financing of the show is that they have to sell it in other territories. They are wonderful partners who actually believed so heavily in me and in what I had created. They had actually put up an advance against the foreign marketplace, and in the U.S. So I knew that it was going to end up airing somewhere in many different countries, and I really did believe that the power of Robyn Carr, her audience that she was bringing with her from the books, but also the audience that we had developed together with Virgin River … I mean, I felt very confident. I was extremely confident in how it was going to be received and that it would be well received with the same audience that is enjoying Virgin River. One of the reasons I wanted to partner with Robyn was because of the audience she’d already brought with her. I’m not exactly sure about the number, but I think it was close to 27 or 37 million. Once we developed Virgin River, we saw the numbers there and how it resonated with the streaming audience. I knew that Sullivan Crossing would resonate with the same people.
DEADLINE Robyn’s books have been around for a while. Why do you think it took so long to develop them into TV shows?
ROTH Way back before Virgin River, I was doing a lot of Lifetime a television movies. That’s where I cut my teeth. And at one point, I don’t know how many years ago, I had a feeling that we were going to have kind of a shift, pre-Covid, to what people would want to watch. I feel like things happen cyclically in television, and it felt like we were going to go back to the 80s and the 90s with regards to what was going on in the news. I kind of felt that people were lost, emotionally lost. They were desensitized to what was going on in the world, emotionally distant. So that would’ve been like season one of Virgin River. And then when Covid hit and everything went bananas, it just escalated what I had already been feeling. I wanted to develop shows that would allow people to reconnect emotionally with themselves, give them a safe place to experience feelings through characters that they could connect with and go on an emotional journey with. It allows you to feel again, and also gives you the catharsis that you need in your life to feel alive.
DEADLINE Shows that originate out of the country, or in this case Canada, are generally described as cheaper programming. Is that a fair description of Sullivan’s Crossing?
ROTH I don’t think our show is cheap, obviously. I don’t think it’s Canadian programming. Just because something is produced and shot in Canada doesn’t mean that it’s not something that’s going to resonate with a global audience. If you look at what the streamers are airing, for example, shows that are in the Korean language shot in Korea are huge with kids. I don’t think it matters anymore where a show is produced. I think what matters is what is the show and how does that show connect with an audience? The only thing that kind of differentiates our programming or the shows that we’re doing from others is that it happens to be filmed in Canada. But otherwise all the boxes that you would tick to make it a hit show are still there. Yes, we are benefiting from tax credits and subsidies, but that’s kind of where the world is going these days. You need to be able to make a show that doesn’t put a network at risk that allows them to still have the same quality show that they would’ve once had, but at a lower price point for them. The show itself is not a cheap show to make. It’s still a show, but it just has money that’s coming in from different funding areas.
DEADLINE A show like Sullivan’s Crossing isn’t necessarily reinventing the wheel. Shows like it or Virgin River are not what any TV critic today would call a cool show.
ROTH I disagree actually. If you watched a Sandra Bullock movie from 80s and 90s, or if you watched Runaway Bride, I mean, those movies were blockbuster hits and they were about romance. So what makes a television series seem like it’s a lesser show if it’s about romance? Just because we don’t have serial killers? Some executive, I don’t know who it was, decided that nobody wanted to watch romance. And yet love is what everybody wants in their lives. Every person wants to be loved, wants to love somebody. Even a serial killer show has somebody loving somebody in it. I just think that whoever that executive was who decided that romance wasn’t selling, maybe they were just having a bad day. The romance genre has the same dedicated and loyal audience as the Marvel universe. If you look at who’s going to get the autographs at those Comic-Cons, there’s always going to be somebody there from a romance show.
DEADLINE Can you talk about casting Chad Michael Murray?
ROTH We were looking for someone who is attractive and compelling, but also somebody who has within themselves the ability to really connect with an audience and with their female lead. Chad Michael Murray is one of the nicest human beings you will ever meet. He is genuine. He is warm. He shows up every day at work with a smile on his face and is supportive of everybody. So when I was looking for who would be our perfect Cal, I wanted somebody who would resonate with an audience. And so I did a lot of research. Chad has a history in television of being a quote, heart throb, right? He also came from a generation that I was looking again to reignite. I spoke to my then 13-year-old daughter about who resonates with her as well as me. Before I actually pulled the trigger on Chad, I went and talked to my daughter, who was familiar with him and his body of work. He crossed a generation between the shows that I used to watch as well as my daughter. That obviously can equate to eyeballs for the show.
DEADLINE And Scott Patterson?
ROTH I’d been searching for the perfect actor to play Sully Sullivan, an actor who could play a curmudgeon with heart. I needed someone who would have the emotional range necessary to dig deep and pull off the character while still being lovable. I was walking by the living room and my daughter was watching Gilmore Girls and I saw Scott Patterson and a light bulb went off. He was the ideal Sully and I instantly knew the audience would fall in love with him as this character. I contacted his manager Leigh Brillstein and the rest is history.
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