No. 186: JASON PRIESTLEY, BRAD SHADE & MATT SHADE / When not great things sometimes happen to good people, not to mention good books & a very good TV series.
Millions saw Matt Shade, but some were fans of Brad Shade, me among them. How to tell them apart Part 1.
And these were just the first two pages. Yeah, the other cliffhanger, the other story so far untold.
GOING back ten years or so I wrote three mystery novels (The Code, The Black Ace and The Third Man In) that did okay sales-wise and very well critically, which is all I could reasonably hope for. My unreasonable dreams would have been that the novels might turn into something more, but for reasons of mental health I couldn’t entertain the possibility that this would ever happen. Devout readers on this SubStack include many friends fast and otherwise who know that I drew to an inside straight flush and the novels were adapted for the series Private Eyes, which starred Jason Priestley and enjoyed a six-year run.
The business of books and the business of television are much alike: Any change behind the scenes can disrupt and scuttle a seemingly good thing.
The novels did pretty well and earned out, which is rarer than it sounds. To me it looked like a solid foundation to build on. Sigh. Then a merger meant that a change in personnel and operation strategies and what had been a priority at Penguin Canada became just something on the inherited inventory. I was an industry casualty.
The series did so much better than I could have expected: It remained the top-rated show in Canada throughout its entire run, 60 episodes, and wound up broadcast in 120 nations. Just about everyone involved was blind-sided by what happened next: The series wasn’t re-ordered for S7. Everyone was so confident that the last ep of S6 was scripted and produced as a cliff-hanger, which is so far unresolved. How did Private Eyes become a casualty? See the paragraph above: a shift at a corporate level, a change in network proprietors resulting in a change in priorities. Other factors further complicated matters, but I won’t get into it here—the principals were puzzled and disappointed but it was cruel callback to my experience with the novels.
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