HOLLYWOOD - They deliver the mail six days a week down here, giving irate viewers more chances to pen-lash a network that cancels their favorite show. The Internet's even faster.
CBS Entertainment President Leslie Moonves credits a flood of mail, E- and otherwise, with returning the Canadian crime adventure series Due South back to U.S. primetime.
"There was a huge amount of mail. There was a huge reaction to that show not being on the air," he said.
CBS declined to renew the show about a Mountie in Chicago for a second season, then in November, decided to pick up eight of its 13 new episodes. Last week, it grabbed the rest.
Now that they've got the U.S. network's attention, the show's producers plan to keep it with major plotlines that run from romp to tragedy.
Executive producer Kathy Slevin describes one episode as similar to the film In The Line Of Fire, in which Fraser (Paul Gross) worries that he's losing his knack.
"We have these wonderful secret service men who are all 19 years old with aviator sunglasses. Later on, he has a dream where there are 12-year-olds in suits standing there saying, `You know, you're over. You've lost your edge.'"
Ray (David Marciano) will endure the betrayal of a childhood sweetheart in the dark-tinged Feb. 2 hour Juliet Is Bleeding.
But what's making everybody's heart skip a beat is a double episode written by Gross.
"It's an epic romance on a train," Gross says of All The Queen's Men, which finds the RCMP Musical Ride on the way to an exposition in Chicago.
"The train is taken over by terrorists and turned into a sort of runaway bomb," says Gross.
"Small - easy to produce," is what Slevin says wryly.
"You have to picture (fellow executive producer Jeff King) and myself and our faces as we're sitting in Paul's motor home and he's saying, `Here's the episode. Thirty-two horses. Thirty-two Mounties leaping out of a speeding train,' " she says.
"Yeah," agrees Gross. "But the best was the money, the guys who are working the money out. `What? A train? We can't do it.' "