December 19, 2016: It can’t get any better than this!

I started my writing career in animation, After several years of freelancing, I landed a full time job as the Manager of Animation Development at a local studio in Montreal. My 9 to 5 duties covered all aspects of the internal creative and, over the course of my time there, I developed such shows as Animal Crackers, Mona the Vampire, Paddington Bear, and Caillou. I also continued my freelance scriptwriting in my off-hours AND story-edited several (of the aforementioned) shows. I was happy and, at the time, thought “It can’t get any better than this.”

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I eventually left the security of my 9 to 5 job for the feast or famine world of full time freelancing. I continued to write scripts and story-edit, shifting focus from that local studio to some of the bigger animation guns, eventually lending my services to the CBS Saturday morning line-up. I made my own hours, worked at my own pace and, more importantly, made better money. “Okay, now,”I thought, “it can’t get any better than this.”

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I eventually transitioned from animation to live action, partnering with my long-time friend, Paul Mullie, and landing a staff position on a teen sitcom called Student Bodies. We shot in an abandoned school and wrote in our enormous office, a carpeted former classroom. One day, the show’s creators asked us if we needed anything. I jokingly suggested an air hockey table. Well, the following week, an air hockey table was written into an episode and, once said episode was shot, that air hockey table found a permanent home in our office. It was a pretty sweet gig and, at time time, I was pretty damn sure “It can’t get any better than this.”

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And then, we ended up on Stargate and spent 12 incredible years writing and producing one of the most successful franchises in scifi television history. Paul and I worked our way up from co-producers to showrunners and had a hell of a lot of fun along the way. Even though the shows had their challenges, we enjoyed going to work every day and enjoyed the company of the people we worked with. Judging from everything we’d heard about the many other productions out there, we knew we were very lucky and I had no doubt then that my time on Stargate would be next to impossible to top. “It can’t get any better than this,”I assumed for presumably the last time.

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Then, two years later, Dark Matter comes along. Three season in, it reminds me a lot of my time on Stargate – fun, fulfilling, and very rewarding with the added bonus that it happens to be MY show. Surely, it can’t get any better than this.

But who knows?