Full disclosure for those that have had a long-time understanding that I would love to live in London. Recently, however, I’ve found myself going 180 degrees in the opposite direction and have started thinking about the possibility of life in Dog River, Saskatchewan. Ok, maybe just for a long weekend

With a population of approximately 500 (depending on if anyone stops gas and a bite to eat at The Ruby, the adjoining coffee shop to Brent’s corner gas station), Dog River is affectionately billed as being 40 kilometres (25 mi) from nowhere with Corner Gas being the only gas station for 60 kilometres (37 mi) in any direction.

During it’s run in Canada from 2004 to 2009, Corner Gas was the #1 comedy on the air ending after six seasons and 107 episodes. In the era of ‘one-and-done’ for a series to last 6 years and over 100 episodes is definitely not the norm and immediately speaks to the popularity both from an audience and critical standpoint.

With a population of just under 500, it feels like we almost meet the entire town over the course of the series. Brent Leroy (Brent Butt) is the owner of Corner Gas and his father, Oscar, played by Eric Peterson, is the former owner of Corner Gas. Wanda Dollard (Nancy Robertson) works at the station’s convenience store as a retail assistant. An adjoining coffee shop, The Ruby, is owned by Lacey Burrows (Gabrielle Miller), who inherited it from her Aunt Ruby.

Richard Henry “Hank” Yarbo, played by Fred Ewanuick, is Brent’s perpetually unemployed best friend. With an expressed goal of becoming a rodeo clown, Hank does find it a bit hard to remain focused in one job for long as he has a life goal of remaining “awesomely” unemployed while actually having experience in many physical and maintenance activities, including auto mechanics, gardening, knitting, woodworking and plumbing.

In advance of Saturday’s premiere on KERA TV (PBS in North Texas), we had the great good fortune to catch up with series creator and star, Brent Butt, who talked about the beginning of the series over two decades ago, the driving force behind the concept, the importance of a strong ensemble cast and the reason for the longevity of the series. It had to be one of the most enjoyable in-depth dives into the creative mind palace responsible for the greatness that is Corner Gas.

Tellyspotting: If you would, take us back to the beginning of Corner Gas when you pitched it. You’re pitching a series about life in a small Saskatchewan town and all of a sudden it was like, yes, let’s do this. Was it a ‘you’re kidding’moment or ‘oh no, now I have to do this’ moment?

Brent Butt: I wrote the treatments for the show fully expecting to never pitch it to anybody. I just didn’t think it was a real hot pitch, right about a gas station in Saskatchewan. So, I didn’t anticipate anybody would have much interest. The way that it came about was basically a director that I had worked with before called me up and said, I’m in town and I want to take him for coffee and talk to you about something. So he told me that he he had been talking to the network CTV and pitching them some ideas. He said they weren’t really interested in any of his ideas, but they said to him, you know, Brent Butt, right?

You think he has any TV show ideas? Because you two have worked together before, we would be interested in that. So he said to me, do you have any show ideas? And I said, Well, the only one that I’ve been, the only one I’m sitting on is I wrote a treatment for us to come about a gas station in Saskatchewan.

I told him about it. He thought it sounded funny and sounded like it might have legs. He told them about it, and they were surprisingly interested. And so we went into meetings from there. It’s something I have to do for my own mental health. I get these ideas in my head, and they sort of spin around in my head and take over until I get them outside. I just get stuff on paper, just to purge them out of my head. And it felt to me like this is one of those things.

It started out as having this idea of what would my life be like if I hadn’t pursued standup comedy?  And I thought, well, I would probably just be still hanging out at the gas station back in my hometown, going for coffee with hanging out at the gas station. And that was sort of the impetus because I did grow up in a small, rural farming town in Saskatchewan.

Tellyspotting: I don’t know if it’s a testament to the series or not but after watching it, I find myself wanting to live in Dog River. I don’t know whether to say thank you or bless your heart.

Brent: We get that a lot. We get a lot of people said, Is this a place we can actually move to? It seems to be a place where people at least sort of imagine themselves living for a half hour at a time. It’s true. It’s a great place to visit for a short period of time.

Tellyspotting: You mentioned your pursuit of stand up. Are there things that you were able to draw from when you were writing the treatment from your stand up history as to what would work from an audience standpoint because you were in front of a live audience and you saw what worked and what might not work?

Brent: You have to rely on things that you’ve built up over years of performing stand up because it’s a situation where now you’re sitting in a room writing a script, and you have no audience and so you have to rely on your experience of saying, ‘Okay, this is a funny line, but it’s probably too wordy. I’m going to have to come up with a way to say it more briefly’. Those kind of things, that sort of comedic craftsmanship, is what you have to sort of rely on in a situation like that.

At the time I got the opportunity to do Corner Gas, I had also been writing and producing some local television here in Vancouver. I got hired freelance by this producer named Michael French, who had a habit of shooting a bunch of footage of something and then saying, ‘watch this and see if you think it could be a show’.

He sort of taught me how to produce TV and write TV, so I sort of had a little bit of experience in editing stuff together, sitting in an editing world, making something funnier than it was before, and that helped a lot. So, yeah, it’s just, I think it’s like anything where you just have to rely on past experience.

Tellyspotting: Were there positives and/or negatives when developing Corner Gas given you were the central character in the series?

Brent: For me, it just made a lot of sense because, partly, I’ve never really found myself an actor. I’ve done some acting, but fairly small parts, small roles. So for Corner Gas, I could respond to things exactly the way I would. It’s also sort of a standard US model of finding a comedian with a track record of being able to make crowds laugh and see if they can translate that into television.

But as old as time from the days of radio, they would find comedians from vaudeville and say, ‘Can you do a radio show’? Right? And so then they would say those people, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, they would say, ‘Okay, you did it on radio, now can you do that on TV’?

And this, for whatever reason, is not something we had done much of in Canada. So, Corner Gas felt very much more like a US model where it was like, okay, a comedian has a track record of being able to get laughs and see if they can build a show based on their sense of humor that has worked for 10 to 15 years and and it clicked.

Tellyspotting: Historically, with a lot of British comedy, they were not doing that either. It was completely different where most actors bring theater training to the table and weren’t stand up comedians. But then you saw the Americans like you’re talking about, Ray Romano and, in later years, Seinfeld, where you saw the extension of their stand up, and it became the basis for a sitcom.

Brent: It’s a very reasonable, smart method. You find somebody who has a track record of getting laughs with a certain sensibility and a certain sense of humor and see if they can do that in a way that we can film and broadcast. It makes a lot of it makes a lot of sense from Jackie Gleason on up through Kevin James and Ray Romano and, like you said, Seinfeld, it was done for years and years from a writing and production standpoint.

Tellyspotting: The other big difference between British and American comedy is the the writing aspect where they’ll have one writer for every episode of every series, and you have a team of writers here in America. Were you the sole writer or did you have a team of writers for Corner Gas?

Brent: No, we had a team. We had a writing room. It certainly would have been a lot more difficult for me to do it all myself. It was very much a team effort. It’s one of the things that I really love about TV and film, versus stand up, as much as I love stand up where you’re just responsible for everything, and it all relies on you.

TV and film is very much a team support. Even though I was the one at the end of the day in charge of saying yes or no to all the creative decisions and deciding which storylines we were going to pursue, it was very much a team effort, sitting around and breaking stories in sort of the classic sitcom model, break it down as a group, as a team, if you can.

Tellyspotting: Speaking of teams, talk a little bit about the the ensemble cast that you had in Corner Gas, and the importance of where even though you were the central character, you had a stellar ensemble cast where everybody seems to have brought so much to the table in each of the episodes.

Brent: It sort of evolved that way. From the outset, the idea was going to be that I was sort of the eye of the storm. I was going to be the most sane of the group, and I would sort of comment on behalf of the viewer, in regards to the other ridiculous things that the people around me were were going to be bringing to the table.

You then add the fact that Lacey comes to this small, rural Saskatchewan town from Toronto, the biggest city in the country, and fit in pretty well. The idea was to show that people are more alike than they are different. So here she is, this tremendous fish out of water, but she and Brent click on a sort of cerebral level and a sense of humor. Everything sort of swirled around them in that relationship.

It became clear to us that this cast that we had put together, they were all so talented and so good, and they all brought so much to the table that we just kept expanding and giving the characters more and more. And by the third episode, it was clear this is going to be an ensemble, and everybody’s going to have sort of an equal seat at the table here, and I’ll maintain my position as the eye of the storm.

I was a big fan of Bob Newhart and his show in the 70s, and then Newhart in the 80s, where he commented on behalf of the viewer where, basically, he was sort of like the voice of sanity. And I felt that that was a role that suited my comedic sensibility, being the commentator more than a participator and then we just really took advantage of this magic that sort of happened with this cast.

You can have a cast of tremendous actors but, for whatever reason, if it doesn’t click and there isn’t the chemistry, there isn’t that sort of weird and tangible magic that happens you can’t force it. You can’t. There is no way to contrive it. You put the best people that you can imagine in place and cross your fingers.

When we had that first table read, we knew each of these actors were amazing, we were blown away by each of them in the casting session, and we hired incredible actors. But still, you don’t know, when we sat down into that first table read, we all walked away going, I think we have something here. I think we got a little greater than the sum of its parts.

Tellyspotting: As you moved through the series, did you see where the writing, I don’t want to say, changed, but maybe you could see what each of the individual actors brought to the table and you could take advantage of that to where you could elevate them and do more with their character because of that individual actor strengths?

Brent: Sometimes you would write a gag and then you would see it play out, and you would go, yeah, that works really well. We should just do more of that. Take Davis, this big strapping cop really being into wedding planning or really being into stuff that you wouldn’t expect a big strapping rural cop to be into like reading Cosmo magazine and being super into sort of non-traditional beefy macho stuff. That was something that we expanded on, just because of, just because it worked really well.

Having Lacey suddenly be very competitive with a real competitive streak that arose out of a few jokes and we were like, yeah, let’s do more of this. Or Wanda being much more intellectual than anybody else in town with her voracious appetite for knowledge and absolute zero ambition to do anything with it. That just seems like a funny thing that grew the more we did it, the more we were like, again, let’s, let’s do more of this. So it was all evolutionary.

The pace of the show as you’ll see from the first episode, has a much slower pace, a nice pace. It’s comfortable, especially compared to a lot of TV. It’s one of the things that people liked because it’s a comfortable pace. It sort of picked up through season three. You could see, as we were putting more and more into an episode, the pace picks up and it shows also, just from a cinematography standpoint where we started to learn how to shoot in this big sky environment and in this gas station that was mostly windows.

You learn how to compensate. You learn how to make it look better, and so the show just morphs and evolves and gets better and better as it goes along. Even though I’m very happy and very proud of that first episode, you can see it become a tighter show as it moves through the season.

Tellyspotting: I think that’s partly what I love from what I’ve seen so far is that it is you’re not trying to cram 30 minutes of dialog into 20 minutes of time. You give lines a chance to breathe and you’re introducing all the characters early on in the first couple of episodes. So you get a chance to get to know them without missing some of the gags that are being written.

Brent: I’m a big believer in character driving story. I think there’s nothing to a story that isn’t driven by character. So I really wanted to establish who are these people? What do they believe in? What are they like? What don’t they like? What aren’t they interested in? What’s their motivation, if they make and let it all spring from there?

I think it’s a testament to the writing. I think you can join the series at any point in time without really having to have seen the first episode. I agree, in some ways, these are archetypes. In some ways, you understand who these people are at an archetypal level, and then there’s layers to them beyond that. But you’re right. You could drop in the middle of season three, end of season five, and probably in very short order, understand who these people are and what they’re about.

Tellyspotting: In a very odd apples and oranges comparison. I looked at Corner Gas as this is life in a small Canadian town, but it easily resonates with viewers all over, because most everybody can identify with life in a small town no matter where it is. We have King of the Hill here which, a lot of times, we consider it a documentary as opposed to a comedy series, because it is life in a small Texas town but I think you could place that in any state, in the US or up in Canada.

Brent: I remember getting fan mail from a guy from Sweden who said this is exactly like the village he grew up in in Sweden. And then in the same week we had a guy from Manhattan say, ‘this is my neighborhood. There’s a little gas station, there’s a coffee shop where we all hang out. I know all these people, even the couple of dopey cops that come in every day’. It’s one of those shows that, for whatever reason, tends to reach across all demographics.

Tellyspotting: I think it reaches across demographics, but also all age, which I think is really interesting. I see a lot of generational possibilities as people watching with their parents or grandparents.

Brent: It’s one of the things that really warms my heart the most, and we hear it a lot, as people say there was no show on TV that I could watch with my parents or that my grandparents and I would sit down, except this Corner Gas show came along, and it was like we all wanted to sit down at this time of the week and watch this show. You know, a 14 year old, a 40 year old and a 78 year old would sit down to watch the show together and for the rest of the week, they would all go this separate way.

Tellyspotting: It goes back to your comparison of Bob Newhart earlier, who was masterful at being able to do that. Were there other influences that you had from a comedy standpoint growing up?

Brent: I was fortunate that in the rural town that I grew up we only got two channels, and a lot of that was Canadian television. So anything that even claimed to be comedy from the US was really intriguing to me. And we were fortunate for a while, for a year, year and a half, at four o’clock, The Honeymooners came on, and it was such an iconic, pivotal show in the history of television.

I was fascinated by it. I would watch it every day and see how they put it together. But throughout Corner Gas, I kept saying, you see Ralph and Norton in Brent and Hank all the time like that. I wasn’t conscious of it until I would see it in the editing room. I told Hank, or I told Fred pretty early on that I just realized you’re my Norton.

Even in the very first episode, the first time that it hit me was at the end. In the very first episode, Hank is sort of boycotting the Ruby because there’s a scene at the end where Lacey and Brent are watching out the window as Hank is picketing out front. And Brent said, I’ve known Hank since we were six. Let me talk to him, and he can stop.

I said I wanted this to be all one shot so you see it play out without any edits, because it’s very sort of old live TV. We just stacked it, blocked it. You continue through Lacey’s POV out the window where I walk out and you see me grab the sign, break it and slap him in the head, knocking his hat off and walk back inside. And I was like, wow, that’s a real Ralph’s thing.

Tellyspotting: Ha! I can just imagine…Sorry, you’re my Norton character. Is there anything that you watch now that you particularly like?

Brent: There’s nothing right now, comedically, that I’m watching on a regular basis, my wife and I love British murder mysteries.

Tellyspotting: You’ve got Murdoch Mysteries right in your backyard.

Brent: Oh, that’s right. I mean, in terms of current, contemporary sitcoms, there’s nothing that I’m watching on a regular basis.

Tellyspotting: I find myself gravitating to Frazier, Third Rock from the Sun or Seinfeld. Things like that are clearly classics for a good reason. They remind me a lot of classic British television.

Brent: I’ve always said that one of the reasons that we keep producing comedians that sort of rise to international thing is because we grow up sandwiched in between our British heritage and the biggest exporter of culture and media in the world we’ve ever seen.

We’re right in between and so we just sort of sit quietly and observed. And that’s not a bad place to be from a comedic standpoint. You know, if the British or the US does something loud and wacky and crazy and get it to go, we benefit.

At that point, unfortunately it was time to bid my short visit to Dog River farewell or I could have gone on all day asking about life in a small Saskatchewan town while pondering whether or not people really get upset if the price of coffee goes up, was there really a graffiti cold case, what’s it like to write for The Howler or why such a dislike of the residents of Wullerton?

Should you feel inclined to visit Corner Gas, all the outdoor scenes and all scenes that take place in the gas station were filmed on location in Rouleu, a small town on Highway 39 between Moose Jaw and Weyburn.

For those in North Texas, Corner Gas premieres this Saturday night at 11:00p on KERA and will be there each week for all 107 episodes. If that doesn’t fulflll your Canadian needs, The Red Green Show returns at 11:30p. I’d love to know what you think!

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