Dr. Robert Gardner is a professor of media writing and chair of the School of Radio and Television Arts, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto.

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"Drama is comedy without the jokes. It's all about structure." Not a bad line from part of a team of writers who struck me as hybrids. Phil Bedard and Larry Lalonde are two 39-year-old Canadians writing a series very definitely in the American mode.

They look younger than their years, even though they're rumpled and touching into exhaustion. They are quick to point out, though, that "39 would be old in the States." In Canada, they're still kids, and they have the quirky sense of humor and informality that proves it. At Paragon, working on Forever Knight, a gothic tale about a vampire's quest for mortality, they're like youngsters at a perpetual Halloween party.

Bedard and Lalonde started out as standup comics in Montreal in the '70s. An irreverent comedy series for radio won an actra award and identified them as "guys who could write."

They've had stints with Royal Canadian Air Farce, My Secret Identity, Dracula: The Series, Katts and Dog, and, in 1992, they landed an assignment with Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, a series they coproduced.

The experience at Kung Fu and Warner Bros. was a bit of a trial. Says Bedard: "Nothing was ever done on time. Sometimes you'd be given a scene to write and you didn't even know the context of the episode. Some episodes would be as much as 10 minutes short, and they'd have to be filled."

Lalonde puts it this way: "Television writing is often 'contained panic,' but there was nothing 'contained' about that particular experience."

Now they're writing and producing on the third season of Forever Knight, budgeted at $1 million per episode.

In the American system ­ by virtue of their age and experience ­ they'd be show runners. We ended up talking about this at some length.

What you have to realize (and this is where the Canadian system has really gone wrong), is that everyone on an American show is a writer; all the way from the neophyte (likely in his/her early 20s), up through the story editors, the producer, the executive producer, and above. They all know a good script.

That's not true in Canada. Writers form a sort of perpetual "peon" class. They seldom, if ever, move up the ranks. As a result, Canadian executives are likely to dress well, "give good meetings," and they know the jargon, but they're at a loss when it comes to evaluating a script.

The Americans ­ for all our tendency to think of them as Philistines ­ have a profound respect for the writing process. That's why the ranks of the production companies, at the highest levels, are suffused with writers. Think of James L. Brooks, Larry David or Diane English.

Bedard and Lalonde are Americanized, too, in the way they understand the system.

Forever Knight is shot in a former factory up by Eglinton Ave. and the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto. The sets ­ the vampire's lair, a morgue, a police station, a bizarre nightclub, and a rat-infested basement ­ all exist in huge work spaces filled with the noise of a clanking air-conditioning system. It's quite unlike anything I've seen in l.a., but it d'es approximate the huge back lots at Universal and elsewhere.

Bedard and Lalonde are housed in an office with a garish color scheme. Two computers sit on their desks. The lights are dim and the room has the look of a den.

They like working on Forever Knight because it is so much less "scattershot." I took that to mean that, as writers, they have more control and that the executive producers are script literate.

In this environment, they can prepare scripts ­ still under enormous time constraints ­ that will adhere to a structure and a concept they completely understand. They talked about how they could write in such a way as to maximize the budget and make the best possible use of the available sets.

The show's executive producers, in valuing the writers, have created a process that is creative yet orderly.

Sometimes, in Canada, a type of high-level tension and disorder is seen as a necessary part of the act of producing television. The really experienced people in the States would find that attitude baffling. South of the border, a show that's been around for a season or two has the precision of a Normandy landing. It struck me that Bedard and Lalonde, as show runners, are emulating the best of the American process.

Part of the problem with any tv show is that they often get picked up by a network late in the day. And then the scripts have to be written at incredible speed. (Apparently, that was part of the problem at Due South, where Bedard and Lalonde picked up a writing credit. The show suffered from an off again, on again syndrome that caused some problems for the writers.)

But even Forever Knight is facing this difficulty in the current season. Because of delays in the pickup of the show, they couldn't start shooting until July for a September startup. Says Lalonde, "Lead time is everything."

Forever Knight, which runs on ctv and is distributed in the States by Screen Gems, has become something of a cult favorite. The early shows struck me as over the top, but recent productions have found a shape and a style that is somewhere between a cop show and a gothic adventure.

Bedard says one of the problems they faced with the show was determining "exactly what it was about." Apparently, Jim Parriott and Jon Slan, the executive producers, kept asking, "What is the show attempting to say?" By that, they meant, "What aspect of human nature are we talking about?"

Bedard and Lalonde were struggling to base the show in some type of reality. In a sense, the vampire dimension of the series is being pushed further and further into the background.

The show deals with a soul trying to achieve mortality and peace. It's not enough to have bats and bloodŠthat will only take you so far. The series has to be about the human condition.