The Gazette - February 21, 1986

"Americans love CBC's Anne"

Critics see something very "small-town America" in the Prince Edward Island of Anne of Green Gables, the Canadian mini-series fast becoming a public television hit in the United States.

Toronto film-maker Kevin Sullivan, who produced and directed the series about an orphan growing up in P.E.I., readily admits the sentiments in the original turn-of-the-century Canadian classic are very small-town American.

Hit stateside

Islanders can claim Anne "for their own," Sullivan said in an interview in The New York Times on Sunday, but American reviewers of his four-part series - which first aired in New York last weekend - are clearly very comfortable with it.

"Prince Edward Island and Green Gables is everything you imagined it to be," writes Kay Gardella, nationally syndicated TV columnist for the New York Daily News.

"If television serves the symbolic purpose of the hearth for many American families," writes another critic, "it is time to draw the family in a circle around that flickering electronic fireplace for what may be the best family entertainment of the year."

As it turns out, only 10 per cent of the series was actually shot in P.E.I. But the less-hurried pace of life in Maritime Canada in the 1890s and the strong family values of Sullivan's production have universal appeal, says Jay Rayvid, director of the U.S. Public Broadcasting System's Wonderworks series.

"What Kevin has managed is what Lucy Maud Montgomery did with the novel," he says. "He has created a universal story based in Canada, in an era that holds a great deal of nostalgia for all the western world."

TV Guide, the Washington Post and The New York Times have all lauded the series, with Times critic John O'Connor suggesting Anne almost seems designed "as a rebuke and object lesson" to a current updated American production of Huckleberry Finn.

Although the ratings won't be available for a month, early indications are the mini-series is attracting an American audience several times the record 5.5 million viewers it drew in Canada last December.

The praise the series is receiving is "so laudatory, I'm embarrassed, as is Kevin," says Rayvid.

Wonderworks contributed roughly the same amount to the project as did the CBC, with the bulk of the $3.5-million Canadian budget coming from Telefilm Canada. The West German ZDF network also contributed.

U.S. link was key

American participation in the project was a key to the quality of its casting. Canadian-born Colleen Dewhurst - who plays Anne's adoptive mother, Marilla Cuthbert, - and Richard Farnsworth, who plays Marilla's brother Matthew were introduced to Sullivan by PBS.

And Toronto-born Megan Follows, who has won shining praise from American critics for her portrayal of Anne, appears regularly in Canadian productions shown on Wonderworks.

"Megan has become such an institution on the show that we used to joke we were running a Megan Follows festival," says Rayvid.

Source: The Gazette