Radio sitcom provides insight into Roughrider characters

Corner Gas meets Bull Durham.

That’s how writer Jarrett Rusnak describes his newest project — the Riderville Radio Sitcom, a six-part series that will debut on Labour Day weekend.

“Corner Gas. Yes, it’s hilarious. Yes, they’re good scripts. But what’s underneath all of the dialogue and underneath all of that is that prairie sensibility,” says Rusnak, a Regina product who relocated from the Queen City to Toronto three years ago after the Saskatchewan Film Employment Tax Credit was eliminated.

“The Bull Durham part is the quirkiness of professional sport,” adds the show’s creator, who coordinated practice videos for the Saskatchewan Roughriders for more than 10 years.

“I witnessed it first-hand when I was working with the team in the ’90s. There are just a lot of really great characters that come out of that.”

Rusnak, a lifelong Rider fan, is a member of the Toronto Cold Reads series — a community of professional writers and actors that meets Sunday nights to cold-read scripts.

When one of the community’s actresses became pregnant, Rusnak was among five writers asked to prepare pregnancyrelated scripts.

“Me, being from Saskatchewan, being from Regina — and it was in October, with the playoff chase on — I wrote a script about the Labour Day Classic,” recalls Rusnak, a former Roughriders season-ticket holder.

“I wrote about a couple who was at the 2007 Labour Day Classic. The girlfriend is about to hatch a kid and she goes into labour. But she doesn’t want to leave the game,” he adds with a laugh. “She’s in labour and the boyfriend is beside himself. Kerry Joseph scores that touchdown, the kid pops out, everyone is excited, and it’s the best Labour Day ever.”

Rusnak says he wasn’t sure how his work would be received, but the script went over really well with what he calls the “Toronto arts crowd” — so much so that he played the recording for Riders play-by-play man Rod Pedersen, among a few others, while at home in Saskatchewan for the holidays in 2014. “There was a real interest — like this could be something much bigger,” Rusnak says. “The idea for a radio sitcom came out of that.”

A series of meetings between Rusnak, the Riders and Harvard Broadcasting ensued. And the rest, Rusnak says, is history.