It was 2006, and a handful of young actors were gathered near Calgary to shoot a pilot about a family horse ranch. Amber Marshall was there, still a teenager. So were Michelle Morgan, Graham Wardle and Jessica Amlee. Most of them were new to the business.
Then the old pro in the group pulled them aside.
Shaun Johnston had been working in film and television for years. He knew how this usually went, and he felt it was his job to warn the kids. This is a pilot, he told them. Pilots usually don’t turn into series. Television can break your heart, so don’t get your hopes up.
That little ranch show became Heartland. It’s now in its 20th season.
The pep talk nobody wanted
Johnston tells the story on himself these days, a little sheepishly. Sitting in his trailer on the Heartland set southwest of Calgary, on a break from shooting Season 20, he owned up to it all over again in a conversation with the Calgary Herald.
“Shame on me, maybe, but I thought it didn’t have a hope,” he said.
He laughed when he heard that Amber still remembers the speech. The young cast didn’t take it well at the time. “I’m telling them my old-man wisdom,” he said. “They’re going ‘boooo … Don’t bring us down, man, you’re ruining the party!'”
It’s a very Grandpa Jack moment. He was gruff and practical, a little too honest, and he only meant to protect them.
Why a family show looked like a long shot
Johnston wasn’t being gloomy for no reason. He had looked at what was winning on television in the mid-2000s, and Heartland had none of it.
“At that time, it was doctors and nurses, of course,” he said. “Cops and robbers, of course, like NCIS and Law and Order and all those big ideas that were coming on strong and had staying power.” Comic-book heroes were taking over movie theaters. Reality TV was everywhere. A gentle drama about a girl who heals horses on her grandfather’s ranch didn’t fit any of it.
So he made a quiet deal with himself. He would give it everything as a professional and build a character who fit the story. “But I’m not putting all my eggs in this basket,” he remembers thinking.
Looking back, he sees exactly where he went wrong. “Heartland was the opposite of all the ideas. That was the mistake I made because I didn’t see past the trees.”
Nobody on that set was betting the farm
Shaun wasn’t the only one hedging. Nearly everyone who made that pilot had one foot out the door.
Amber Marshall almost didn’t make it to Alberta at all. Creator Michael Weinberg had auditioned girl after girl for Amy, and four days before cameras rolled he still had nobody. Then a rushed self-tape arrived from Amber. She had made it with her dad reading the other parts. Her very first words on the tape were, “My agent told me to tell you I have my own horse.” She was hired on the spot, and the whole story is in CBC’s oral history of Heartland.
Even then, she kept her backup plan. She had already seen a pilot go nowhere, so after filming she was still set to start university in Toronto that fall. “I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” she said. Only when Heartland was picked up for a first season did she turn down her university spot and head west for good.
Shaun’s own road to the ranch was just as unlikely. He was 46 and went in to read for Tim, Amy’s dad. The producers called him back to read for the grandfather instead. When the call came that the part was his, he wasn’t on some glamorous film set. He was laying hardwood floor in a new house in Edmonton. “I almost fainted,” he said.
Michelle Morgan had to take a red-eye from Toronto in the middle of winter, squeezing the pilot around a movie she was still finishing. Flights were being cancelled because of snow. The producers were so worried that they flew in their second-choice Lou, just in case. Michelle made it.
Her first scene was with Shaun. Lou and Jack look through a hospital window at Amy, and she says something clicked right there. “I felt a connection to Grandpa and to Amy,” she said. “And it all felt real.”
The show that went the other way
What Shaun couldn’t see from the inside, the people behind the show were counting on. They wanted to win back Sunday nights on CBC for families, in the spirit of Anne of Green Gables and Road to Avonlea. Weinberg was an investment banker with no TV background. He just couldn’t find shows he could watch with his kids without being embarrassed.
That turned out to be the whole secret. On October 19, 2014, Heartland aired its 125th episode and passed Street Legal to become the longest-running one-hour drama in Canadian TV history. It has kept adding to that record ever since, and today it’s watched in more than 120 countries.
Amber needed a while to believe it, too. “I don’t think it was until Season 5 when I really thought, ‘Wow, this has really exceeded my expectations for longevity and storytelling and being able to play this character,'” she said.
“And now here we are”
These days, Shaun has a simple explanation for why the show outlasted so many trendier ones. “The reason Heartland got legs and has such incredible staying power is that it doesn’t have those ideas,” he said.
Then he added four words that sum up two decades: “And now here we are.”
He’s still there, sharing scenes with the kids he once warned. He has watched them grow up and fall in love, and he keeps photos of the young cast on his trailer walls. We told that side of his story in our feature on the farm kid who became Grandpa Jack.
Fans in the U.S. will get their own look at Season 20 soon. It arrives on UP Faith & Family on November 19.
Shaun was right about one thing. Most pilots don’t become series, and almost none of them run for 20 seasons. This one did, because it never tried to be anything but Heartland.
