Michael Konyves speaks onstage at The CW presentation of Wild Cards during the 2024 TCA Winter Press Tour in February, 2024, in Pasadena, California.Leon Bennett/Supplied
It’s not hard to spot Wild Cards’ Montreal-raised, L.A.-based creator and showrunner Michael Konyves in a Toronto café near the CBC’s headquarters.
The screenwriter’s sporting a Montreal Expos cap, but in a chipper mood – one of very few Canadian baseball fans to match that description on a November afternoon not long after the Blue Jays lost the World Series by few centimetres.
“When the Expos left Montreal, I didn’t watch baseball for years – and then when I moved to L.A., I got into the Dodgers,” explains Konyves, in town visiting relatives with his kids.
“So this year was perfect for me. I win no matter what.”
It was a win-win 2025 in other ways for Konyves.
Wild Cards, his self-described “easy-breezy” cop-and-con show set in Vancouver, was renewed for not one, but two more seasons by the public broadcaster.
Vanessa Morgan and Giacomo Gianniotti in Wild Cards.Bettina Strauss/CBC/Supplied
Following the crime-solving exploits and will-they, won’t-they romance of straight-shooting police officer Cole (Giacomo Gianniotti) and his intermittently reformed hustler partner Max (Vanessa Morgan), the light drama also found a new audience beyond the CBC and the CW in the United States when its first season was acquired by Netflix on this side of the border, and Prime Video on the other – where it quickly hit the top 10 despite no marketing push.
“The reach of Amazon Prime is enormous,” says Konyves, during a break from working on postproduction on Season 3 while gearing up to shoot Season 4 back-to-back.
Wild Card’s new hordes of American fans will have to get a VPN for now to access Season 3 on CBC Gem on Jan. 7 and find out what happened when Max’s presumed-dead mother, Vivienne (Tamara Taylor), showed up at her door at the end of the last season.
On Gem, Wild Cards is described as a “blue sky” procedural - a term that initially referred to an era of TV in the 2000s and early 2010s at the American cable channel USA Network where its dramas were sunnier and quirkier than the darker, broodier fare that had dominated critical discourse since The Sopranos came along. (A number of those USA Network shows, such as Suits starring Meghan Markle before she married Harry, were shot in Canada).
This wasn’t the type of material that Konyves, 52, first put on the radar.
After a decade mostly toiling in development and writing made-for-TV movies for the Sci-Fi Channel (with a stint as Rob Lowe’s assistant on The West Wing), Konyves got a high-profile job writing Barney’s Version, the 2010 Genie-nominated film adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s final novel about a cantankerous, thrice-married TV producer.
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Konyves got that gig exhibiting all the Jewish Montrealer hustle of a Richler protagonist – hunting down the long-in-development project’s producer Robert Lantos, being invited to give notes on a draft screenplay, then handing over his own 20-page treatment instead.
His next big project was running two seasons of Bad Blood, a mob drama inspired by the Rizzuto crime family of his hometown that was on CityTV from 2017 to 2018 (and for which he won a Canadian Screen Award). The show – which lost a third season to the pandemic – was very much in the vein of post-Sopranos era of small-screen entertainment.
But then Konyves got married (to an American), had children and started to mellow; maybe West Coast life and living in L.A. no longer on a green card helped alter his mindset as well.
“My worldview started to change a little and I really wanted to write something that, on a very basic level, was fun to write, would be fun to watch and then, week after week, brought joy,” says Konyves.
Cue Wild Cards – inspired by buddy-cop movies like 48 Hours and banter-heavy, chemistry-fuelled shows such as Moonlighting and Castle.
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Konyves originally sold it to Bell Media – where it was developed before getting lost in a shuffle when executives switched over.
But after a meeting with Piller/Segan, the production company behind the popular Global Jason Priestley/Cindy Sampson P.I. series Private Eyes, the pieces quickly fell into place for the CBC to take it over.
Wild Cards – which is co-produced by Blink49 Studios and Front Street Pictures – ended up having a “very, very fast turnaround” at a time when “blue sky” was on the ascendent again.
After Suits was acquired by Netflix in 2023 and surged to the top of the streamer’s charts, industry chatter was all about this genre of TV’s enduring popularity in the streaming age. Wild Cards then premiered in January, 2024.
“It definitely was the right piece of material at the right time at the right place that was looking for that kind of thing,” says Konyves.
Wild Cards has its obvious appeals – chiefly the charismatic central performance from Ottawa-born Riverdale alum Morgan, and her on-screen chemistry with Canadian Grey’s Anatomy vet Gianniotti.
What distinguishes it from its case-of-the-week peers, however, is that it is very much a self-conscious piece of pop culture.
Each episode doesn’t just see Max and Cole solving a case – but pays homage to another TV series or movie along the way.
The Season 3 premiere is a nod to The Color of Money, for instance, with Cole and Max going undercover in a pool hall. Past episodes have nodded at Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone or The Fast and the Furious movies.
“Tonally each episode we get to play around,” Konyves says. “So some are more broad and some are more, you know, straight ahead and some are darker, but that’s the fun.”
In that, even more than its Vancouver establishing shots, Wild Card feels Canadian – a comment on American culture from an adjacent perspective.
Konyves is happy to have it on the public broadcaster – and its role in “bringing entertainment to Canadians made by Canadians.”
“As a Canadian to have a show on CBC – it’s like being a kid and playing hockey and getting to play for the Canadiens,” he says.