Canadian TV Writer Andrew Wreggitt

He pens our collective memories, be it Don Cherry’s rise or Conrad Black’s fall, but despite a war chest of awards, Andrew Wreggitt (on IMDB) types away under the radar in a Calgary coffee shop — just another laptop-toting guy on his third latte. 

The Calgary-based screenwriter and producer is a local boy with a national voice, a stealth cultural orator lurking behind the scenes of our most-watched shows. Whether “guest writing” an episode of Heartland or Flashpoint, or dramatizing the triumphs and tragedies of our national psyche in epic miniseries and movies such as the Alberta-shot Mayerthorpe — for which he won Gemini, Rosie and Writers Guild of Canada awards — Wreggitt is living the dream of telling Canadian stories. 

Not bad for a guy from Fraser Lake, a small mining town in northern B.C. where even watching TV was a bit of a challenge. “We had a poplar pole with a TV antenna attached to the top of it, and if we turned it just the right way we got one station,” says Wreggitt. 

That one station, the CBC, gave Wreggitt hockey and The Beachcombers, a life-shaping series for a 13-year-old aspiring writer who discovered: “Wow, you could actually write a show about where you live! And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ” 

By 1984, Wreggitt was a transplanted Albertan with a fledgling writing career, taking on work in any genre that would have him — Morningside radio plays, stage plays, poetry and even paying back his early inspiration by penning scripts for The Beachcombers.

After perfecting his craft for nearly 10 years, Wreggitt eventually landed a coveted staff-writing gig on the Alberta-shot, Northwest Territories-set CBC series North of 60. “We were working in trailers with mice running across our keyboards out in the bush and our little northern town was just outside the door. You really felt you were living inside the show,” he says. 

The show gave Wreggitt his first long-form credit in 1999 when North of 60 was spun off into the first of five movies, four of which he wrote. It also gave him the opportunity to delve into developing the show’s characters. “The great thing about a series is that you have these characters and you now have time to spend with them. You can spend four or five seasons exploring all the different aspects of this world,” he says.

Today, Wreggitt has amassed 70 hours of shows that he has written for network television. This foundation serves him well as he now mines his own “gold rush” year, with five shows shooting across the country and a development deal with CTV to adapt the Arthur Beauchamp series by William Deverell into a one-hour series pilot.

And despite what appears to be a hectic year, Wreggitt is not stressed. “When you walk into something that’s high stress and lots of pressure — when you have experience you know that you’ll be all right. But earlier in my career, I might have had a heart attack,” he laughs.

“It’s very exciting to tell stories about Canada and Canadians that become part of our cultural fabric.”