Craig Olejnik may be “The Listener,” but he’s a pretty good talker, too.
The Nova Scotia native, who also spent a few formative years in Toronto, has plenty to say about his CTV series, which returns Wednesday at 10 p.m. for a third season.
Let’s start with the fact that the Canadian drama has made it to a third season at all.
“I actually cannot believe I’ve done three seasons of my own TV show,” he says while being interviewed at a mid-town Toronto coffee shop. “It boggles my mind. I can’t fathom it yet. I keep thinking I’m going to get fired!”
His character, Toby Logan, is much better at fathoming things.
Logan is telepathic, an intuitive power that has come in handy as a paramedic who is often thrust into big city crime scenes. That situation only intensifies in Season Three as Logan is asked to cut back on his EMS duties and become more of a cop, part of a newly formed special ops unit of a big city investigation bureau.
Still, even Logan would have a tough time fathoming CTV’s placement of “The Listener” over its first two seasons.
Originally a Can-Am co-production, “The Listener” was immediately popular in Canada but not in the U.S., where it was quickly dropped by NBC.
Producer Shaftesbury Films found other international partners, but CTV treated it like a bench player, pulling it for weeks or months, flipping it over to CTV Two, plugging it into last minute holes. It was once bounced off the CTV schedule after another Can-Am co-production, “Flashpoint,” was unexpectedly summoned off the CBS bench.
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The simulcast switcheroo amounted to every Canadian producer’s worst nightmare – a Canadian show losing a berth on a Canadian network thanks to a scheduling move at an American network.
Despite all the bouncing around, whenever “The Listener” returns, it draws a million or so viewers. It’s the show you can’t kill with a stick.
Why does his show seem to be schedule proof?
Olejnik thinks it comes down to the characters.
“If they don’t love me,” he says of the fans, “they love Ennis (Esmer, who plays Logan’s EMS partner Osman (Oz) Bey).
There’s more to love this season as “The Listener” becomes more of an ensemble drama. Olejnik is a huge fan of Lauren Lee Smith who plays police sergeant Michelle McCluskey.
“You can’t help but fall in love with her,” he says. “She’s phenomenal.” Mylene Dinh-Robic, Peter Stebbings, Rainbow Sun-Francks and Tara Spencer-Nairn round out the cast, along with Arnold Pinnock.
Olejnik says Season Three is a whole other show.
“It’s night and day and head and shoulders above season two. It starts out of the gate strong and it just goes, goes, goes – it totally goes.”
Wednesday’s season opener, “The Bank Job,” finds Logan – who had resolved to start ignoring his telepathic powers – relying on them more than ever as he finds himself protecting others in the middle of a hostage taking.
Ian Tracey (“Intelligence”) guest stars as a bank robber and Olejnik says the veteran actor brought his usual measure of reality to the action scenes.
“He hurt me!” says Olejnik. “He lost it a bit on one of the takes and booted me. I wanted to freak out right back at him. We ended up using those takes – he was amazing.”
Olejnik credits showrunner Peter Mohan (“Lost Girl,” “The Bridge”) with elevating Season Three, along with a group of young writers.
“The show needed more of a younger voice,” he says.
Olejnik also candidly admits that, along with the show improving, so is he as an actor.
“I can’t watch the first season, it’s just me learning the ropes,” he says. “I’m in third year now, I hope I can get one more year and then graduate as an actor. This show has taught me a lot, that’s for sure.”
With all 13 new episodes already in the can, Olejnik had grown a playoff beard and was headed for South America the day after this interview. He loves to travel, and is producing a documentary called “Finding Ricky” that came out of a chance meeting three years ago with a water taxi operator in Macedonia.
He takes plenty of photos while travelling, and used to share them at a web site, but “something very unpleasant happened,” he says without going into details, “and I shut it down.”
Olejnik has learned the hard way that, just because he plays a listener on TV, it doesn’t mean he has to listen to everything in real life.
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Bill Brioux is a freelance TV columnist based in Brampton, Ont.
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