I've always felt that improv looks and feels more clever when you're there to experience it live than when you have the degree of separation that television creates. Television raises expectations.
I worked for [Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame inductee] Tommy Hunter. It was a wonderful training program at the CBC, because they made sure they never paid you very much, so you had to do a lot of things, and that way you made some money. [A phone rings.] That's my agent right now telling me I've got a 13 cent residual from Tommy Hunter in 1969.
So we had psychiatrists and counselors and therapists around the set regularly, especially for those scenes in which Jason would be dealing with a patient to make sure we were doing it all appropriately.
My two boys were the same ages as the kids in the show. In real life or in between the breaks I was raising two kids off camera who were not unlike the two kids who were being paid to be my kids.