Jake and the Kid is a Canadian television drama series, which aired on the CanWest Global system of stations in the 1990s.
[1] The second television adaptation of W. O. Mitchell's 1961 short story collection Jake and the Kid,[2] the series is set in the small town of Crocus, Saskatchewan, and centres on the friendship between Ben "the Kid" Osborne (Ben Campbell), a young boy growing up on a farm with his widowed mother Julia (Patricia Harras), and Jake Trumper (Shaun Johnston), a farmhand who becomes Ben's surrogate father figure.
[3] The supporting cast includes Fred Keating, Brian Taylor, Lorne Cardinal, Warren Ward, Jenny Cooper, Marty Chan, Joe Norman Shaw, Henry Ramer, Tom Cavanagh, Chad Krowchuk, Gabrielle Rose, Michael Hogan, Edanna Andrews, Julie Khaner and Robert Clothier.
[7] Due to a loss of $500,000 in production funding when the provincial government of Alberta shut down the Alberta Motion Picture Development Corporation,[8] the network declined to order a third season; although it committed to air the second season that had already been commissioned, by agreement with the producers it delayed the scheduling so that they could attempt to reach a deal to continue the series with another network.
[9] However, the producers also alleged that Global was dropping the series in retaliation for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's concurrent denial of CanWest's applications for new stations in Calgary and Edmonton.