What he does fuss over is that it took so long for American viewers to finally see the joint Canadian/South African production, which was filmed in 2004, premiered in Canada, South Africa and Europe in 2005 and will now finally make it to the States in 2008, courtesy of SCI FI Channel, on June 6 at 8 p.m. ET, as part of the channel's Friday-night lineup.

The series is about a detective named Charlie Jade who lives in a cold, corporate world called Alphaverse. Charlie finds missing people. However, his life is turned upside down when he tries to help a lost young woman with no identity, only to be thrown into a parallel universe. Suddenly Charlie is the lost one as he attempts to get home, along the way discovering an intricate mystery involving three separate parallel universes, Alphaverse, Betaverse and Gammaverse.

Wertheimer, who has worked on television shows including Friday the 13th, Due South and RoboCop, just finished a six-hour miniseries called Across the River to Motor City. He chatted with SCI FI Weekly about being involved with a two-country production, about working harder than he ever has in his life and about doing things no television producer has had the opportunity to do before.How do you feel now that Charlie Jade will finally reach the American viewers after years of development and a turbulent first and only season?

Wertheimer: It took two or three years to get off the ground. The journey it evolved into and became has been quite an adventure. ... I have to say how thrilled I am that it's actually going to get an airing on SCI FI in the United States, because when I started this, that was my ultimate objective.Tell us what this story is about.

Wertheimer: It's about a calculating, cold, hard man from a parallel universe who finds himself trapped in our universe. ... He becomes completely cut off from his entire existence and desperately tries to find his way home.So Charlie's from Alphaverse, but he's stuck in Betaverse, which is basically our universe.

Wertheimer: Yes. If Alphaverse is the metropolis, it is New York City, and Betaverse is in the middle. All the raw resources are in Gammaverse. The way you used color was really interesting, to separate the different universes, with Alphaverse having a Blade Runner feel and Gammaverse having a very vivid color palette.

Wertheimer: I experimented with an awful lot of stuff and one of things, one of the big issues for this show, has been clarity and people following where they were in the story. In our experiments we found that when I actually labeled the universes Alphaverse, Betaverse and Gammaverse, the more people watched, the less they actually noticed, and it almost became subliminal. So we felt we needed another layering. ... That Blade Runner thick atmosphere was used in enough contrast, we hope, that people would have a sense of where the hell they are. You think Charlie would have noticed the color difference between worlds right away.

Wertheimer: Yeah [laughs]. He notices the food tastes a lot different. ... When we first find him in the desert, he's waking up. We worked very, very hard on the color in those sequences. Nobody had ever shot HD in those lighting conditions before. And to work in the middle of the desert, which we found a half an hour outside of Cape Town, in those dunes and to work with that stark white against that stark blue, I spent days balancing those colors after the fact, almost a year later.There are some the cool sci-fi elements in Charlie Jade, especially in Alphaverse.

Wertheimer: At the time when I was flying to South Africa I was investigating all sorts of the things. I was reading all the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines at the time to help pass the time on the transatlantic flight. I was struck by the future world that they were all talking about. You'll see the majority of the technology that we designed in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, particularly if you see the first episode. The four-barreled gun, I found that in future weapons in Popular Mechanics, and our designer and I sketched it out. ... A lot of the technology we were really careful about, as if we were making a movie, and we took a lot of pride. We created those Plexiglas viewers, which you see in the main board room, where if you go around behind the viewers you see the back of the peoples' heads. Nobody had ever done that before. We felt that was the way people were actually going to be presented in the future in these highly refined corporate environments.Why did you want to tell this story?

Wertheimer: I wanted to get paid [laughs]. What happened was I met Chris Roland and Izidore Codron from The Imaginarium when they were here for a film festival. They were from South Africa. We started talking and they said, "You should come here one day and see what our country has to offer. We're trying to create TV and film." I hauled a writer along with myself and we hopped a plane, believe it or not, and we flew to Cape Town. I was so overwhelmed by what I saw visually, the potential of the area and how underexploited it was by traditional television and film, that I sat around with them and with Stephen Zoller, my writer associate, and we said, "Look, we may have an opportunity here. There is a shortage of challenging and intelligent television. Let's invent a television show like no other that speaks to our particular tastes." ... One of the shows I was most entertained by and intrigued by over the years was The Prisoner, which worked over time to present a narrative thread to its audience without providing obvious clues.Why has Charlie Jade had so much trouble getting to viewers in the United States?

Wertheimer: It's a very, very hard to sell for an American cable company or an American network, even though this show was designed for SCI FI because it goes against what is the popular convention today of giving audiences a distraction and easy entertainment. At the time we made this show with the cooperation of Chum television, which frankly doesn't even exist anymore in Toronto. Really, there were so many obstacles to overcome. ... We were in so much trouble so many times. It was the hardest I've ever worked on anything in my life.What were some of your challenges?

Wertheimer: In order to qualify for International Co-Production [involving Canada and South Africa], there are treaties. To give you an example of what life was like before we ever closed the money, we were there and I was in preproduction, running around finding locations and designing sets and working casting in Johannesburg. I would leave my partners, and they would be talking to my lawyer in Toronto, who would be on a long-distance conference call with Chum, our broadcasters, lawyers and broadcast executives, who would be on the phone at the same time with our film financers, the completion bonders and their lawyers, who at the same time would be on with my partners in Montreal, CinéGroupe, and their lawyers would be connected with Vintage, a collection agency in the Netherlands, who are connected to our distributor Jim Howell's distribution company, Park Entertainment in London, who are connected to my partners in Cape Town at The Imaginarium, who are connected to our partners in a studio in Johannesburg, who were connected to the IDC, which is the South African bank putting up half of their money, who then come full circle to the National Bank in Canada and their lawyers. I would go out on a location survey at 10 o'clock in the morning, and that conference call would be commencing, and it wouldn't end till 6. And it would go on day after day. Our documentation alone was 4 and a half feet tall in order to close the bank, in order to close the deal.

That was insurmountable and took years of work, so that when you arrive at principal photography you're beyond exhaustion, and in my case it was a first-time show-running gig. ... I had to replace the writing staff at midseason, so I had 11 episodes to go and a hungry machine that wanted a new script on Monday.Why did you replace the writers?

Wertheimer: We had a creative difference. They were unable to embrace the direction that the cast and myself and my domestic broadcaster wanted to go in, so I replaced them. Can you imagine calling somebody up from Cape Town, South Africa, and saying, "Hey, I'm in the middle of production of a one-hour episode. We're over budget already. I need to get a whole bunch of new writers in here. I know you're in Toronto. Can you be here in three days?" One of our writers is 6 foot 5 five, 300 pounds, and he poured himself into a coach seat and flew for 23 hours, got off the plane. I said, "Good. Here's the next outline. See ya." [Laughs.]What does star Jeffrey Pierce [at right] and the rest of the cast bring to the series?

Wertheimer: Jeff Pierce is a producer/director's dream come true. He was the only American in the cast and was the lead. I cast in New York and Los Angeles and Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and we couldn't find a lead. ... Then Jeff came in and we just clicked. And funnily enough, everybody in the cast ... they believed in me. In 21 hours of shooting over seven months, not once, not once did one cast member show up late. Not once did they not know their lines that, frankly, I was writing the night before. Not once did I have a hissy fit or a problem with any cast member. And I had people flying in from Johannesburg and people flying in from Cape Town. Can you imagine casting that show every week? And I have leads from Montreal, leads from Los Angeles. I've got people from Toronto. Michael Filipowich, who plays [villain] O1 Boxer, had rented his house. Because we had so much trouble closing, he was living with his baby and his wife in a hotel room for seven weeks, waiting for us to close the bank, close the financing, which we might not have.What was it like working on location in South Africa?

Wertheimer: It's remarkable when you say to people, "Look, I found the 24.5 Hour Café." It's 350 kilometers in the Karoo Desert. "Everybody in the mini buses. Let's go," and there is no broadcaster to say no. You see, you can't make that kind of television by committee. You can only make that kind of television with a sole vision and the courage to believe what you're trying to do.

We were finishing episode five and we were in the middle of burying the town in the middle of the desert. We have a sequence where an entire town has disappeared under a sand dune and there are just the tops of telephone poles and chimneys that come up through the surface of the desert. They said, "You know, Bob, we're really out of money." And so we all took our own checkbooks out. We went from a traditional seven and six shooting schedule, seven days of principal photography with a turnaround and six days of second-unit and plate shooting, to five and six. I had to turn those scripts around and enter into new principal photography every five days. No one had ever done that in a one-hour, and certainly no one had ever done it on location, in a one-hour sci-fi drama. That was challenging.What was your biggest surprise in going through this journey?

Wertheimer: What really surprises me is when I go back years later and I watch the show, having seen every episode maybe 80 or 90 times, is how much I'm continually entertained and how I continue to find things that amuse me. It's interesting when I show the show to friends of mine who are obviously a captive audience and interested in my success. I watch them as much as I watch the show. Most people watch TV even when it's on DVD, they eat ice cream or they eat yogurt or they're playing with their kids, and every time somebody dips their spoon they miss a clue. And I think about how if people can embrace Charlie Jade in his full and complete content, how surprised they might be.

It's a tough show. It's a hard show. How come it wasn't on the air here? Because it's not simple entertainment, and it's not that the corporations are evil. It's not that the broadcasters and cable companies are evil and they're trying to restrict our viewing, but in a sense they are. But they are businesses, and they've got to show profit, and audiences today have evolved to a place that Dancing With the Stars fucking means something. And it should have its own place, but there has to be a place for something like Lost or Charlie Jade. You must be excited to see shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica survive and thrive?

Wertheimer: Yeah, it made me smile. But it also made me a little jealous, obviously. Because in the world I live in up here [in Canada], our budgets and our publicity promotional opportunities are so truncated compared to what the opportunities that are south of the border. And I knew that particularly with Charlie Jade, if we had recut it a certain way or remade it a certain way or corrected some of our errors, we would have been competitive. I wouldn't say we were better than anybody else, but I didn't think we were worse than anybody else in the genre I was trying to create. I felt a little bit jealous that couldn't get it on the air in the United States in a way that could give it an opportunity to find the audience and to have the support. I can't tell you how thrilling it is to know that somebody's going to get to see this. 'Cause I think we did a good enough job to be aired.With only one season to offer us, does Charlie Jade have a complete story?

Wertheimer: Yes, but it's open-ended.Is this possible, if this is successful, that the series could go back into production?

Wertheimer: Anything is possible. ... It all comes down to a will and money.Is there anything else you'd like to add about the show?

Wertheimer: I was particularly blessed in making this show, to be given the freedom to make it and to make the mistakes in it and to make the things that didn't work equally with those things that people admire and the things that did work. And it was an extraordinary, extraordinary privilege to make a show like Charlie Jade, which I only hope someday I'll have the opportunity to do again.