Leah McLaren’s ‘Abroad’: soon to be a meta motion picture

Discovered amidst a tangled web of Facebook invitations (and via YouTube): the trailer for Abroad, the teleplay based on Leah McLaren’s dating misadventures in the U.K., premiering March 14. But this event has been in the works for a while — when the project was announced in June 2008, the Globe and Mail columnist promised, “It’s going to be like Sex and the City, only smarter and funnier.” And, by virtue of being broadcast on CBC Television, sure to be seen by more folks than How to Lose Friends and Alienate People — based on the Vanity Fair misadventures of journalist Toby Young, whose complaints about American women in a Globe profile she wrote led to McLaren writing her rant about British men for The Spectator, followed by Young’s response, followed by reaction from a bunch of other columnists — all part of a tidily contrived dance between the two in August 2002. Today, such an exchange would take place on Twitter, and disappear into the data abyss within a minute or two. But no one around here was so captivated by all of this, either: when McLaren introduced Young for a jetlagged appearance to promote his follow-up memoir at the Drake Hotel in July 2006, there were approximately four people in the audience who weren’t working for the publisher.

But who isn’t baited by the misadventures of a fictional chick columnist? Amy Pearce, the Leah-esque character played by Liane Balaban, has the additional madcap layer of working in a country where everyone speaks English, yet talk funny — like Local Hero, or that flick where Janeane Garofalo goes to Ireland. The real nostalgic twist is a curmudgeonly editor played by Maury Chaykin, the type who instinctively knew that getting wacky young women to write lifestyle articles between the classified advertising was the most lucrative media business of all. Dispatched to a new job to cover topics like the mating habits of the British male, her boss is a more foppish sort, played by Sean Cullen. For what it aspires to be, looks like Abroad can’t lose — even if the original hopes it would be a pilot for a CBC sitcom seem to have been dashed in the wake of Being Erica’s success. But could the mystique even survive now that Leah outed herself as a married woman in print? Her husband, Patrick Sisam, caught a break a couple years ago by directing a dysfunctional family indie film, The Year of Getting to Know Us, with Jimmy Fallon, Sharon Stone, and Tom Arnold, which may not have sunk into obscurity if it wasn’t a dysfunctional family indie film with Jimmy Fallon, Sharon Stone and Tom Arnold.

[Google image via longtime Leah lurper Ryan Bigge: "Hack Journalism At Its Finest"]