From the Bible to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” from films like The Exorcist and Angel Heart, to recent television series such as Brimstone, the Devil has unequivocally been the villain of choice for storytellers since time immemorial. A compelling, fascinating and enduring embodiment of all that is evil, the Devil is commonly portrayed as a sarcastic, flippant opportunist; a mercurial trickster, hell bent—if you’ll pardon the pun—on using his virtual omnipotence to lure mankind into eternal damnation, usually through the promise of some instant, earthly, gratification. And who among us hasn’t desired a little instant gratification now and again? C’mon, fess up…

While historians will trace the Devil’s origins back to the early demons that held sway in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian belief systems, it is the Christian, monotheistic Devil that is frequently associated with pure evil and that popular culture has so often embraced to elucidate humanity’s “dark side.” Moreover, the Devil is the perfect dramatic character, the one we love to hate: who could forget Al Pacino’s deliciously malevolent panache in The Devil’s Advocate? By turns irascible and avuncular, the Devil effectively represents the quintessence of drama, for drama is about conflict, and certainly no character has engendered more conflict than the Devil. He preys upon mankind’s conflicted nature: on the one hand our desire to do good, on the other our Faustian strive for power and gain even at the price of spiritual values.

For 2004, the Devil has triumphantly returned, this time to Canadian television—and notwithstanding the cynical pundits who will assume this is a comment leveled at Canada’s writhing television industry—with a few new wrinkles added. In June, Space: The Imagination Station premieres the first season of The Collector. Created by writing & producing team, Jon Cooksey and Ali Matheson (previously known for Rugrats and So Weird), The Collector is a Canadian supernatural drama—in the tradition of Rod Serling and the original Twilight Zone—about a man, Morgan Pym, who has been collecting souls for the Devil since 1348. Morgan is one of many such collectors spread across the earth, but the only one who now seeks redemption for those from whom he’s sent to collect. By entering into their lives in an attempt to change their destinies, he hopes to perhaps one day change his own.

Canadian actor Chris Kramer plays Morgan Pym, a man born into poverty in Medieval Nuremberg, and raised in a monastery.

In 1348, when the Great Plague swept Europe and claimed his one true love—a servant girl named Katrina who began working near the monastery when Morgan was twenty—he made a deal with the Devil: ten years of bliss with Katrina in return for his immortal soul. Morgan took the deal, for himself, for his beloved, and to spit in God’s face.

For a decade, their lives, and their love, was perfect: they walked untouched among the sick and dying, traveling as they pleased, good fortune always smiling on them. On the eve of the tenth anniversary of Morgan’s bargain, however, Katrina’s plague returned, and Morgan himself was also infected. Within hours, Katrina died horribly, and the Devil returned to collect Morgan’s soul. But Morgan became enraged and fought back, and the Devil was impressed. He offered Morgan a second deal, to become one of his Collectors—the alternative being to die now, horribly, and spend eternity in Hell. Miserable, lost and alone, Morgan took the deal, but couldn’t be sure whether the Devil had taken Katrina’s soul or not, as the Devil had implied. Six and a half centuries later, Morgan is still tormented by his ignorance of the events.

When we first meet him, Morgan is basically an automaton; he lives only for that call from the Devil, once a week or so, with the name of a soul to collect. Of course, Morgan never knows when the next call will come, so his time is never his own. Keeping the secret of what he does for a “living” also precludes ever getting close to anyone. And should he weaken and actually start any kind of relationship to fill his sleepless, lonely days—which happens every few decades—he knows it can’t last; sooner or later the Devil will move him to another city, before his ageless existence attracts unwanted attention.

As for the collecting itself, Morgan’s task is simple: to find the person and let them know they have forty-eight hours until their ten years is up, then hang around until the moment comes to suck their soul down to Hell. Why the early warning? The Devil enjoys a good laugh, and watching people squirm for the last forty-eight hours is apparently one of his great pleasures.

But in the premiere episode, something happens: Morgan meets a pretty young junkie who brings up all of his loss over Katrina, and his existence finally becomes intolerable. He goes to the Devil, but doesn’t end his deal—instead, he renegotiates for the power to help his “clients” seek redemption in the last forty-eight hours of their existence. The Devil, intrigued by having a wild card in his otherwise predictably omnipotent existence, agrees to Morgan’s request. And so Morgan goes off on a unique quest that exemplifies the core of the series: to prove that everyone, no matter what they've done, can earn redemption…hoping that someday that may include himself.

Each week, the Devil takes a different form, and is played by a different actor, thus Morgan can only “recognize” the Devil when the Devil chooses to reveal himself. This adds to the irony and mystery of the series, for the Devil could be an expectant mother, a child…or the neighbor down the hall.

What’s interesting here is that the Devil is portrayed with more multi-dimensional depth. Oh, to be sure, he’s educated, philosophical, witty, evil and fun—all the things we’ve come to expect from this character—but he’s also described by the producers as a lonely, singular creature destined to forever feed on torment and to promote misery; perpetually enduring his own form of pain. You’ll need to watch the series to see what we mean.

The series also features Jeri Slate (played by Ellen Dubin), a reporter for the Vancouver Star newspaper. Jeri is in her early forties, smart, pretty, and driven. She’s also single mom to her eight-year-old son Gabriel (played by Aidan Drummond), an autistic boy who compulsively draws cars, buses, trucks and trains, and who hasn’t said a word since he was born. (As the series progresses, we’ll discover that Gabe is also the one person who can recognize the Devil in any form.) Raising Gabe alone isn’t what made Jeri tough—she was tough before he was born—but rather what’s made her more patient, as she’s learned to wait for the hoped-for day when Gabe will finally emerge from his private world. Beyond that, the experience has put an idealistic heart under her natural cynicism, partly out of a natural desire to make the world a better place for her son, but partly also to fight back against the unfairness in a world that Gabe’s disability represents—she can’t fight autism, so she fights what battles she can.

Through a series of circumstances revealed in the pilot, Jeri will begin noticing a pattern in certain people in Vancouver and throughout the world: several years of extraordinary success, followed by blinding failure and sudden disappearance or death. She’ll slowly connect some of these people to Morgan, playing a game of cat-and-mouse with him in order to discover what role he plays in their success and downfall. As she does, Morgan will begin to realize that the Devil is manipulating the people and events around him in ways he hadn’t imagined. But we’ll see early on that even the Devil isn’t in control of everything, as he reacts to an eerie thread running through the episodes: Gabe’s awareness of Morgan’s emergence as a redemptive figure, made clear in the boy’s drawings.

Season one will feature 13 episodes, with touching, poignant, and often ironic tales in the best tradition of such classic series as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.