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The Eleventh Hour is a Canadian television drama series which aired weekly on CTV from 2002 to 2005. The show revolves around the reporters and producers at a fictional television newsmagazine series, The Eleventh Hour. Unhappy with the newsmagazine's shrinking audience, the network has brought in a new executive producer, Kennedy Marsh, to reorient the show in a more ratings-driven tabloid journalism direction. The tension between the ratings imperative and the more traditional journalistic ethics of the show's senior staff is the primary conflict that drives the show, but storylines also include the team's efforts to get the stories that will make it to air each week. The Eleventh Hour was produced by Alliance Atlantis, Canada's largest film and television production house. It aired in the U.S. on Sleuth, under the title Bury the Lead, to distinguish it from a CBS series with a similar name.
New Eleventh Hour producer Henry Shelley makes his debut tracking the murder of a rent boy (male prostitute). What was his relationship with a Member of Parliament? Was he killed for love or money? Kamal considers war corresponding to boost his profile.
A violent case of mistaken identity gives Kamal a lead on his long-missing sister, Layda. Kennedy pounces on the opportunity to take Kamal's private pain public and boost his ratings. When he and Isobel jet to Halifax armed only with a hidden camera and a fistful of dollars, Layda's trail takes them up against desperate meth addicts and into the command centre of an identity-theft ring. Meanwhile, when Megan lets Henry sweet-talk her into going undercover to bust quack plastic surgeons, she gets an unsettling proposition.
Megan tracks a drug mule's child to a Colombian orphanage. The Columbian boy is used as a decoy to smuggle heroin into Canada. Henry fears she's getting too involved in a dangerous underworld.
Isobel gets romantically entangled with the police sergeant hosting her ride-along piece. When her investigation into a serial rapist runs up against the cops', she decides to hold her story one night, with disastrous consequences.
Kamal is accused of sexual assault while reporting on the trial of the bombers of a Winnipeg mosque. Ex-producer Tony Joel, hired to ""spin"" Kamal's PR, causes a stir at the office.
Megan recalls interviewing an eccentric chess champion days before his suicide. Ten years later, Kamal finds new evidence to suggest it was murder.
Even Isobel's new cop boyfriend can't protect her when a dangerous young man, one of her earliest interview subjects, gets out on parole.
Megan's conflict of interest lands the whole Eleventh Hour in hot water when she catches a domestic-goddess CEO with her hand in the corporate cookie jar. Kamal is shadowed by a sharp-eyed student reporter.
Isobel and Kennedy clash over the story of a quiet Rosedale housewife (guest star Barbara Eve Harris) arrested for shooting a police officer in her former life as a Sixties radical.
Henry's journalistic instincts – and marriage – are strained to the limit while profiling a quadriplegic, his faith healer, and a wife who suspects abuse.
Henry gets a double dose of shell shock when a sniper's bullet strikes on the doorstep of the Eleventh Hour. Megan and Isobel struggle to stay objective as they investigate an attack too close to home.
Kamal and James join fellow reporters for conflict training at an army base, but when a hostile sergeant pushes their war games too far. Kamal's digging unearths a story more explosive than anything in the field. Back at the office, Kennedy and her team get confessional during a productivity workshop.
Megan gets a tip from ex-producer Dennis, in town on the book tour for his racy new thriller. While Henry scours Ottawa for Dennis's deep-throat source, a Hollywood director who's optioned the novel visits the bullpen and recognizes more than a few ""fictional"" characters.
