The skeptics said it would never last. The TV critics hated the series and condemned its violence. Bitter behind- the-scenes feuds led to the resignation of several key FX people. But like its cinematic cousin, "Friday the 13th: Series" lives. And this season, last year's second-rated syndicated series (After "Star Trek: TNG") moved from late night to do battle with "Freddy's Nightmares," "Monsters," and the newest "Twilight Zone," and the plethora of cable revivals like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

The bigger audiences and, one might assume, bigger revenues of prime time will hopefully provide this year's "Friday the 13th" writers and directors plenty of scope for going beyond what last years low budget conditions would allow. So what's new about "Friday the 13th" this year? The format remains the same and the ensamble cast is unchanged: John LeMay as Ryan, Robey as his cousin Micki, and Christopher Wiggins as their friend and mentor Jack. However, the regulars won't be as insipid and perfunctory as last year's models.

"After 26 weeks of fighting emissaries of the devil," observes John LeMay from the anthology's Toronto set, "you can't help but grow up a little bit. The writers are taking more chances. They've allowed me to branch off and have different experiences. I've had a few more girlfriends. Of course, they all die. But that provides something to springboard the melodrama from."

Commenting on her character, the beautiful Robey says, "Micki brings an obvious vulnerability factor. She's becoming more interested in the occult, beginning to get into the books a bit more. Her fiance is gone, and she feels more of a responsibility about the evil going on in the show and setting it right. She's learned more about herself, and thinks more for herself than she probably ever has."

The setting remains the same, i.e. the old Curious Goods antique shop, but the enlarged budgets arising from last years ratings success allows the characters to move in a wider range of locations. The studio is jammed with elaborate sets, constructed for each episode and lavishly decorated, then demolished and replaced by others. "We're on our home base an average of one shooting day per episode," comments production designer Stephen Roloff. "The rest of the time is spent exploring and searching. We inevitably end up in the villian of the week's lair, so we have to build a lot of those places to generate what's required for the story's mood.

"I develop a metaphor for each episode," Roloff continues. "For example, for this season's opener, part of the entire drama is a gateway to hell. I went back to very old imagery, a decayed, ruinous archaeological environment."

Season one was plagued with rumors of serious dissatisfaction over the series' small budget. "I was finding," indicates Roloff, "that I had to make too many compromises. It was difficult to get it done on time. People were having to kill themselves a little bit too much. also, I didn't have quite the flexibility to bring in the type of visual illusions I like to play with. This year, I have around a 50 percent increase."

According to supervising producer Jon Andersen, Roloff's design department recieved one of the largest budget increases. "We had to increase his budget," Andersen explains, "because he was spending more than he was alloted. We have to build a lot of elemnts to accomodate action that we can't do in a real place -- some weird cave in the bowels of the earth or the gates of hell, things that we can't just go out and find."

In the special FX department, now headed by Megan Hope- Ross, the increased budget means better facilities and larger staff. "We didn't do a lot of hard mechanical effects last year," Hope-Ross admits. "Or big explotions, or pyrotechnic works. We're doing much more this year because we have more leeway. The technicians are availible to us. We're doing much more prosthetic and makeup work. The optical work will be about the same. Most of it you probably wouldn't notice."

Pressed to disclose a figure, she says, "I don't think anybody has a real figure. Every show has a cursed object and that cursed object has to do something, some spooky business. It's hard to differentiate in many cases between a special prop and an effect. Which budget does it come out of?"

The same ambiguity arises about the average number of special FX per episode. "What kind of effects do you mean?" Hope-Ross asks. "Mechanical, optical, what? On my last effects breakdown, there were something like 85 shots that required a composite with optical, or a practical effect with an optical. On the episode we're doing now, `Voodoo Mambo' the gag is a voodoo mask. A snake comes out and kills people. Every time the sequence happens, it requires about six effect shots. In all, there are 35 or 40 single effect shots covering maybe five or six scenes.

"In general," she concludes, "I don't think it's a big show for effects people. I don't want people to tune in and go, `Oh wow! Looka t that special effect!' For the audience in general, the effects should just go by and be part of the story. Whatever the story is trying to tell, whether it's fear or happiness or good old-fashioned chills down the spine, that's all I hope the effects are doing, carrying the emotions of the moment."

The most significant changes, however, appear to be in the writing and story development. Story editor Jim Henshaw is emphatic on the point. "The villians are much richer," he explains. "They have a few more dimensions. We explore more areas of them. As far as the curses go, we're trying to make them a little bit bigger, not to have global effects, but certainly to affect more people than a small circle. That means that curses sometimes have a second or third level to them, which we start getting into as we progress through the story. The stories will have more going on, as far as the plots and the characters are concerned, and the activities in the curses are more complex and deeper.

"The tendency is to keep the show from becoming one murder after another," Henshaw adds. "We're trying to deal with Faustian obsessions, trying to get inside the villians and their obsessions, and the victims, too. We're trying to raise some kind of moral dilemma in each episode, to introduce moral ambiguities. we're trying to be scary in areas people don't normally look at for horror."

"The stories are getting more intricate," Andersen concurs. "The characters that come and go in the piece are drawn in more interesting and exotic ways. Our own cast people interact with them in more interesting ways, deepening the emotional relationships. Micki falls in love with a handsome guy who turns out to really be a monster, sort of a beauty and the beast kind of thing. Ryan falls in love with a woman who's being pursued by a horribly disfigured phantom who ultimately kills her. So there are heart-wrenching events that our people ae tied into."

Thus far, the new "Friday the 13th" catalog has featured a vampire piece, a "Phantom of the Opera" update, time travel, a demonic confrontation at the gates of hell, voodoo, covens of whitches and sorcerers, and reviving the dead. Since treating classic themes has always carried the danger of repitition, trivialization and improbable distortion, much will depend on the quality of the writing and direction.

Due to the American writers' strike (since settled), the series has drawn heavily on Canadian writers. With it's status as a U.S.\Canadian co-production, "Friday the 13th" is permitted to shoot up to 13 (no irony intended) Canadian- scripted episodes without violating Writers' Gulid of America agreements. This will carry the show through to Christmas, by which time American scripts should be "in the can."

In one of the episodes, "Tails I Live, Heads You Die," it appears that Micki dies as a rite involving cursed coins and is later brought back to life. William Fruet directed the season opener, "Doorway to Hell," in which Uncle Lewis returns to lure our heros into damnation. and former Jason director Tom McLoughlin helmed "Master of Disguise," in which a famous actor uses a cursed make-up case to prolong the success of his career.

"It was a wonderful opportunity," McLoughlin confesses, "to learn about this [TV] world. It's a lot more difficult than features, in terms of faster schedules, smaller budgets, and lack of time to fine-tune things. It's an interesting challenge to try to pull off a lot of feature ideas and feature executions of moves and story points and so on.

"On a feature, you get a lot of time to prep, weeks and months," he continues. "Here, scripts are ready three or four days before shooting. You have a couple days to cast and look for locations. Everything happens all at once."

Apart from being intrigued about the series as a whole, McLoughlin was motivated to direct this episode because of enthusiasm for the script. "I was going to write a script," he discloses, "from a story idea I had pitched them. We were negotiating when the writers' strike occured, so they asked me to direct another one instead. I grew up in show buisness, so the idea of an actor and a cursed make-up case really appealed to me.

"Micki falls in love with a guy she always had a kind of movie star crush on, without really knowing anything about what he's like. Then she finds out. We break a few doors down in a sexual scene that we do. We have a lovemaking scene between Micki and the villian that, for TV, is pretty hot. I'll be interested to see how much of it we get away with. I tried to add and element of romance and sensuality to it and also to play up between the two characters a very strange, Gothic love story."

"Friday the 13th"s move to prime time will obligat it to compete for a substantially different audience than the one that put it in the number two spot last year. Is the show in danger of losing what made it so popular as late-night television? "No," insists Andersen. "We're leery of changing what we're doing. The audience is younger, broader, more sophisticated and critical."

So "Friday the 13th" is still a small-budget show: no big name actors to be seen, no big-name writers or major directors behind the scene (though David Cronenberg *may* come back for an episode), no large scale special FX, no exotic locations. The show's creators are apparently counting on subtlety, inventiveness and style to keep it at the top of the ratings. Pledges producer Andersen, "We don't underestimate the intelligence of our audience."