Jared Keeso is a big fan of second chances.

It was a second chance that gave new life to his acting career after his award-winning turn as legendary hockey coach/broadcaster Don Cherry in two well-received CBC movies.

And it was a second chance that allowed Keeso’s newest project to find a home on the airwaves. “19-2,” a police drama set and filmed in Montreal, debuts later this month on Bravo and CTV.

Keeso is a native of Listowel and a former junior hockey player who used his on-ice expertise to win the role of Don Cherry in the movies “Keep Your Head Up, Kid” and “The Wrath of Grapes.” After those successes, his career seemed to stall while CBC tried to find another project for him.

The network came up with “19-2,” an English adaptation of a popular Quebec series of the same name. Keeso was hired as one of the series’ two leads, a police officer named Ben Chartier. But then CBC pulled the plug after filming the pilot episode.

“That’s one of those things that, as an actor, it’s just so heartbreaking,” he says. “You do great work with great people, and then all of a sudden someone tells you that you can’t do that anymore. So it was pretty crushing.”

But all was not lost. The project had attracted the attention of CTV and Bravo, which decided to pick it up and bring everybody back from the original pilot. The first episode of the series will air on January 29 on Bravo, and will be repeated the following night on the full CTV network.

“We had such a good time shooting that show. Everybody got along so well,” Keeso says of the ensemble series, which does focus on himself and Adrian Holmes in the lead roles, although “everybody else has their storylines along the way. Everybody contributes.”

Keeso says he knew of the original series, which is still in production, but chose to not watch it because he didn’t want it to affect his own creative process as he worked to develop the character of Ben Chartier.

It was a risky decision, because the stakes are high with “19-2.” Keeso points out that the original series is extremely popular in Quebec, and the adaptation is being filmed in an environment where the people already know the show and the characters.

“They have 2.5 million viewers a week in Quebec alone,” he says. “If we got a third of the viewers in Quebec alone that the French version got, we’d be a hit show in Canada. That gives you a little bit of perspective as to how popular this show is in Quebec.”

Naturally, there’s been a bit of a mixed reaction in Montreal. Many people are excited there is an English translation on the way. Others are leery and have made it clear to the production team that they’re working with a cherished property.

“‘Don’t fuck with this, this is really important to us,’ Keeso says, describing that attitude. “It’s a very important series to the Quebecois and the Francophone people. So a lot of people will take a look at Adrian and I, give us the stink eye a little bit, kind of wonder whether we’re gonna be able to pull it off.”

He says show-runner Bruce Smith is intent on showing the gritty, dark side of police work in “19-2,” which is what made the project appealing to Keeso when it came to his attention.

“You see a lot of shows where the actors in the story will offer a little bit of a wink and a nudge to the audience the odd time, a little bit of comic relief,” he says. “Not that we don’t have any humour in our show, but we get into that serious pocket and we stay there. It is a very dark show, the content is very dark and, once we get into that dark space, we don’t poke our heads out to see the light. We stay in the truth.

“I think actual police officers are going to appreciate that. Whenever you do something like this, you hope the people who actually do this job professionally, in the real world, will look at it and say, ‘That’s exactly how it is. That’s the truth of the job.’ And that’s our goal.”

Keeso’s character, Ben Chartier, transfers to the Montreal police in the pilot episode. He comes to the city from a small town elsewhere in Quebec and is running from something painful in his past. He is partnered with Nick Barron, played by Holmes, who is dealing with his own issues.

“It’s really interesting to play these characters. In the pilot episode, you see that Nick and Ben just can’t stand each other. They’re very, very different, but at the same time they have so much in common in that they’re suffering in silence. They’ve got these demons, these events that have happened in their lives that are starting to make them crack. . . and they can’t come together on it. They can’t offer each other any bit of support.”

Working on the series has made Keeso a better actor, because he has to clash often with Holmes, who in reality is one of his best friends.

“I just love this guy,” Keeso says. “He’s just the perfect actor for me to be beside. When he gives me something, it’s very easy for me to play off of. We have really good chemistry on screen, even though we hate each other! That’s something we had to fight, because in real life we’re such good buddies. The director had to tell us to push it a little more. I think he thought the friendship was coming through in areas where it wasn’t supposed to be.”

Ten episodes of “19-2” have been produced. Keeso says he expects they will be aired weekly on Bravo, with no breaks in between.

“They’ve been really great with us, allowing us to push the envelope and do things that we wouldn’t be able to get away with on network TV,” he says, adding he’s surprised and happy that CTV is also taking a chance on the pilot episode.

“It is the most tame of all our episodes, even though it is the furthest thing from tame. And then we just up the ante and keep pushing it and pushing it, every episode afterward.”

* * *

After Keeso finished the second Don Cherry movie for CBC, he experienced a lull in his career that he hadn’t expected. “Keep Your Head Up, Kid” had resulted in him winning the 2010 Gemini Award for best actor, and he thought it would open doors that ended up not opening.

His career was revived when CBC produced the first pilot of “19-2,” but it left him devastated when the network decided to not go through with the project. Being cast in an ongoing series doesn’t happen often for an actor, and being cast as a lead is even more rare.

Keeso was in a deep funk, even more so after his next job turned out to be a low-budget horror film about a “killer demon scarecrow,” as he describes it now.

“Just absolute garbage,” he says. “No offence to anybody who may have worked on it, but I was so depressed. And I decided right then and there that I wanted to take matters into my hands. I wanted to be in charge. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a creator.”

It was something he had already dabbled in through a web series called Three Flames Fans, but it didn’t catch on, despite his best efforts. In the meantime, he and his childhood best friend, Jordan Beirnes, were anonymously operating a Twitter account called Listy Problems, gently mocking their hometown.

“We would make jokes about what goes on in Listowel. It got really, really popular. We had 1,500 followers, and there’s only 5,000 people in Listowel. So we were doing pretty well, you know? We would joke that anyone who had the internet in Listowel was following Listy Problems.”

One day it hit Keeso – they were having such a good time with it, why not try to expand on it?

“Eventually I said to Jordan, I think I can shoot this. I think I can take these jokes and dress them up and present them to the camera. If we make it look good, if the quality of the production is good and the sound is good, I think the jokes are funny enough, and they’ll hit.”

Thus began “Letterkenny Problems,” first a Twitter account and then a web series of five episodes, filmed on a farm in Ladner, B.C.

“We went out and filmed those things in less than two hours each. They took almost no time,” he says of the episodes, none of which is longer than two minutes, all of which have approached or surpassed one million views on YouTube. The series, dubbed by Maxim magazine as “Canada’s best new comedy export,” has also been nominated for best digital series at the Canadian Screen Awards in March.

But what is Letterkenny? The name change came about because Keeso wanted an Irish-sounding name that would not be out of place in his home region of Midwestern Ontario.

“Letterkenny is Huron, Perth, Grey, Bruce. That’s Letterkenny,” he says. “That’s where I grew up, that’s where I played hockey and that’s where I met all the characters along the way. So those four counties can call themselves Letterkenny, if they were ever crazy enough to.”

The first episodes of “Letterkenny Problems” took off right away, aided by Reddit, Funny or Die and other corners of the internet. Keeso suspects they filled a void in a country where “people didn’t really have that element of Canadiana that they could laugh at,” in the absence of content like Trailer Park Boys.

“Nobody likes to laugh at themselves more than Canadians. We’re always taking the piss out of ourselves,” he says.

“It’s just something people connect with in their own way, whether it be having some familiarity with somebody who’s kind of like the characters or just bringing back a toughness – a stiff chin and an unwillingness to flinch and a complete willingness to fight. It’s something people like, and we hope they’ll like it on a TV show too.”

Keeso and Beirnes have signed a development deal with Bell Media to produce “Letterkenny Problems” as a TV series, but pre-production may not start until 2015, depending on the success of “19-2.”

“I think we’ll probably end up on HBO Canada. Our content is certainly filthy enough,” he says, laughing.

But he turns serious again when he reflects on the down times that inspired him to take more control of his career.

“I had to make that decision. So I scraped together the money that I had left and we made ‘Letterkenny Problems’ and now I’m in a position where I’m at the top of everything with this – creator, head of development, writer, producer and lead actor. Not to toot my own horn, but it’s exactly where every actor wants to be. You just have to put in the work to get there.

“They say the true strength of a person isn’t when they’re at their best, it’s when they’re at their worst. And I’m really proud of myself that I was able to crawl out of that and use that pain and disappointment as something productive, to have something good come out of it.”