Engel and Rafayko co-producing
Walgreen’s first weekly health show

Walgreen’s has come up with a healthy antidote to the dearth of locally-produced TV shows with its upcoming 26-week health series.

The half-hour “Walgreen’s Health Corner” will start airing Saturday mornings in January on Ch. 9 and it activates the series skills of executive producer Tom Engle whose T. Engel Productions got the nod.

The series also marks the first time the Deerfield-based chain has ventured into long-form television programming although it has been a consistent spot advertiser for 35 years. And the show is also notable for being a commerical television entry. Orbis Productions had a lock on cable health shows for two decades.

Engel is co-producing with Michael Rafayko, a former long-time Leo Burnett senior executive producer.

“Michael works with Walgreen’s a lot; he does their commercials,” said Engel, who started working on the series a month ago.

“They’d been looking to do a series like this for some time. I spent six weeks creating a proposal for them. They liked what I presented, and we took about six to eight weeks to make a deal.”

Each episode of “Health Corner” will explore a particular health topic, like memory, headaches, or colds, from a variety of perspectives, and will feature regular departments like “Kids’ Corner” and “Old Wives’ Tales.”

The series will combine location shooting around the country with studio footage. Engel is still deciding on a local studio facility and the producers are in the process of hiring a production staff.

Swell was tapped to handle “Health Corner’s” postproduction.

O’Connor Casting was called in to search for a series host. “We’re getting close, which makes me much more comfortable because that’s a very hard thing to find,” Engel said.

Engel has a lengthy background in TV series. Since founding T. Engel Productions 20 years ago, he has produced and directed documentaries and show series, including “The Children’s War,” a documentary about pediatric trauma that ran on Fox and ABC; a six-part mini-series for Lifetime and a nine-part series on telecommunications and computer technology for IBM. He directed a children’s feature, “Thinking Big,” that played theatrically in Europe and ran on Disney and Nickelodeon.

Earlier, he was an actor and theater director. He worked for 10 years at Ch. 11 and was director of program development for the Chicago Program Group, the for-profit arm of the Chicago Educational Television Association.

Engel Productions is at 1440 N. Dayton; phone, 312/440-9222; engelprod@hotmail.com. -Ed M. Koziarski, edk@homesickblues.com.