The Reagans is a 180-minute television movie about U.S. President Ronald Reagan and his family which CBS had planned to broadcast in November 2003 during fall "sweeps", but was ultimately broadcast on November 30 of that year on premium cable channel Showtime due to criticism over perceived liberal bias.
Viacom originally scheduled the series to run on CBS, but moved it to Showtime after protests by the Republican party and a threatened boycott over its portrayal of the Reagan family.
Producers had set up filming in Toronto in 2003 when the SARS outbreak hit the town. They were forced to scratch nearly all their preparations and move filming to Montreal. They had to find new locations, hire a Montreal-based crew, and import English-speaking actors from Toronto and New York. The last-minute switch cost about $1.5 million, which they made up by cuts from the script and sets.
The producers could not find any house in Montreal that looked like a "California modern" 1950s house, so they had to build the Reagan family's house on a set. The crew was always running into its many glass walls.
In Montreal, producers built an exact copy of the exterior wall of Washington's Hilton Hotel in order to recreate the Reagan assassination attempt.
