Anyone old enough to pay taxes should know that just when you think life can’t get any worse, the fates scoff at you and boom! Life takes a sharp turn south.

So it goes for Sophie Parker (Natalie Brown, “I Me Wed”) in the engaging premiere of “Sophie” at 9:30 p. m. Monday on the Family Channel.

Her father recently died of a heart attack while with his lover, Estelle (Sara Botsford, “The Lot”), an actress who emotes all the time, darling. Dad left Sophie his talent agency, and Sophie seems suited to it. She has a gay male best friend, Matt (Jeff Geddis), a physician. And at 30, she’s eight months pregnant.

Unfortunately, the man she’s been involved with for five years, Rick (Sebastian Spence), is a louse. Not only is he cheating on her, he’s doing so with her closest girlfriend, Melissa (Amy Lalonde). Incidentally, Sophie had just secured a terrific contract for Melissa.

The cad leaves Sophie and her agency. Sophie’s assistant even goes with Rick, and within a day he also poaches her top clients.

Life is not going well for Sophie, but it’s not as if she hadn’t been warned.

The opening scene has her visiting a psychic, who keeps exotic herbs in jars and a potion on the stove and proclaims the ability to communicate with the dead. Upon holding her hands, he gets such a strong vibe of dread he tells her, “You are about to have the most horrible year of your life, and just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, your troubles will only be starting.”

Not exactly comforting stuff.

“That first episode packs a big punch,” Brown says. When telling friends about the plot, she says, they think she’s describing the first season, and it’s actually all in the premiere.

Brown describes her character as “impulsive, impetuous. What she is trying to do best is keep it all together. She is feisty, flirty, sometimes quite frazzled but a whole lot of fun.”

Now that the Canadian show is moving to the States, Brown says the action could unfold in any North American city. The show has been well received in Canada (where it is produced and broadcast by CBC Television), and the cast just finished shooting the second season.

“The reaction to the first season was great, positive,” says Spence. “It took us a while to find out what we were doing.”

Well, it’s pretty obvious what Rick is doing, and it marks him as a cad. By the end of the pilot, though, when Sophie delivers her baby, it’s clear that not all of the blame for the failed relationship is his.

“That was the problem with the character—no one has anything nice to say about him,” Spence says. “You find out over the course of the series [that] he is just a little boy trapped in a man’s body. He is like a 4-year-old.”

Rick’s story emerges, Spence says, “that he is one of those guys, a go-get-them kind of guy. There’s not a lot of moral fortitude there, but deep down he’s a sweet guy trying to figure out who he is.

“He’s not an evil guy,” Spence continues. “He just makes bad choices, and once he makes a decision he sticks by it but takes no responsibility for his actions. He hasn’t paid a parking ticket for five years because he doesn’t think he’s wrong.”

On the cover: From left, Amy Lalonde, Sebastian Spence, Mimi Kuzyk, Sara Botsford, Jeff Geddis, Catherine Berube and Natalie Brown.