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Featured, Murdoch Mysteries

Review: Murdoch Mysteries mines silver and Group of Seven

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If only Canadian history classes were as entertaining as an episode of Murdoch Mysteries. My favourite instalments are the ones that delve into real-life history or introduce actual historical characters into them, so I was positively giddy with “All That Glitters,” which managed to combine Ontario’s silver rush with Aboriginal rights and the Group of Seven.

Inspector Brackenreid’s paintings—done while he was convalescing following the harbourside beating—were given the spotlight when Julia entered one in a Toronto art contest.

“I see a creative vision taking hold. You seem to be capturing the essence of the north woods,” Julia told Brackenreid of his work, which featured abstract trees painted in oranges and yellows. The reason? He’d run out of green. Lori Spring’s energetic script called for the painting to be stolen not because of the canvas but the high-priced frame it was in. That didn’t deter a fresh-faced young man from paying $15 for the work, telling Brackenreid the work inspired him to walk a similar journey with his own art. The budding painter? A lad named Tom Thomson.

Murdoch_art

When Monday’s story wasn’t teasing with the fictional inspiration that led to the Group of Seven, it was grounded in many references to Ontario’s rail history, from the Don Station (which was located on Queen St. at the Don River), to the Northern Ontario Railway (which became Ontario Northland). The railway adventure for Crabtree and Murdoch began with “Eagle Flight … murder,” muttered from the mouth of a dying man on the steps of the Constabulary. Graham, the victim, had been a surveyor for the Northern Ontario Railway; a hidden compartment in his suitcase revealed a map and sent the coppers to Haileybury, Ont., where a burgeoning silver strike was about to consume the area.

There were plenty of suspects in Graham’s murder, from a railroad magnate upset Graham was planning to have the train trail moved to Mack, a strong-willed prospector who had the hots for Crabtree. The real killer led the story in a dark direction: Migize Pimise (Eagle Flight in English), an Ojibwe man who wanted the silver vein kept secret. His worry was that once the government discovered there was silver on their land, they would be forced to move off the reservation. Unfortunately, it proved to be true both in Spring’s script and the panel that was the final frame of the episode: “In 1903, silver was found near Cobalt, Ontario. The provincial government extinguished the Indian land title.” A sobering fact indeed.

Notes and quotes

  • Continuity error! The flask Graham was carrying was much smaller than the one Murdoch and Dr. Grace examined in the morgue
  • I wasn’t even a little surprised that Crabtree takes his own pillow when he travels
  • “Nature. I’m not sure I care for it.”—George
  • Question: Murdoch revealed he’d once been a lumberjack. Has that been talked about before?

Murdoch Mysteries airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on CBC.

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Featured, Strange Empire

Review: The noose tightens on Strange Empire

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Chekhov is quoted as saying that if you have a gun on stage in the first act, it must go off in the second. Well, Strange Empire‘s guns are starting to blaze.

To mix my metaphors horribly, all the threads we’ve seen since the inciting incident of the show — the slaughter of the men — are coming together into what looks very much like a noose, as secrets are revealed and consequences start to unfold.

There’s a tangle of race relations in this strange empire, too. Kat is eager to see John Slotter hanged for killing the smithy, but Marshal Mercredi points out no jury will convict him of killing a black man. Justice will only be served if Kat can connect him to that slaughter of white men. And how disturbing is it to watch a scene between two half-Native characters forced to value white lives above others?  They also happen to be two very attractive characters doing that post-coitally.  At least there’s some solace.

So Kat lets Slotter free from his cage: “Let all hell break loose, I suppose.” She and Briggs plot to get Isabelle on their side to help implicate him, and Isabelle “needs pressing from within that house.”

Pressing she gets. Though Kat doesn’t make good on her promise to reveal that the baby wasn’t born a Slotter, Ruby does. She was Cornelius’ lover and the mother of his child, and exchanged blood with his son. “I will not turn on John Slotter. We are wove together.” She turns on Isabelle instead, who is brutally beaten and discarded by father and son. They in turn bond over her betrayal, cementing the Slotters as the most dysfunctional of families.

Tattiawna Jones plays Isabelle at her most regal and most fragile in this “Confession” episode. All along she has fought to maintain the standing she won by entering into the Slotter clan, and now she seems to have lost it. Kat and Rebecca come to her aid and find Jeremiah’s glove in his possession thanks to their new reluctant ally — one breadcrumb on the trail to proof leading to his confession to Rebecca. He sees in her a glimmer of his own fascination for life and death — though hers takes a slightly less murderous turn.

Robin, meanwhile, happens upon a collapsed Chase and his bag of tongue.  He’s haunted by the little boy whose tongue he cut out and through Robin’s spying, second sight and some trickery by the Janestown women, he confesses all, implicating Slotter in writing. Fiona’s fictionalized story Massacre on the Plains forces her to confront the truth of what happened that night, and the deception of Chase leads him to reveal the truth.

The deception the women act out gives us a glimpse we may have forgotten since that first episode, too, of what these women have lost and what they’ve had to do to survive since that loss — the printer’s wife, now a whore, was the most striking to me.  Jeremiah remains a mystery — a gun still to be fired — but though Kat and Briggs have found other men for their beds, they mourn still their absent husbands.

Despite the women’s desire to see Chase hanged with his master, Ruby and Robin set him free with Mary’s baby, allowing us to hope for one happy ending at least when that strange, sweet new family is reunited.

In the end, Isabelle goes to Ling. His assumption — and mine — was that she was fleeing to the protection of another man, given her limited options to not revert to the whore she’d become at 11. She dismisses that assumption with a welcome and disdainful: “I haven’t come to you. I have come to devise their downfall.”

The noose is tightening. But will John Slotter end up the one inside?

 

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Book of Negroes, Featured, Schitt's Creek, Strange Empire

CBC: Not dead yet

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One of my frequent criticisms of Canadian conventional networks is that they’re so risk averse, they would rather create shows generic enough to sell overseas than stand out with anything that hasn’t worked in the American market — or at least, worked there five years ago. And one of my most frequent criticisms of the CBC has been that they were so busy pursuing the same kind of shows as the private networks, they gave me little reason to find solace in our public broadcaster.

Then came a regime change. And a declaration that they were changing direction to pursue more cable-like series. And some rolling of eyes as some of us recalled the low-rated and swiftly cancelled cable-like Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays and Intelligence. I could almost hear them say “honest, babe, this time it’ll be different.”

It’s early days in their attempt to shift direction, and a shift can only be judged over time. But with The Book of Negroes and Schitt’s Creek, they’re finally getting rewarded with ratings as well as the critical acclaim of their first bold new-direction show, Strange Empire.

Schitt’s Creek provides the welcome return of Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, so comedically comfortable together, into our homes each week, in a show that mercifully isn’t trying to be either Corner Gas or a Chuck Lorre production.

In an unusual partnership, CBC will air ex-Kid in the Hall Bruce McCulloch’s comedy Young Drunk Punk this fall after its season airs on City, making CBC the new home of edgy comedies from nostalgic favourites.

But it’s the dramas that reveal what the public broadcaster should be able to do but hasn’t done in a while: reveal to Canadians through entertainment a history we often sanitize, from the birth of our country steeped in violence and the sex trade — not just a national railroad — to our unsavory role in the slave trade — not just the underground railroad.  Soon will come X Company, centred around Canada’s little-known role in WWII espionage.

There’s innovation with money too. With The Book of Negroes, the risk to their limited budget was mitigated by partnering with BET for the expensive co-production — not an unusual solution, to be sure. But the partnership with City (which will also have Mr. D air on that Rogers-owned network) gives them more programming for less money.

And given that the CBC debate usually circles around whether they should be chasing ratings or edgier fare, it’s a relief to see their risk rewarded both ways this winter. Schitt’s Creek premiered to 1.3 million viewers, while The Book of Negroes bowed to 1.7, dipping to a still-great 1.4 for the second episode.

In a year where it’s been hard to cheer for our public broadcaster, that’s good news for CBC, for the audience, and for a Canadian industry that could use some incentive to take more risks.

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19-2, Featured

19-2’s shocking, stunning Season 2 return

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The second season return 19-2 on Monday night features a continuous tracking shot that sets the tone for a series that already set a high bar for drama in Season 1. “School,” directed by Podz, who helmed the episode for the original Radio Canada series, captured over 10 minutes of stunning, shocking television in a continual shot, following officers Ben Chartier (Jared Keeso), Nick Barron (Adrian Holmes) and the members of their squad as they track down a shooter loose in a Montreal high school.

Ben and Nick go from the front office area through the cafeteria as bullets fly and students flee around them. The camera continues to a wall of windows to show a squadron of police cars arriving while frightened students weep against walls and pillars, praying they survive. It’s the most dramatic episode of 19-2 so far, a big deal considering cop Audrey Pouliot (Laurence Leboeuf) was beaten to the brink of death by a group of thugs in Season 1.

Monday’s return also marks a new direction for the Canadian Screen Award-nominated Bravo series. There is the overarching theme of Ben being asked to spy on his partner, Nick, who is suspected of being a mole by the Sécurité du Québec (SQ)—a theme explored in the French series too—but it won’t follow the same trail to get there.

“We get to the same place, but we get there in a very different way,” says executive producer, showrunner and writer Bruce M. Smith (Cracked, Durham County) during an on-location press junket in Montreal last August. “We did that not because we didn’t like what the French did, but because of who our cast was and how they had developed over Season 1. They had become quite different people from their French counterparts.”

Smith is a huge fan of the original 19-2, and likens Bravo’s take to NBC’s version of the British smash comedy The Office; they were given a lot of liberty to make it different organic being based on the same DNA. Benz Antoine (Blue Murder), Smith explains, plays Officer Tyler Joseph in both versions of 19-2, but they’re very different characters. Speaking of writing, the room has expanded for Season 2 as well. First season scribes Smith and Jesse McKeown (Republic of Doyle) have been joined by Damon Vignale (Blackstone) and Nikolijne Troubetzkoy (Call Me Fitz), a four-person luxury Smith says is alien in Quebec where writers pen their scripts at home alone and then bring them to set for filming. Lynne Kamm has kept things realistic on 19-2, serving as a liaison between real police and the show, which has entailed dozens of ride-alongs.

Smith says he expects there to be a lot of talk among viewers following Monday’s return broadcast—there are many, many casualties in “School” and the overall story mirrors recent events around the world—but Bravo has stuck by the producers since Day 1.

“We see this as a cable show, and they have encouraged us to go there with the content,” Smith says. “We are, at times, much more realistic and darker, and we show these characters warts and all.”

19-2 airs Mondays at 10 p.m. ET on Bravo. The season premiere will air commercial-free on Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CTV.

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Featured, Helix

Jordan Hayes gets put in a Helix hot zone

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It’s been 15 months since Arctic Biosystems blew up in Helix’s Season 1 finale and, as you might expect given that final epilogue, they haven’t been quiet ones for the CDC members. But even with the mysteries of Ilaria—and Julia’s disappearance—lingering over what’s left of the team, it’s still time for another case and, more importantly for Helix faithfuls, another disgusting virus.

The series set in motion its plan to revamp the show each season, taking us from the soundstages of downtown Montreal to the Abbey of Notre-Dame-du-Lac in Oka, Quebec. One chilly, wet weekend this past summer, the cast and crew are in the midst of filming the fourth episode of the season and Canadian Jordan Hayes—last year’s CDC rookie—is nursing a tea and analyzing how becoming immortal has turned Dr. Sarah Jordan into an up-and-coming name at the organization.

“She’s much more reckless this year,” Hayes tells TV, Eh? inside the former monastery. “Last year she was terminally ill and this year she’s basically invincible, and not really vulnerable to any kind of disease or anything. So she’s able to put herself into critical situations, hot zone areas where she can really be effective.”

Hayes chalks it up to an urge to boost her reputation—mixed in, of course, with her character’s desire to help people. “That’s why she got into this field in the first place,” she explains. “Along with a love and passion for science—but I think that she’s also very ambitious and wants her name to be recognized amongst the greatest scientists of her generation.”

That certainly seems to be the path she’s on when Season 2 of Helix opens. Sarah’s now a no-nonsense expert capable of throwing a decent punch and having nothing to do with newcomer Dr. Kyle Sommers (Matt Long, Mad Men) or his jokes. Then again, Sarah doesn’t seem to be too thrilled about much now that she’s on a team being led by Peter Farragut (Neil Napier, Bullet in the Face), dubious brother of Season 1’s hero, Alan (Billy Campbell, The Killing).

“A bit of it is because of the competitive nature,” Hayes says. “Maybe Sarah feels like she’s proved herself and she should be team captain—but I think it’s more that she sees that Peter isn’t Alan, and he’s not the same leader that Alan was. She really got spoiled in her first expedition, where she had Alan as a leader, and now she’s stuck with Peter, who she thinks isn’t as good.”

Of course, Sarah’s relationship with her former team leader is a bit more complicated than whether Alan was simply better at the job than Peter. Right before Arctic Biosystems lit up the Arctic in a final, desperate attempt to contain the Narvik virus, Sarah found out from one of the doctors at the base that she was pregnant and Alan—at that point in the arms of his ex-wife—was the father. Hayes couldn’t say much about how that played out for Sarah on the super-secret set, but she did confirm it’s “still a plot point in the second season.”

It’s plenty for Season 1’s rookie to have to handle, hot zone expert or no. But Hayes seems to be relishing the extra challenges facing her character.

“To add that dynamic on top of everything else that she had gone through—being terminally ill, basically losing her life and then coming back to life and becoming immortal—on top of all of it, now she has to deal with bringing a child into this life that she has … I mean, as an actor it was good because it’s a lot of juicy, complicated things to work with but I mean, as a character she has to deal with a lot, for sure.”

Helix airs Mondays at 10 p.m. ET on Showcase.

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