From Katie Scott of Global News:
Link: Yannick Bisson says 200th episode of ‘Murdoch Mysteries’ ‘snuck up on all of us’
“The loyal fan base is the reason the show is as popular as it is, and this passion for the show, the stories, the characters is what helps drive all us to ensure that it is the best that it can be and continue to improve as the series goes on.” Continue reading.
How would the stresses of breaking the law—no matter how well-intentioned—affect a marriage and a family? That’s explored in Fortunate Son, CBC’s Wednesday night miniseries.
Created and written by Andrew Wreggitt, Fortunate Son stars Kari Matchett as Ruby Howard, an American activist in Canada who isn’t merely happy with vocally protesting the Vietnam War; she does something about it. That includes helping smuggle American soldier Travis Hunter (Darren Mann) over the border into Canada. And though her husband, Ted (Rick Roberts), supports his wife, increased scrutiny on the family hints something has got to give.
We spoke to Kari Matchett about Ruby, getting into character and signing on to Fortunate Son.
I was speaking to Andrew Wreggitt and I asked him about the casting of you and he said that as soon as he saw you audition, he knew that you were the perfect person for this role. What’s your reaction to that?
Kari Matchett: That’s great. I didn’t know that. He didn’t tell me that. Wow. Well you know, my initial reaction through reading the character description was, ‘I must play this part. This part is f–king perfect for me. I can’t even imagine a better part for me.’ It encapsulated so much of what I’m interested in. The late 60s … I’ve always, since my teens, been obsessed with that era. I also love what was happening at the time politically. The social unrest, the issues with inequality of the sexes, of the races. All of those things are still happening now.
And it, I felt, was the perfect time to do a show about this. And I also thought, ‘I can’t believe nobody’s ever done a show about this time, this era before.’
I knew nothing about the sheer number of Americans that were coming over the border during this time to avoid the Vietnam War. This was all new to me.
KM: In 1968 after [Pierre] Trudeau became prime minister, he instructed the border guards—which doesn’t mean they did this, but he instructed them—to not ask draft-age men, whatever in the way you want to look at them, not ask them anything about it. Trudeau stood up against what was going on in Vietnam. When you see American governance, he was anti-Vietnam. So it’s a really proud moment in Canadian history as well.
I was talking to an older friend of mine the other day and I said, ‘Look, was it the political arena that was less heated, but in terms of was it easier? Would it have been easier for Trudeau at that time to do that then, let’s say now?’ And he said, ‘No way.’ Which is why we love Pierre Trudeau. It is a real proud time in Canadian history, that Canada did that.
Getting into the characters a bit, I love the interaction that Ruby has with Travis. I just loved his performance and the scenes that the two of you had together are just fantastic.
KM: I loved working with him. In fact, I think Darren and I are very similar in that we’re actually quite serious and so we gave each other a lot of space and oxygen, but we also when we’re not shooting, we have a great time together. So it’s sort of serious on the set, plus it is really serious stuff, and he was going through serious stuff. Ruby’s going through serious stuff. We’re both quite quiet when we’re working and we both do our own thing and then when we’re not working we sort of have an amazing time. He’s a lovely guy. I just love him.
How did the wardrobe and hair help you get into Ruby’s headspace?
KM: Every character that I’ve done, whether or not it’s a period piece, the clothing is a major part of the character. It took us a long time with the wardrobe to find the right things that worked for Ruby. Ruby is in her mid-40s so, I mean she was born in about 1922 so it’s not like Ralph and Destiny where I was just like, ‘Let’s throw on a long skirt and big hoop earrings and let’s go do the hippie thing.’ I would’ve loved that, except that that just wasn’t the case. Women were not allowed to wear pants in institutions.
Ruby hasn’t been working in an institution for two years, but she’s still a woman who was born in 1922 and she’s a firebrand and a political activist and she’s her own woman. So who is she? The coming together of all of those worlds, how does that work in terms of what she wears? So, just naturally from having worked in Princeton, she would have had a lot of skirts in her closet that she would still wear, because she grew up wearing skirts, she’s comfortable in skirts. She wore skirts, you know, but also has to wear pants. It’s a political thing. And I’m going to wear pants because I can wear pants. But it was still relatively new for women to do that at that time.
And then deciding to wear a pair of boots because it rains a lot and she lived in a country that’s being muddy. So putting all of those things together. When we finally got to her skirts with her boots and she put her hair up because she’s working in the scarf. Then suddenly it was like, ‘Here she is.’ She appeared, but it was a lot of elements to put together to make that happen. It didn’t fall off the truck that way.
As the first two episodes unfold, there is this relationship with her husband, played by Rick Roberts. He’s into the smuggling and helping. But to a point, he’s still got to keep that front up and is urging her to keep that front up as well. It’s fascinating to see this relationship become very at odds because of this kid that she’s helping out.
KM: It’s a complicated relationship, and I mean we find out later that Rick’s character is actually sort of the original activist, but then he sort of pulled back and things changed. And, as marriages do and people evolve in different ways. He became a little calmer and a little mellower and didn’t want to be so on the front lines of the activist world. How does a marriage survive that? How do you parent together? How do kids fare in that world? And Andrew, he’s such a brilliant writer, he wrote these complicated characters in situations that were just rich.
Fortunate Son airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on CBC.
Images courtesy of CBC.
As the second season of Coroner begins, it’s clear that Dr. Jenny Cooper—the hit CBC crime drama’s competent but anxiety-prone heroine—still has a lot of personal demons to confront. She’s overmedicating and she’s developed a disturbing sleepwalking habit.
However, according to series lead Serinda Swan, Jenny doesn’t want to deal with any of this.
“She just suppresses and suppresses and suppresses,” Swan tells us during a phone interview from her Los Angeles home. “She is taking six Ativan a day. She’s really numbing herself.”
It’s easy to understand why Jenny isn’t eager to dwell on her emotions. After all, Season 1 began with her husband’s death and ended with the revelation that she accidentally killed her sister when they were both children, a fact that her father Gordon (Nicholas Campbell) hid from her. That sort of trauma can be messy and time-consuming to unpack, but—unlike her character—Swan has no interest in glossing over the process.
“One of the things I find can happen in television is that we establish a big tragedy in someone’s life and deal with it in the first season, and by the second season, we are kind of like, ‘Well, we solved that!’” says Swan. “You sort of lose that fundamental, true human trauma that we all have in various different ways. And mental illness was something that, if we were going to do, for me, you really have to do it justice.”
Swan’s commitment to her character’s mental health struggles led to a key moment in last week’s Season 2 premiere, where Jenny threw her bottle of anti-anxiety pills across a vegetable garden and then started to have a panic attack.
“Those are the types of scenes where I’m like ‘Hey, guys, I need about 15 seconds here to be able to show the panic,’” Swan says. “Because in that scene, she didn’t have any of that panic. It’s just written that she throws it and says, ‘Damnit,’ and goes after it.”
Swan’s license to change scenes on the fly are a tribute to the deep trust showrunner Morwyn Brebner and executive producer/lead director Adrienne Mitchell place in their headliner’s creative instincts and acting methods. 
“This is the first project where I’ve really worked on asserting myself and said, ‘You guys, this is how I really, truly feel about this character,’ and have been given the space to be able to say it,” Swan says. “Adrienne and Morwyn have been so supportive of me this season—they were, of course, last season—but this season, Adrienne came to me and said, ‘I trust your instincts and you need to do what it is that you feel is right for Jenny.’ It was this beautiful sort of symbiosis.”
To get us ready for Monday’s new episode, “Borders,” we asked Swan to tell us more about her creative approach to Season 2 and preview how Jenny’s relationships with Gordon, who is suffering from dementia, her son Ross (Ehren Kassam), and her boyfriend Liam (Éric Bruneau) might evolve in upcoming episodes.
When we last spoke, you told us that you helped develop some of Jenny’s physical quirks, such as the crooked way she cut her bangs, in the first season. What were some of the details you wanted to emphasize in Season 2?
Serinda Swan: We started again with the physicality. Her hair has grown out, and I let it go a little bit lighter. It’s a little bit more feminine, it’s a little bit more relaxed because that where she feels like she is. It’s sort of the outward expression of ‘I’m doing great!’ Then quickly, within the very first scene [of Season 2], you see her lighting a candle for Ross and the match burns down and burns her finger, but she doesn’t react, and you start to realize that she’s numbed herself in a way and that she doesn’t have normal reactions to things. So for me, it was sort of, ‘Oh, look at Jenny, she’s so fancy! We put her in a dress!’ And then it quickly becomes clear that it’s a coping mechanism. I wanted to show the polarity between the two.
There was one other thing that we were playing with that was really interesting for Jenny physically, which was that she is afraid of her anger and is afraid of her physical anger. At the opening of the season, we see her tackle Kelly [Nicola Correia-Damudeand]. Originally, that wasn’t written in the script, and I said, ‘We need something physical in here to trigger Jenny’s sleepwalking, because that is the next iteration of the dog [from Season 1], right? How do we trigger it?’ The last time Jenny got so mad that she touched someone, she killed them, and that was her sister. At this point, she’s so mad, that [she decides] not another person is going to die in front of her. Nobody else is going to help this woman, and she just runs and tackles her, and this odd reaction comes out, her screaming ‘No!’ at this woman.
Kelly becomes a very big part of her life this season. So this is a journey for the two of them, which is really interesting to see. 
What else can you hint about Jenny’s journey this season?
SS: I think that moment where I throw my Ativan is a great analogy for the season. Obviously, she just talked to Dr. Sharma [Saad Siddiqui], and he’s like, ‘You need to feel, Jenny,’ and I’m like, ‘Why? I understand what happened, I understand the feeling is going to be sadness and all of those things. But I know what that is, I’m getting on with my life, I don’t need to go into it.’ She’s kind of reverting into something that she did before, which was control, control, control.
It’s this constant suppression and avoidance and eruption this season. All of a sudden she has to face her demons. She has to face what happened in the past, and she has to have some really human conversations. She has to have them with herself, she has to have them with her son, with her boyfriend, and this season, a lot of it is around the conversations she won’t have, and eventually has to have, with her father around his choice to protect her from the truth—that inevitably just ended up protecting himself—because it hurt her so badly. There is a resentment there, and think that’s a really interesting thing to see.
In the premiere, we found out that Ross didn’t graduate from high school. How is that going to go over with Jenny?
SS: At first, she acts like a parent with him, and says, ‘You are in so much trouble and you’re going to get a job,’ and the typical parent reaction, but then, there’s this just utter betrayal that he didn’t tell her the truth, so it’s something for her that hits her at a really deep level.
But it’s also sort of an interesting dynamic as Gordon deteriorates more and more, the relationship between Ross and Jenny gets more and more strained because he doesn’t understand Jenny’s anger toward her father. It’s a really interesting thing for Ross and Jenny to deal with. They’re going through a growing spurt, you could say.
And we found out that Liam, who continues to struggle with PTSD, is now living with Jenny. Will they be able to support each other emotionally, or will there be conflict?
SS: Again, we try to ground everything in reality as much as possible. When you have these traumas, you either share them all, and that’s how you bond or you don’t share them at all, and that’s how you bond. And it seems like, at the beginning this season, they are doing the latter. They’re both ignoring the fact that they have work to do, and doing work outwardly, instead of inwardly. So Liam takes on the house as a project and keeps renovating for her and doing acts of service for her and kindness and all that, and Jenny’s out solving crimes and they’re both doing the thing that they think they need to be doing but really not talking about it. And as you see for Jenny, that the truth starts to bubble up, the same starts happening for Liam, he starts getting faced with his demons, and that becomes a point of contention within the relationship, of “Are you going to talk to me?”
And so it’s a struggle between two people who may have gotten into a relationship a little too soon but ultimately love each other so much. The love that’s in this relationship is really beautiful and really true for both of them. It’s just the timing that’s really interesting. They both kind of come into each other’s lives as lessons instead of as true, healthy partners, and so watching them kind of navigate that this season now that they’re in such close proximity is beautiful and lovely and funny and really heartbreaking. 
What are you most excited for viewers to see this season?
SS: For me, it’s having the audience continue Jenny’s journey. I’ve had so many messages from people who deal with mental illness letting me know that they felt seen within the show and within the character, and having that kind of responsibility and then sharing that with our creators and insisting on it in every scene and moment that I possibly could is what I’m excited to share this season. And how adamant I was in holding that we all have cracks, we all have tears, we all have points of trauma in our life, but it doesn’t mean that we’re not capable, it doesn’t mean that we’re not strong, but it also doesn’t mean that we are able to deal with them all the time in the best possible way.
I’m excited for people to see that, and I’m so grateful that people had that reaction the first season and shared it with me. Not only does it solidify why I’m an actor, but it also makes all the tough conversations that you have to have within the production on why you need a little more time to prepare to get ready for the panic attack or why you feel that Jenny needs to tackle someone rather than sit with someone a lot easier. It makes it easier to walk into a room and take up space for a second and say what I feel. And the beautiful thing about working with a room full of women is they go, ‘Oh, yes, of course, come sit at the table and let’s hear what you have to say.’ And that’s such a rewarding job to have.
It’s like being forced to do paint-by-numbers your whole career and then suddenly someone gives you a blank canvass and says, ‘These are the colours you have, this is the character you have, but you’re allowed to paint the picture that you want.’
Coroner airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on CBC and CBC Gem.
Images courtesy of CBC.
Last week, I wrote a preview about the debut of High Arctic Haulers. The documentary series, broadcast Sundays at 8 p.m. on CBC, spotlights the captains and crews of ships delivering supplies to communities in Canada’s far north, as well as the people who rely on those supplies to arrive.
It turns out I previewed the wrong episode. Networks swap episodes all the time, and that was the case with High Arctic Haulers. The bad news? Anyone who read last week’s story and tuned into the debut was probably a little confused what they watched didn’t match what I wrote. The good news? It gave me the opportunity to cover the show again, this time by chatting with High Arctic Haulers‘ director and production consultant, Indigenous filmmaker Kelvin Redvers.
You grew up not only hearing the stories but also witnessing these ships coming in, right?
Kelvin Redvers: Sort of. The community that I grew up in was one of the starting points for some of the deliveries that went to the Arctic. And so that company doesn’t exist anymore, called NTCL. But it was a main industry in my town, which was the summer deliveries to the Arctic community. When I was a teenager, I’d actually done some documentary work on the boats that deliver up to the Arctic and I’ve always been amazed at the story. The work that they do is so necessary and important and, often, southerners know very little about this mode of delivery and actually just very little about the north in general.
It’s so foreign for someone living in Toronto to learn what these communities really rely on and if the weather’s bad, maybe they don’t get this stuff.
KR: It’s full of little small things as well too. What I love about the show is each episode kind of opens up a new layer of the complexity of challenges that we wouldn’t ever really think about. There are just so many different aspects to what these ships do and what makes it challenging that this format of having seven episodes is really fantastic. Each one opens up a new puzzle that these crew members have to solve. I love watching people who are really good at their job have to solve very difficult challenges.
What are some of the specific challenges that you had to deal with, with regard to equipment or production or weather just wreaking havoc?
KR: The production team, the team in the office figuring out logistics, had some of the hardest jobs out there in media because everything would change constantly. From day to day, even within a day, there’d be changes in terms of weather, in terms of when a ship is due to arrive. At one point we had, I think, 25 crew members spread out across five different communities in the Arctic.
And in each of those places, there are flight delays. Sometimes a bag doesn’t come in. There was a team that got stuck in for, I think, four or five days. I was stuck trying to get to Cape Dorset because there were flight delays there. Everything would change constantly. We sort of had to be really nimble and in the show you see the ship’s crew having to make decisions about where to go and what they can do based on the weather.
Even with all those challenges, anytime footage came back to the production office, it was emotional, it was moving, it was funny. It had all the elements that you would need under some of the most incredible pressures that you could ever face in a documentary series.
Can you give me a little bit of background on We Matter?
KR: My sister and I started, back in 2016, a nonprofit designed to support Indigenous youth who are going through mental health issues. And one of the main reasons is there is a lot of mental health challenges for Indigenous young people across Canada, the First Nation community and Inuits. And one of the reasons we started that was because of our own experiences being Indigenous folks growing up in the North, feeling that there weren’t many resources for Indigenous youth, but also there just weren’t many portraits of positive Indigenous role models in the media generally.
We never got to watch ourselves on TV in dramas or even the superheroes. The organization uses videos, predominantly on social media, of people talking about mental health issues and talking about positivity, overcoming challenges.
I think that affects some of the work that I do in media. And I think the sort of crossover between what this show does is that it really does present Indigenous folks, Indigenous young people, and Northerners in such a positive, inspirational way. In the premiere episode, one of the main stories is these Inuit high schoolers learning how to build kayaks and they are so excited about building kayaks and bringing in some of the materials that they need. Through the stories of what it takes to get material out, you also get to spend time with these young people and hear their humour and learn a little bit about them and see them on screen and their excitement and happiness to get these materials.
And I think that that has an impact in our country, generally, both for Indigenous folks to get to see ourselves in our homes and in our areas presented in such a positive way. But also it helps people in the suburbs or in Toronto to see a different side that you might not normally see in a news article or something more negative slanted and at the same time it’s also just a part of this incredible story that’s exciting and interesting in itself. It brings people to the table because the stories are so captivating. Then along the way, we’re teaching Canadians about themselves, showing others that yes, this is a part of your country. These are people who are contributing to what it means to be a Canadian in unique and interesting ways and really powerful ways.
High Arctic Haulers airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on CBC.
Images courtesy of CBC.
From Charles Trapunski of Brief Take:
Link: Burden of Truth’s Kristin Kreuk and Peter Mooney
“The fans who love the show are very passionate about the characters and about the dynamics and they feel deeply connected.” Continue reading.
From Melissa Girimonte of The Televixen:
Link: Kristin Kreuk and Peter Mooney are back in Burden of Truth Season 3
“Millwood represents stasis. He’s not growing there, and he’s got his patterns where he can hide from things. Going back and forth from the city to Millwood and the shift that happens each time forces him to make changes, which is difficult.” Continue reading.
