Lark Productions and CBC today announced that Season 2 of police drama ALLEGIANCE (10×60) is currently shooting across BC’s Lower Mainland through December 5, 2024.
Premiering in winter 2024, ALLEGIANCE was CBC’s most-watched new series of the 2023-24 season.* The high-octane police drama uniquely set in Surrey, BC, is a CBC Original series from Lark Productions in association with Universal International Studios, starring Supinder Wraich (Sort Of) as Sabrina Sohal and Enrico Colantoni (English Teacher) as Vince Brambilla. Season 2 welcomes Samer Salem (The Expanse, The Boys) to the ensemble cast as a series regular, portraying Detective Corporal Zak Kalaini. Plus, showrunners Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern (Flashpoint, X Company) are back at the helm of ALLEGIANCE, a series created by Anar Ali (Transplant).
The series focuses on identity and belonging, policing and politics, and finding truth within the heart of a flawed justice system. Season 2 will be rooted in a powerful set of engaging and topical storylines including online gambling, tech janitors and international schools. Lead character Sabrina Sohal (Wraich) joins the Serious Crimes Unit of the CFPC and has six months to prove she’s got what it takes to be a detective. She’s paired with a newly transferred partner who has a decade more of experience compared to her and a very different approach to the job. While navigating a complex love life and an equally complicated family life, Sabrina is determined to take down the man responsible for framing her father.
“Audiences embraced Allegiance, and we are excited for viewers to see the next instalment on CBC this winter. Our creative team continues to raise the bar this season and we are grateful for the opportunity to continue to explore the lives of our characters and tell these important stories,” said Erin Haskett, President, Lark Productions.
Returning series regulars include Stephen Lobo, Adolyn H. Dar, David Cubitt, Crystal Balint, Toby Levins, Melanie Papalia, and Andres Joseph.
A CBC Original series, ALLEGIANCE is produced by Lark Productions in association with Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group, with NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution handling global sales. Stephanie Morgenstern, Mark Ellis and Anar Ali serve as Executive Producers alongside Lark Productions’ Erin Haskett, Nicole Mandes, David Valleau, Tex Antonucci and Season 2 director, Nimisha Mukerji.
The last time I spoke to Supinder Wraich, it was about The 410, the excellent CBC Gem series she created, wrote, and starred in.
After gigs on Sort Of, Surreal Estate, Hudson & Rex, Private Eyes and Crawford, Wraich is back, toplining the excellent new Allegiance.
Debuting Wednesday at 9 p.m. on CBC and CBC Gem, created by Anar Ali (Transplant) and showrun by Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern (Flashpoint, X Company), Allegiance follows the journey of new cop Sabrina Sohal (Wraich), who is of Punjabi heritage.
Sabrina is a smart, confident newbie cop. She’s been paired with a veteran training officer named Vince (Enrico Colantoni) and looks to make a difference in her home city of Surrey, B.C. But her personal (and to an extent, professional life) is thrown into disarray when her father, Ajeet Sohal (Stephen Lobo), the revered Minister of Public Safety, in charge of the police, is accused of treason.
With a debut episode packed with action, humour and emotion, we spoke to Wraich about her journey to Allegiance, what Sabrina will face in Season 1, and if there will be more The 410.
How did you end up getting involved in the show? Did you have to audition, or did they have you in mind? How did the journey all begin for you?Supinder Wraich: Well, it was a little bit of both, but I didn’t know at the time that they had me in mind. And so, originally I was under contract for Sort Of, so I wasn’t looking for work because contractually it wasn’t something that was open.
When we found out that Sort Of was coming to an end, it opened an unexpected door. At the same time, I think that the Allegiance folks had been casting for a while in looking for Sabrina. But when I went in to audition, I really didn’t think that they were looking for me. There was a naiveté to this character that where I was in my life at the time I had just played Aqsa. Tonally, in terms of energy-wise, they’re very different characters. And also, I’d just had a son.
And so, when I went into audition, I really just thought my friend Anar Ali had written the show, Anar and I had known each other for years and wanted to work on something, so she was doing me a favour by bringing me in just because I was Sikh Punjabi and we knew each other. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s nice of Anar to bring me in.’ When I got the call that they wanted to offer me the part, it really was a bit of a surprise for me, and I had to figure out, okay, how do I build Sabrina? How do I find this woman and where she’s at in her life?
Enrico Colantoni and Supinder Wraich
Was it easy to identify with this character? Could you understand where this character was coming from and being caught and having to deal with racism every day, unfortunately? SW: Yeah. Some of the things that I had built for Sabrina and was just wondering about her life, I can definitely draw a couple parallels. One major one was that this is my first big leading role and in a way a new position for me that I’ve had to learn as I stepped into those shoes. For Sabrina, similarly, it’s also a new job and something that she’s learning as she goes along, so that I could lean on.
But then, there was also something very different where one of the things that Anar wanted to explore was what does racism look like for a family who’s been in Canada for generations?
And that’s very different from my experience because I was born in India. I was born in Punjab, and I moved here when I was four. And so, finding that balance of what it would feel like to belong to a family that had existed in Canada for generations and the type of confidence that gives you in a way that I didn’t have growing up in terms of real feeling of belonging somewhere and what it means to have that taken away from you is something that I had to define and then allow that fall to happen for Sabrina when her father gets charged and all of a sudden in a very significant way she is confronted by the color of her skin and this particular experience.
What I like about Sabrina and what I connected with right away is how smart she is and how instinctive she is at being a cop. Even though she is a rookie, you’re already getting that feedback that she knows what she’s doing and her gut reaction is good. That’s refreshing to see a rookie cop on television these days. SW: I think that where that comes from is this confidence that has been instilled in her because of her father.
I remember we had a couple of conversations about who Ajeet Sohal was and how he carries himself in the world. I think for somebody like him, a Sikh Punjabi man who has a beard, who wears a turban, and has confronted so much about his culture, about his religion, and had the confidence to stand up for himself, Sabrina’s watched that happen her entire life. He really is a mentor to her. And so, amid everything else that’s happening, when she embarks on this career, one of the things that she’s really learned to do, and I do believe that it comes from her father, is to trust her instincts.
Speaking of mentors, I love Enrico Colantoni. I’ve spoken to him many times, and I feel as though the character Vince fits him like a glove. I love that there was that connection with Sabrina right away. The dad jokes are all there. What’s it been like working with him? SW: Oh my god, Enrico’s a dream. We had this genuine chemistry the moment we met, and I can’t explain it. We’d never worked together. I obviously knew who he was and had seen his work, and so I was really excited to work together.
I remember when we were first auditioning together. Enrico wasn’t auditioning. He was there during the test, and there were a couple of different Sabrinas that he tested with. I remember just being enamored in terms of watching him work and thinking like, ‘Oh my god, he’s really in it, he’s really in this scene. He’s very present, and if I got the chance to work with him, I think I could really learn a lot from this person.’
It’s funny how life works. In Sabrina’s situation, Vince is definitely not the training officer that she wants, but he’s very much the training officer that she needs.
Obviously, I wanted to work with Rico as soon as I knew that he might be taking the project. But there is a beautiful thing. I learned a lot from working with Rico. Likewise, I think Sabrina also learns so much from Vince’s relaxed mindset because she’s so driven and so focused, and she begins to figure out what the important things are.
Lachlan Quarmby and Supinder Wraich
Not to mention everybody else in the cast. Brian Markinson, Stephen Lobo, you already mentioned David Cubitt, from top to bottom, this is a stellar cast. This is a who’s who of Canadian television all on one screen. It is just amazing. SW: Yeah, and you know what? It makes your job a lot easier when you go to work every day and get to work with people who are so talented. You show up in the scenes, and they’re there with you, and you can play and bounce off of each other.
One of the things that also intrigued me about the show was the script and the dialogue. The dialogue sounds very natural. Everything just felt very natural and conversational to a point. SW: I would say definitely credit the scripts. I think what’s really cool is that Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis had worked with Rico for years. And so, when it came to developing Vince, and I’ve heard Rico say this, they got him in terms of just his humor. There’s a lot of humor in the show too. He did a really good job of inserting those jokes. And also, just we have a great team of writers.
And the other thing is as showrunners, Mark and Stephanie are not precious about dialogue, that it has to be word-perfect. And so, between them and the directors, there was a fair bit of ad-libbing that was allowed and encouraged.
And Rico and I, sometimes we would just riff, and the directors would let us keep going until we ran out.
Did you do any police training in advance of this role? If so, what was that experience like? SW: Yeah, we did a little bit of police training just right before we started, and then we would always have someone on set to ensure that what we were doing was accurate in terms of gun control or making arrests or just general walking into a room and where the dangers are, how do you clear a room? And so, we did that.
And then, I also spoke with a couple Sikh Punjabi female RCMP officers just to understand their world and what they dealt with on a day-to-day basis and also just their familial relationships. Because as much as it is a cop show, there’s also so much family stuff. For me, I really wanted to understand Sabrina’s experience, what the reality of it looks like.
And then, also just things that you pick up along the way, like once you’re done training in depot, it’s the little things, even running. You’re trained to run with your hands up so you can protect yourself when you’re fast. And so, Sabrina had a lot of running scenes. I remember it was one of our first days, and it was something that one of my references had told me. She was like, ‘Your body gets used to doing things a certain way, because for six months while you’re in depot, it’s ingrained into you.’ And so, if I was a cop who had been doing this for a while, those things would need to be less specific. But especially when you join the force in those first couple of episodes, I can remember just thinking about whenever Sabrina enters a scene, she’s always referencing the training that she’s had. Because it’s not like it was years ago. It was she just got out of it.
What can you tell me about Sabrina’s professional journey this season? SW: Without giving too much away about the show, I think that there is a removing of the rose-coloured glasses, because one of the things I think that the show and the writers have done beautifully is to not shy away from the things that we experience, we as in society, and have experienced over the last couple of years with the policing system, right?
Our legal systems are troubled. Depending on who you ask, a lot of people would say that they’re broken, they need to be rebuilt. One of the things that we wanted to look at was what’s legal is not necessarily always what’s fair and what happens to the human hearts that are involved in those negotiations. And so, for Sabrina, I think that the show is really aptly named in terms of allegiance because this thing happens to her father, and then all of a sudden this organization that she’s taken an oath to serve and to protect is no longer serving and protecting her and her family. In fact, they’re a threat.
And so, that journey, I think, it’s a fascinating one to watch as she negotiates being… When she comes in, she believes in the system normally. And then, she really does have to at some point choose sides in terms of who is she going to serve. Truly, what does it mean to be caught within those two worlds?
And then, I think there’s also a strength. I think for a long time in Sabrina’s life, she’s benefited from being her father’s daughter. And then, without him around to protect her, to show her the way, she really has to go on this journey where she has to become her own woman and be in this police force in her own right.
Okay, last question. In your bio, it mentions future seasons of The 410. So, what can you tell me? SW: I’ve been working on the hour-long version for The 410 for, I think, since we’ve released The 410. And so, I’m working with a showrunner in India.
His name is Vikram Motwane. He did Sacred Games on Netflix. It’s this big crime series. And so, right now for the last little bit, we’ve been developing the hour-long version, and now that the strike is over, we’re going to take it back out to mostly American networks and start pitching the show.
Allegiance airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on CBC and CBC Gem.
Images courtesy of CBC/Lark Productions/Darko Sikman.
CBC and Lark Productions today announced casting and production details for Anar Ali’s (Transplant) character-driven police procedural ALLEGIANCE (10×60), now in production in Vancouver and BC’s lower mainland. A CBC Original series from the award-winning team at Lark Productions in association with Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group, the series features an ensemble cast led by Supinder Wraich (Sort Of), Enrico Colantoni (Station Eleven), Stephen Lobo (Continuum), Adolyn H. Dar (Superman & Lois), Brian Markinson (A Million Little Things) and David Cubitt (Virgin River); with showrunners Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern (Flashpoint, X Company) at the helm. Greenlit by CBC in early 2023, ALLEGIANCE will premiere on the free CBC Gem streaming service and CBC TV in winter 2024.
ALLEGIANCE focuses on identity and belonging, policing and politics, and finding truth within the heart of a flawed justice system. The drama stars Wraich as Sabrina Sohal, a star rookie police officer who must grapple with the limits of the justice system as she fights to exonerate her politician father Ajeet Sohal (Lobo). Sohal serves her diverse hometown of Surrey alongside Vince Brambilla (Colantoni), a veteran training officer who sees her potential but doesn’t always agree with her forward-thinking methods. ALLEGIANCE is the story of a young woman caught between her allegiance to her flag, to her badge, and to her family.
A CBC Original Series ALLEGIANCE is produced by Lark Productions in association with CBC, with NBCUniversal Global Distribution handling the distribution of the series globally. Showrunners Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis also serve as Executive Producers with Series Creator Anar Ali, alongside Lark Productions’ Erin Haskett, Nicole Mendes, David Valleau and Tex Antonucci.
The Writers Guild of Canada is pleased to announce that showrunner Dennis Heaton is the WGC’s new president, elected by WGC council to serve the 2,200 members of the Guild from May 1, 2018 to April 30, 2020. Dennis is an award-winning screenwriter based in Vancouver; currently showrunner of the upcoming Netflix show, The Order.
“We’re very excited to work with Dennis,†says WGC Executive Director Maureen Parker. “His showrunning experience will hold us in good stead as we go into Independent Production Agreement bargaining within the next year.â€
Dennis has been a member of the WGC since 2001 and has served on the Guild’s council since 2012. He was showrunner of the internationally renowned police procedural Motive (CTV/ABC seasons one and two), and has written for The Listener and Blood Ties, among other shows.
“It’s great to be the new WGC president,†says Heaton. “I’m looking forward to building on the Guild’s past successes, as well as facing the challenges ahead.â€
In addition to electing a new president, the Guild also has a new council, responsible for setting policies and overseeing Guild activities. The 2018-20 WGC council is made up of experienced screenwriter members from across the country: Vice President Andrew Wreggitt (Mayerthorpe), Treasurer Mark Ellis (X Company), Marsha Greene (Mary Kills People), Alex Levine (Orphan Black), Anne-Marie Perrotta (Max & Ruby), and Michael Amo (Pure).
The WGC’s new council, along with Executive Director Maureen Parker, is ready to move ahead in a time of industry flux, and to continue the Guild’s ongoing work on behalf of Canadian screenwriters.
When CBC’s gripping World War II spy drama X Company returns for its third and final season on Wed., Jan. 11, at 9 p.m., the lines between the show’s heroes and villains will be more blurred than ever.
“Aurora (Evelyne Brochu) and the other characters have to go deep into the territory of the enemy, and to pass for the enemy, they have to begin to adjust what they do to belong,” explains series co-creator Stephanie Morgenstern. “After a while, you start to lose track of what you’re doing that is you and what you’re doing in the role that you have to play, and it leaves a greater and greater stain on your soul.”
Season 2 ended with Tom’s (Dustin Milligan) gut-wrenching death at Dieppe and Franz Faber’s (Torben Liebrecht) decision to flip to the Allied side. Both events will cast long shadows over Season 3, as the depleted spy team tries to find the will to go on, and Sinclair (Hugh Dillon) tries to determine if Faber  — and his disillusioned wife, Sabine (Livia Matthes) — can be trusted.
“Is our enemy becoming us to infiltrate us?” asks co-creator Mark Ellis. “Or is he legitimately turned to try and do the right thing for the Allied cause? We won’t know until the last seconds.”
Meanwhile, all the shifting battle lines will take their toll on the team, says Morgenstern.
“This is a season where everything is put into question, whether it is right to follow orders, or whether it is right to trust the person who’s alongside you.”
Sitting down with TV-Eh in Toronto, Ellis and Morgenstern talk about the end of the series, what’s coming up for the spy team and the Fabers in Season 3, and their plans to produce more serialized, sophisticated television in the future.
Season 3 will be X Company’s final season. Do you feel you’ve had enough time to tell the story you wanted to tell? Stephanie Morgenstern: At the very beginning of the writing process, we knew this was our last season, and it was something that felt completely right to us.
Mark Ellis: There’s a thousand war stories you could tell, but there’s two things we wanted to be truthful. One is that our mantra from the beginning of the show has been the life expectancy of these people is 50 per cent in the field. You’re not supposed to live a lot of weeks, if you do live. We wanted to be truthful to that history. We also wanted to ground the show in a war story and not multiple potential stories. And what I mean by that is the first episode of X Company ends with the image of an elite Gestapo officer looking at the face of a Canadian spy, and the series as a whole is about the growing relationship between that German Gestapo officer and this group of five,  and reducing number, of spies. So the story ends in a meaningful, tragic, hopeful way in the last episode of Season 3, but it’s a story that comes full circle, and that’s something that we engineered.
The Season 3 theme is that sometimes to defeat the enemy, you have to become the enemy. What will that mean for the spy team?
ME: Aurora goes from having the occasional coffee date or a walk in the park with Sabine to having to live the cover of Helene Bauer full time. And she’s pulled apart from her teammates, and she takes a job working for a German office in Poland that doesn’t do very nice things. She becomes in many ways complicit with the Nazi machine so she can fulfill a bigger objective. What does that do to you when it screams against every fibre of your moral conscience? How does she cope with it? What will she do to fulfill that objective?
SM: I think we see the same struggle as well in Faber, who’s an extremely conflicted character, as you know, and in Duncan Sinclair as well, who comes into the field again to match wits with Franz Faber. In a way, these are two spymasters who have to begin a very intense chess game, where the pawns are people you’re close to and even strangers. We find that we’re kind of playing by the same playbook. If the enemy is going to make this kind of move, sometimes you have to make the same kind of move yourself.
ME: When Franz Faber comes to the team at the end of the second season and says, ‘What is it you want me to do?’ it feels like we’ve flipped him, he’s going to work for us, he’s going to turn to the Allied cause. In Season 3, we spend all season wondering if that’s true. Is our enemy becoming us to infiltrate us? Or is he legitimately turned to try and do the right thing for the Allied cause? We won’t know until the last seconds.
The Aurora/Faber/Sabine triangle was a highlight of Season 2, and Evelyne Brochu, Torben Liebrecht, and Livia Matthes play wonderfully off each other. Did you always plan to give that story so much time, or did your plans evolve based on the strength of your actors?
ME: I think that there are several levels to the choice to make Faber and Sabine more present in the storylines. One is that you realize that you have very extraordinary actors on your hands, and Torben Liebrecht, in particular, is an actor who is very ready to plumb complex emotional depths within himself. On another level, probably the most complex character we’ve created is the character of Franz Faber, because his love exists on different levels — his love of country, his love of his wife, his love of his son — and yet he’s corrupted each of these things in different ways to try and protect himself and try and protect his family. He’s a great way to be able to test our main characters and for us to be able to look at how Aurora copes with having to become the same kind of warrior that Franz Faber has had to become in Season 3.
SM: If you’re enjoying the Aurora/Sabine/Faber triangle, you’re going to have a really fun season. Because we see much more of [Sabine] and, in fact, we have fun with tracking her evolution from being in some ways an innocent, overprotected young woman who hasn’t even considered the depths that her country’s going to to take on the destiny it feels it deserves. She has a journey from that to a person who has been forced to face the brutal truths of what’s going on around her and in her name. We’re going to meet the character of her father, who is an extremely high-ranking Nazi, and with whom she has a very, very strong bond of allegiance with . . . And the relationship between her and Aurora has sparks all the way through it. They become very intimate frenemies all the way until the very last scene, which I think is going to take people by surprise.
It sounds like Sabine’s father is going to be a major player this season.Â
ME: Yeah, the real wild card in Season 3 is Obergruppenführer Ulrich Schmidt, who’s played by Morten Suurballe, the lead in the original Danish version of The Killing. He’s an extraordinary Danish actor, and we had to find an actor that could stand up to Torben Liebrecht, who is such a presence and a character who has at turns been villainous and very complex at the same time.
SM: [Schmidt] is a fully, fully committed Nazi. He believes fully in the entitlement of Germany to rule the world. But at the same time, he has another side as well, which is he’ll do anything for Sabine, his little protected child. He dotes on her, he does what he thinks is best, and it’s always out of a sense of love. This is the contradiction in him, that we see a truly dark side, which I think is very faithful to the beliefs, the literal Nazi beliefs, about human superiority over other humans.
Tom was killed in the Season 2 finale. How will everyone be coping with his loss in the Season 3 premiere?Â
ME: I think we saw Neil (Warren Brown) and Harry (Connor Price) stand on the beach in Dieppe more or less exploding with the grief of Tom, and we were seeing Harry spiraling and becoming this much darker version of himself. Neil has lost his best friend. These two men, who are each in very different and desperate places, wind up turning towards each a little bit more, so we see a gathering bond between Harry and Neil. We see a friendship emerge. They’re both changed. I think we see a turn towards optimism for Harry, and we see a change in Neil’s mantra as well. He’s gone from being in Season 1 a soldier who wants to kill every German to seeing that Germans have a conscience on occasion, and I think he’s evolved to a point to where he’s no longer fighting a war based on ideology or trying to avenge people that he’s lost. He’s trying to protect everyone that still remains.
Is there anything else you can tease about Season 3?Â
ME: There’s room for levity this season as well. And one of the things we talked about with the writers in the beginning when breaking the season was, ‘What haven’t we seen?’ And one of the things that we hadn’t seen is Alfred smile. We’ve never seen him have a normal moment, a happy time. And the actor, Jack Laskey, is such a warm, open-hearted, funny, charming man, and we wanted to be able to find opportunities for Alfred to exist outside of the constant sturm und drang of synesthesia and memory. Yes, he still fights his memory, and the burden of his memory continues to grow, but he also gets to feel what it’s like to kiss a girl a time or two. [laughs] Not to spoil too much.
SM: It’s funny, because when Aurora goes undercover, she has to do some of the darkest deeds she’s ever done, and when Alfred goes undercover as a Polish civilian, he gets a little, tiny microcosm of what it is to be normal, which he has never experienced. He’s never had a normal family around a table. He’s never had a simple meal with people having a laugh and playing games after dinner. So we get to see a lighter side of him as well.
Stephanie, directing has been a longtime goal of yours, and you directed the final two episodes of Season 3. Was the experience all you hoped it would be? SM: I’m too close to the content to be able to answer that objectively. It was an extraordinary, terrifying, satisfying experience. It felt like everything [came together], like I’ve been acting since I was 12, and I’ve been writing for less than that, showrunning for less than that. So all of these experiences that have sort of piled onto each other have each given me a different angle on how to tell a story, from the first inception of Alfred and Aurora to the final the culmination of what their journey is. And directing felt like everything converging at once, everything paying off at once. Being able to talk to actors in a language they understand and being able to access the story we started developing so many months ago in a way that a guest director might not have been able to, it felt right. It felt satisfying. It felt…
ME: Scary?
SM: [laughs] Absolutely scary. Yeah! But I’m very proud of the work I was able to do surrounded by this incredible team. The actors gave so generously, and also the First AD (assistant director) and the DOP (director of photography) both became my water wings on the right and left side as I was thrown into the deep end. They kept me afloat. And this was based also on working with these folks for three years and knowing that they had my trust and I had their trust. There could not have possibly been a more supportive stage for me to take this first step onto in the final two episodes.
The idea for X Company evolved from your 2001 short film, Remembrance. How does it feel to have completed the project 15 years later?Â
ME: It feels like we’re better equipped to tell that story than we would have been 15 years ago. We developed a feature film script, and every once in a while it mistakenly falls out of a drawer, and we have to avert our eyes from how horrible it is. So we’re very glad that we’ve been able to mature into telling a fairly complex serialized storyline that we wouldn’t have been able to in years past.
Now I have a real sense of, ‘What’s next?’ When you have something that’s been part of your life for 15 years, and you brought that story to its conclusion — that was the last drawer script that we had! [laughs] So it makes the future a little scary, but it makes it also liberating, and it feels good to know there’s a blank canvas waiting to be painted on again.
Do you have any idea what you’d like to paint on that canvas? After the back-to-back successes of Flashpoint and X Company, I know a lot of people are very interested in what you have planned next.
ME: I think we’re interested in shorter format serialized storytelling as our next project. So possibly something like a six-episode series, or four to eight. But there’s some really rich storytelling that can be done these days. There’s an appetite for challenging storylines, and we’d like to continue to evolve as the kind of writers who cut their teeth in very episodic procedural television to something that’s a little more serialized and sophisticated.
One last question about X Company. The show’s historical lessons are, unfortunately, still very relevant today. Is there anything in particular you hope viewers take away from the series, given the current political environment in the U.S. and elsewhere?Â
ME: Hitler used to say, “Let’s make Germany great again.†It’s too easy to draw direct parallels between that regime and what’s happening in the United States, but I think you could watch X Company, and even if you just look past the parallels that exist now in ideology, if you look past the fact that here’s a man who in World War II rose to power because he nurtured a climate of fear,  of distrusting of your neighbor…
SM: Of scapegoating, hatred, how different we are from each other, how some people are naturally better than other people.
ME: You could look past all those things and just look at the images on the screen, and you will see images in Season 3 of X Company that you can also see on social media right now, on Facebook, Twitter, CNN. It’s disturbing. But I also hope that people can look at what our main characters are doing, which is they are getting involved, they’re getting invested, they’re standing up, they’re addressing injustice — they’re resisting.
