This is how it goes - every now and then I leave the relative safety of an office in Toronto and venture forth to other cities where television is made. Vancouver is usually a good bet, though never as much fun as Halifax or St. John's. Sorry, Vancouver.
See, in other places people seem a tad pleased that somebody has turned up to pay attention. Here, it's more like, "What's he doing here?" All suspicious. Maybe that's just me.
Anyways, first stop is the Burnaby set of Endgame, a new Canadian drama series that will air next spring on Showcase. There's even a Doyle involved, which is always promising, I find.
Here's the deal: In Endgame, a Russian chess master, Arkady Balagan (Shawn Doyle), lives in a hotel in Vancouver and uses his tip-top skills of strategic thinking to solve crimes. He's stuck there because his fiancée has been killed and, as a result, he's overcome with a case of agoraphobia - can't, won't leave his penthouse suite. Must pay the bills though, so he ends up solving crimes for a fee. Meanwhile, his real goal is to get to the bottom of his fiancée's murder.
Thus, the show revolves around the brilliant, possibly mad, certainly grieving Arkady and the hotel. The character is officially described as "witty, eccentric, arrogant and playful." One imagines a variation on the guy in The Mentalist, except that this guy has to stay in a hotel all the time. It seems as if it will be a light but cheerful show, an alternative to all those methodically grim detective procedurals about terrifying serial killers roaming the world.
But could the limited setting of a hotel be a drawback? Not so, I am informed by director/producer David Frazee ( Intelligence, Da Vinci's Inquest), who tells me the limits create possibilities. "It's a detective story. It's about a guy who solves puzzles," he says. "Yes, it's fairly light but with a good emotional tone. But the key element is we go inside Arkady Balagan's brain and watch him re-enact things inside his head. Actually, he's not inside the hotel, he's everywhere. The 'Balagan brain moments,' as we call them, are the highlights. He's given a mystery, and we see him run through the situation from several angles."
A short time later, I'm watching a scene from Endgame being filmed. From a distant corner of the set - an eye-popping recreation of the lobby area of a luxury hotel - I see the Arkady Balagan character, dressed in a very fancy bathrobe, irritate the heck out of the guy who runs the variety store in the hotel lobby. I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but I'm getting the picture. Balagan is a charismatic, all-ego dude who plays close attention to everything happening around him in order to do his crime-solving thing.
A scene is filmed over and over, with some characters obliged to freeze in place and then begin moving again. While the director for the episode, Rachel Talalay, roams around telling actors where to stand, Shawn Doyle breezes off the set to shake hands and welcome me, Doyle-to-Doyle. This is a signal of some sort, as Talalay then stops to tell me she likes my column, even when I've been mean to her. I can only explain that I have no memory of being mean.
After watching scenes staged this way and that for the camera angles - the unglamorous part of making TV - I meet up with Avrum Jacobson, executive producer and creator of Endgame. Sitting in an office, he explains he'd worked on the ReGenesis series for some years when he was approached about another show - one he says was merely a rip-off of ReGenesis. Not impressed with this idea, he came up with his own concept, a show about a chess master stuck in a room who uses his wits to help others solve mysteries.
At a meeting in which he suddenly realized he was expected to pitch an idea for a show, he blurted out his concept. Others liked it, "But a friend said to me, 'You can't have him stay in the hotel all the time.' So that caused me to come up with the idea of letting him outside in his own imagination."
I put it to him that the show seems light and perhaps it's part of a trend - an antidote to the style of the CSI franchise. "I wasn't conscious of that, "Jacobson says. "I don't think drama and comedy are such separate things."
Now, to me, this sounds like an interesting train of thought. I ask Jacobson what kind of TV shows he enjoys personally and admires professionally.
It doesn't go over well. "What kind of interview is this?" he asks, a tad annoyed. I explain I'm asking him about his tastes because they might illuminate the show he's created and is producing. "Well, is your story about me or the show?" he asks, still a bit annoyed. I explain he doesn't have to answer any question he doesn't want to answer. We wind it up after that. It's that Vancouver suspicion thing, I reckon.
Eventually, there's break in filming, and I'm taken to Shawn Doyle's trailer. The time allowed is just a few minutes. Doyle - who will also be seen playing Sir John A. Macdonald on CBC next year in a production still wrapped in mystery - is most gracious. Thanks me for coming. "I passed on this show, originally," he says. "The idea of being this character who was inside a room, for 13 weeks, didn't appeal to me. But then I understood the importance of Balagan's brain moments, the way he goes outside, into the world, in his head."
Doyle has a distinguished career, playing vital, often dark characters on 24 and Lost, and he's also been a regular on HBO's Big Love. He was fabulous in the movie Grown Up Movie Star, a film he co-produced with director and fellow Newfoundlander Adriana Maggs. He says a key ingredient in the Arkady Balagan role for him was the challenge of doing a character who must surprise himself and therefore the actor playing him.
"He's a very interesting character to play. The crux of the character is he's been through this trauma and he needs to run away from it. Everything is about fleshing out this character. It's a complex show, the sets are complex, the stories are complex and there is no limit to the character, once we go inside his brain.
"Of course it's also a wide-appeal show. It has a self-contained mystery in each episode. And it's a character piece. It's fun for me to play a brat, and that's what Balagan is."
A short time later, I'm pacing at the gate to Bridge Studios, waiting for a taxi. It's seriously cold in Vancouver, and I pass the time figuring out how to describe this visit. You've seen the result - Endgame looks like fun. Everybody involved is terrific, and there was only one fleeting incident of that Vancouver suspicion.
I'm sticking around for another day.