The Borderline is a Crave Original, with the remaining five episodes after the pilot only available to watch on the streaming service.Supplied
That Crave is no longer the future, but the present, of Bell Media is clear in its big Super Bowl gambit this weekend.
After the game is over, Bell’s linear CTV network will air the first episode of a new homegrown crime drama called The Borderline as the lead-out program.
This is a highly rated, extremely coveted time slot recently used to promote CTV’s American acquisitions such as Rescue: HI-Surf (a Fox action drama later cancelled after its first season) in 2025; and Tracker (which was also CBS’s Super Bowl lead-out show) in 2024.
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The Borderline is not just a Canadian show, however, it’s a Crave Original – and the remaining five episodes will only be available to watch, on subsequent Fridays, on that streaming service.
This is the latest smart strategic move from Bell Media to shore up its leading Canadian streamer and boost its subscription base.
It’s only a shame that the show in question isn’t a killer comedy like Letterkenny – which CTV used the Super Bowl to promote in 2016 and 2017 – or more representative of the higher echelon of Canadian drama that we’ve started to find on Crave.
The Borderline raised hopes with its initial promos, but the Graeme Stewart-created show feels off, writes J. Kelly Nestruck.Supplied
The Borderline is not up there with Heated Rivalry or Empathie – or even its up-and-down but underrated Leonard Cohen series, So Long Marianne.
Indeed, next to the streamer’s acquired international HBO fare with depth and complexity in the crime genre, from Task to Get Millie Black, this six-part series will look borderline bad.
The Borderline raised hopes of being prestige with its initial promos – but the Graeme Stewart-created show feels a bit off from its opening scene where a couple of goons with a body in the trunk of their car cackle and crack a beer while driving across the US-Canada border.
They are first of a series of poorly written, cartoonish henchmen portrayed by actors who overdo it or speak in funny voices – some of whom are in the employ of a British big baddie named May played by a strangely brittle Minnie Driver.
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Set in the Thousand Islands area near its bridge border crossing, The Borderline centres on police officer Henry Roland (Stephen Amell), who, in the middle of a family birthday party, is called to the scene of the roadside death of the two aforementioned goons.
There Henry encounters a dogged border officer named Erica (Tamara Podemski) who wants to call in reinforcements to start a search for whoever was in the trunk of the car.
When Henry finds a Jackie Robinson baseball card on site, however, it makes him realize that Tommy (Transplant’s Hamza Haq), an old childhood friend of his, was involved. He starts running interference on the investigation.
The rest of the pilot sets up the wider world of the show. Local teen Ruby (Katia Edith Wood) pulls comic-bookstore guy Miles (Jeremy Watson) into an easy-money scheme involving drugs that, of course, turns out to be anything by easy and intersects with May’s criminal crew.
The primary problem with The Borderline is its unclear tone.
The Borderline is hampered by its unclear tone, writes J. Kelly Nestruck.Supplied
The brightly shot series is definitely not Nordic noir – but gives early signals that we’re perhaps not far from Fargo black-comedy territory with a quirky selection of cars such as a Crown Victoria and an old VW Beetle.
But scenes that seem intended to comically macabre instead come off as cringey. One highly telegraphed death only elicits an eyeroll due to the clunky dialogue and direction.
It’s hard to tell what to make of Henry as played by Amell, one of these blandly handsome actors from a CW show (Arrow) that Canadian producers love to bring back home; he’s neither charmingly disreputable, nor does he deliver a compelling sense of inner conflict as the crooked cop.
Podemski, often the standout supporting actor playing in series from Saint-Pierre to Murderbot, is so again here, while Hamza is an intriguing presence – but his character is barely conscious in the first two episodes. (That’s how many were available to screen even though the entire show has already been released in New Zealand).
The rest of the performances, meanwhile, are so inconsistent – melodramatic to flat – that the blame must primarily lie with director Rob Budreau, who also has trouble tying together drone shots of the St Lawrence with the rest of the show’s settings to give a convincing sense of place.
Perhaps Shaftsbury, the company behind such campy Canadian cop TV as Murdoch Mysteries and Hudson and Rex, was not the best choice to try to produce more serious fare.
God knows Canada needs crime and cop shows with more substance to them than the mostly middle-of-the-road procedurals our networks churn out that seem have no greater artistic ambition than to be sold to the CW in the United States.
It’s been much too long since CTV’s four-season run of Cardinal, based on Giles Blunt’s series – and much of our best IP has since been bought up and squandered by Americans. (Amazon’s Prime Video messed up twice – first with the single season Three Pines based on Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache novels; and then by turning the great maple syrup heist into the culturally confused flop The Sticky.)
I’m glad to see Crave giving Canadian crime a go – but they have got to find the right collaborators to pull it off and not dilute the increasingly powerful Crave Original brand.