From Kate Taylor:
Those British TV shows in which Miss Marple solves the case or Inspector Morse fingers the wrong guy are often known as cozies. Even when set in the present, they are nostalgic productions with bucolic settings from which a few not-too-gruesome examples of violence are eventually expelled. Gore, corruption and ambivalence rarely intrude. Continue reading.
From Bill Brioux:
The week in Canada: Oct. 20 – 26
The 8 o’clock hour went 299,000 2 Broke and 181,000 for Vancouver-based Package Deal. Murdoch Mysteries arrested 906,000 overnight viewers on CBC. Rookie drama Strange Empire drew 283,000 at 9 p.m. Continue reading.
Murdoch Mysteries, CBC – “Holy Matrimony Murdoch”
As their wedding day approaches, Murdoch and Ogden intervene in the trial of a woman accused of killing her husband.
Strange Empire, CBC – “Lonely Heartsâ€
With Jeremiah missing and bounty hunters on her trail, Kat meets a medicine woman who takes her on a journey to help her search.
Package Deal, City – “The Imperfect Stormâ€
Ryan (Jay Malone) befriends his hero, local celebrity weatherman, Storm Chambers (guest star Jason Priestley, Call Me Fitz). When Storm turns out to be an annoying jerk, Ryan is left looking for ways to shake this new friendship. Meanwhile, Danny (Randal Edwards) uses diplomacy to prevent a robbery at the tea shop and Sheldon’s (Harland Williams) attempt to date an animal shelter employee backfires when he falls in love with “someone†else – a dog.
Strange Empire creator Laurie Finstad Knizhnik mentioned her doubts in finding an attractive young actor with the intelligence, gravitas and humanity to play Rebecca Blithley, and the miracle of finding Melissa Farman for the role.
Tonight’s  episode reveals more about the strange doctor and allows Farman to dig even deeper into the character. I interviewed her last month inside the Blithely’s “crib” on the Aldergrove, BC set that she describes as being like ” theatre troupe in the woods.”
Tell me more about your character.Â
My character is a surgeon in training. She’s a prodigy. She was raised between an asylum and a laboratory as an experiment to test female scientific ability. So she’s very much an outsider in terms of Victorian society but also in terms of this new wild west where she’s going to have to discover what autonomy and freedom mean to her for the first time ever.
What was your reaction to getting this role?Â
I felt very very honoured and I still do. I felt very excited to be part of a show that I think is a brave step for CBC in terms of showing such strong storytelling and so much integrity in representing people whom history often forgets.
Everyone felt a great responsibility to show the realities of the hardships people had to undergo and overcome to build better lives for themselves and their families, because westerns are very much our myths of original as a nation. They take civilization as a goal but they begin in bloodshed as we develop mainstream morality. We’re looking at the origins of society in no man’s land, a land that’s going to be fought over by anyone and everyone. So there’s a great sense of excitement and responsibility to show this clash of morality as people choose to live and die as individuals but also as a society.
That’s a very long answer [laughs].
It’s a very dark show, isn’t it? How does that affect you, to immerse yourself into that dark territory?
It’s definitely dark and edgy. Were showing people in very extreme circumstances. People who are lost in the middle ground between the expectations of a paradise promised – that’s why people came to the west, people who had nothing and came looking for opportunity – and instead they’re confronted by the reality of a paradise that has not yet come, perhaps a paradise that is lost. The conditions are very adverse and they’re going to have to reinvent themselves in order to survive.
So yes it’s very dark but I think in many ways there’s some light to it because it’s about people who are very lost but have the opportunity to build bonds within themselves and with each other, to build some kind of hope of community.
Behind the scenes we’re all supportive of each other and it’s an environment of support and commitment to tell the story with integrity.
How did you get into acting?
My mother threw me on stage as a child because I was very shy and she believed in shock therapy. It was a very safe environment so she thought it would be a good sanctuary for me to become less shy with people, which it absolutely was. I gravitated to theater as a place I could discover facets of myself without ramifications.
I’d joined a troupe and loved it, and then I took a year off after high school. I was going to go to university on the east coast in Pennsylvania, but I went to LA and did this acting program. I wanted to take this year to explore that before I went to university. My current manager found me in that class and convinced me to go on some auditions, and I did and I got the jobs.
So I was very very fortunate and that made my mind up right away. I went to university in California, I went to USC, so I pursued my academics while at the same time pursuing my career.
What did you study?
I was a double major in political science and literature. I felt it was a very good balance. First of all university gave me structure which I think was very important for me, plus I was studying power dynamics and storytelling . I was inspired by what I was learning in school . I love writing, I love debates, and that fed me.
My interest in political science and literature completely fuels my work as an actor as well. I grew up in a family that loved art, I grew up in Paris (her mother is Canadian and father is French) and I’ve always gone to a lot of exhibits. My mother is in the art world. It’s always fun to look at different mediums of understanding to fuel your own craft and creativity.
There was never really a shift for me between academia and art. It was all about studying human beings. You just bring it to a visceral level when you’re acting. I did Game Change, the HBO film about the McCain-Palin ticket, and I was studying Game Change in my class.
Can you describe Rebecca’s relationship to the other characters?
In terms of the three female leads they’re all on the outskirts of society and I don’t think they’d have ever met if they weren’t on this border frontier town. We have this atypical doctor, a wounded trailblazer in Kat, and a madame in Isabelle. They never would have met and here they are.
Their dynamic is constantly changing. At times they bond and at times they antagonize based on what they need to do in order to survive.
Rebecca is always a bit of an outsider. Certain people understand her and others don’t. You kind of have to get her.
What did it take for you to get her?
What I understood from her was she’s a character that very much struggles between what she wanted and what she was. I saw her as a blank slate in terms of human interactions. Because she was raised in a laboratory and she was raised as an experiment she never got a sense of her own humanity.
She’s come out to this wild west where she’s seen types of people she’s never seen before. That’s what the wild west was, it was this concentration of diversity, of people coming from nothing with everything to win, with no laws to stop them but no laws to protect them. They’re disenfranchised. That’s what our show is about, and I think with Rebecca she suddenly realizes everything she has been brought up to be gets in the way of everything she wants, which is connection. I was very drawn to that internal struggle she has to battle.
Strange Empire airs tonight on CBC, and episodes are available online.Â
Strange Empire is a land of outsiders thrown together by harrowing circumstance, scrabbling on a land where they seek to make outsiders of those who lived there first.
There’s Isabelle, the former whore who fights for respectability far beyond the boundaries of respectability, and longs for a world beyond her own (and who is, as Jared says, “a little brown” herself).
Slotter, an ambitious man who didn’t merit the paternal given name or the family business, who struggles with — and often loses to — his inner demons. He confesses to getting his men drunk and rousing them to blood, tells Isabelle he’s not the man she thinks, but his confession seems to stop short of admitting he ordered the men to kill.
Rebecca, for whom any social encounter is like a strange new world, unmoored after the death of the woman who raised her and hasty marriage to the man who raised her.
Among the other supporting characters who are coming into their own is Ling, the “Celestial” and son of a concubine who finds himself the lover of a madame, and Marshal Caleb Mercredi, who is ostracized for his Indian blood and makes a powerful enemy by vowing to bring Slotter to justice.
And then there’s ferocious yet vulnerable Kat, who has fashioned her own instant family after the loss of her original family, and who belongs to neither the white nor the Indian societies. With Cree versus Blackfoot blood she and Marshal Mercredi should be enemies, but in this new world all Indians are lumped together as the “other”, turning potential enemies into allies.
Given how freely the show publicity shared that Kat Loving is Metis, and that an early encounter assumed it, it didn’t occur to me that some of the characters weren’t aware. That explains a few things in past episodes, though it felt jarring in this one when the Janestown women felt betrayed at her deception. Mrs. Briggs in particular, who’s sold her soul to the Slotters in exchange for shelter and supplies, turns on Kat for being “one of them”, while Rebecca reveals herself again to be Kat’s most devoted and awkward ally.
“The Whiskey Trader” opens with an ominous shot of a hanging doll and introduces another outsider, the titular character played by a seedy Ian Tracey. He takes advantage of the lawlessness north of the border to sell “Indian whiskey” — aka strychnine — which incites violence (and not just in Indians) and allows him to serve up two  Blackfoot to Slotter as scapegoats to hang for the massacre his men carried out.
Isabelle, whose impressive deviousness seems more cool and calculated than her husband’s, frames Jared, who threatens to reveal her infidelity with Cornelius Slotter. With twisted loyalty, Jared balks from spilling the news that could destroy the Captain and tells him instead that Isabelle lusts after Ling.
Drunk on the whiskey, his attempt to hang Kat about to be foiled by Slotter, Jared begins again to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear and is shot dead for his near-candour. Hos before bros, dude. With the Indians escaped and Janestown folks not buying their guilt, the Slotters bring in Jared’s box full of items plundered from the slain men. A dead man makes an ideal scapegoat after all.
Rooted in history, Strange Empire plays with heightened language and surreal elements that are combining into a strange and wonderful adventure. How guilty is Slotter, and how far can he trust Isabelle’s devotion? How long can Isabelle hold her world together through cunning? Why does Slotter want Kat alive, though he can kill innocent Indians and his own man? How many more times can Kat swap herself for her girls before saying you know what, just take them? When will Thomas realize his wife is a far better doctor than he is?
The episode ends with the marshal killing the whiskey trader and blowing up his dynamite-filled wagon. It  can only hint at explosiveness to come.
