Tonight marks writer Chris Haddock’s return to CBC with Vancouver-set spy series The Romeo Section, and fans of his Intelligence in particular, and of intelligent drama in general, will be rewarded with a nuanced, layered story that slowly sinks you into its world of lies, corruption and murder.

Andrew Airlie plays professor Wolfgang McGee, who teaches and studies the history of the opium trade while covertly infiltrating today’s heroin trade as an independent contractor to the Canadian intelligence community. All the deniability, none of the accountability as his handler Al (Haddock favourite Eugene Lipinski) points out to his bosses. 

McGee oversees Romeo and Juliet spies — informants engaged in intimate relations with intelligence targets — and apparently was one himself. None of this is very clearly explained in the first two episodes, though it becomes clear enough. It’s not completely clear how all the storylines are connected, though McGee and his work seems to be the connection. It’s not always clear when characters are telling the truth, or what their silences mean, but that’s part of the allure. 

You will be confused. Hold on and let the story unfold. I wasn’t sold at the start of the episode, especially when, excited to get the screeners, I first tried to watch while multitasking. I was, in fact, annoyed that we seem to need an intelligence briefing to understand the basic premise of the show. But by the end, and when watching with attention, I was nearly as hooked as one character is on cocaine. 

The knowledge you need comes as you need it. The pleasures, big and small, of story and character paying off in unexpected ways continues throughout. Stick with the first episode and I suspect you’ll be craving more. 

Some intel on the plot, though, is that McGee manages — coerces? — jittery informant Rufus (Juan Riedinger), who struggles to keep up with his target and lover Dee (Stephanie Bennett), in all her partying, murderous intensity. She’s married to drug lord Vince and Rufus is caught between her ambitions and his own.

Meanwhile mysterious Eva (Sophia Lauchlin Hirt) is a cleaner at a church where Mexican national Miguel (Mathias Retamal) is seeking sanctuary.

And McGee flirts with fellow professor Lily Song (Jemmy Chen), whose interest in his decade-long work-in-progress on opium, and her connection to the Chinese art and diplomatic scene, seems suspicious to me only because everything in this show is not quite what it seems. 

Somewhere in the plot mix is the pending regime change of a Chinese Triad operating out of Vancouver, and an intelligence leak that has McGee paranoid — or realizing — that he’s about to be pushed out.

In some ways McGee is like the soft-spoken House of spies, and I don’t say that only because I can’t get over that Airlie was orange guy in the House pilot (though, mostly).  Rumpled, unshaven, world-weary and witty, his Wolfgang McGee is the central character who reels you in to the series and acts as glue to hold the different worlds together. 

McGee himself seems to float a little above the action, intricately involved in a variety of heavy dealings while maintaining an ironic detachment that seems part self-preservation, part semi-sociopathic, and part just part of the job.

Because this is a Haddock show there’s a lot of meat on those story bones, making me yearn for a philosophical discussion on the meaning of sanctuary and the places we can hide ourselves, for example, or know more about the connections between the historic opium trade and today’s drug wars. Yes, I’d like to read McGee’s opus too. 

The show is also peppered with hilarious lines you have to pay attention to catch in McGee’s deadpan delivery, and a sense of lightness in the exchanges between McGee and Al or McGee and Lily, for example.

I have to love a show that has an exchange where a junior colleague laments that she gets bored to tears of everything she thinks of writing about, with McGee responding: “I believe the French have a word for that.” “They would, wouldn’t they?” is the reply as the conversation moves on. Another show would feel the need to spell the word out but Haddock trusts his audience, and has faith his audience will trust him.

He has an ear for naturalistic dialogue, even when in black and white an exchange like that sounds very writerly — and it is spoken between two professors talking about writing after all. Some scenes sound so natural they almost feel improvised, yet the dialogue and plotting is tight enough to make me believe in the firm hand of the writers.

Haddock is working here with regular collaborators like director Stephen Surjik, producers Laura Lightbown and Arvi Liimatainen, and composer Schaun Tozer, along with his “writers room so small it’s a writers closet” of Jesse McKeown and Stephen Miller.

But no, Haddock is not going to save the CBC. His previous and similarly espionage-themed series Intelligence was cancelled after two seasons for low ratings. I hope but do not expect The Romeo Section will get more eyeballs, and I hope and do expect that CBC has lower ratings expectations for Romeo than, say, Murdoch Mysteries or Romeo’s wildly incompatible lead-in Dragons’ Den. If you make cable-like shows, you must expect cable-like ratings, right?

Regardless, all viewers should care about is that The Romeo Section is an ultimately engrossing series that rewards an engaged audience. And that Wolfgang McGee is a character you’ll want to get to know as far as he’ll let you.

If a show was shot in Vancouver, there’s a strong chance Andrew Airlie has appeared in it. The Glasgow-born, Toronto-educated, Vancouver-resident Airlie has starred in Reaper, Defying Gravity, Cedar Cove, The Killing, and Chris Haddock’s Intelligence, among many others. And he’ll always also be orange guy from the House pilot to me.

His starring role in Haddock’s CBC homecoming, the Vancouver-set spy drama The Romeo Section, feels like watching an actor at home in his setting as well as in his character Wolfgang McGee’s rumpled linen suit.

I talked with Airlie on location during the last day of filming the first episode, at the beautiful St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church downtown. He revealed we had our own spy-like connection: he’d learned of a potential new Haddock show on CBC from an anonymous tip I’d shared on the TV, eh? Twitter account.

“The next day I bumped into Chris on the beach walking our dogs and said ‘I hear you’re coming back to CBC.’ He asked ‘where’d you’d hear that?’ so I said ‘I have my sources.’ He said ‘no, seriously, where’d you hear that?’ I said I read it on TV, eh? and he asked me to keep it under my hat because it wasn’t official yet.”

My set visit was embargoed so it’s only now I can reveal my own secret: I got a sneak peek of the scene in Wednesday’s premiere where Wolfgang strides wordlessly down the aisle of the church, a woman cleaning in the foreground. Spoiler alert.

Airlie did spill a few more details of the intricately serialized show. My take is that McGee is like the Indiana Jones of Canadian spies, minus the running from boulders – professor by day, independent intelligence contractor by other parts of the day.

“He was an operative in the Canadian intelligence community earlier in his career, but now he’s officially off the books. The value and the problem for the government there is they’ve got deniability if I mess up – it means I’m going to be wearing it – but it also means I have no accountability to them.”

The first episode doesn’t spell things out for the audience, but the premise of the show is promoted as McGee managing “Romeo and Juliet spies” — informants engaged in intimate relations with intelligence targets.

“There are a few different worlds set up in the first episode,” Airlie explained. “You can see this first episode is setting the table for what’s going on in these worlds, and it looks like this guy Wolfgang is going to navigate through most of them but you’re not sure how, and it’s going to be interesting to see what exactly is he doing.“

“You should assume that anyone could be lying at any moment. So in this world, who do you trust and how much do you trust them?” Airlie added. “Wolfgang especially is attuned to that. He’ll say and do what’s necessary to achieve his objectives. There’s a lot of lying going on.”

Creator Haddock echoed that sentiment. “Thematically, what lies underneath it all is the duplicity of the human animal and society at large, nations at large. It’s the fronts everybody puts up, the false selves and the false organizations. Everybody’s lying. People find that delightful, somehow.”

The Vancouver on display in The Romeo Section so far looks beautiful, with fewer gritty corners than Intelligence, more gleaming buildings and scenic backdrops, but there’s a similar underbelly slowly being revealed in the spy drama.

Airlie sees an importance in the show’s unabashedly Vancouver setting. “I think it’s a shame there hasn’t been more of an aspiration to set Canadian series definably in Canada,” he said. “19-2 is doing a tremendous job of that right now, and I’m proud to be part of something that’s Canadian set and particularly Vancouver set.”

The scenes filmed in the church involve a storyline in the first episode about a foreign national seeking sanctuary in Canada. “Our lead is asked by his contact in CSIS to check the guy’s background to see if he’s really who he says he is,” explained Haddock. “Is he worthwhile developing as an intelligence asset or is it more worthwhile to send him back to where he came from, or to the US? We get to discuss the theme of sanctuary, which is a worldwide theme right now with the forced immigration of peoples.”

Airlie is a writer himself, occasionally co-writing with Sliding Doors writer/director Peter Howitt, and the team has even met with Haddock for writing advice. “He’s very generous — he supports newbies and those of us who have been doing it for a while,” said Airlie. “I can’t speak highly enough of him.”

He was contracted to Reaper when Intelligence was filming its second season and says he was “gutted” not to continue with that Haddock series to the end. “I’ve been stopped more about Intelligence more than anything else I’ve done – well, up until Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s remarkable how many people have stopped me about Intelligence relative to all the other stuff I’ve done that was bigger and better promoted. Canadians really connected to that show.”

Airlie is gracious about my continued association of him with House, too, despite it being a one-shot guest appearance. “I could tell when they were making that pilot it was going to go big,” he said. “The writing was extraordinary, and Hugh (Laurie) was great, as was Lisa (Edelstein).” Coincidentally, Airlie’s son has acted with both Laurie, in scenes that were cut from Tomorrowland, and Edelstein, with a recurring role in her Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce.

The Romeo Section showcases Airlie’s talents far more than that memorable but brief role, however. Both Airlie and Haddock have confidence that CBC audiences will gravitate toward it, and CBC has given them every reason to believe the broadcaster has confidence in the show.

Haddock mentioned the stillness of the camera as a stylistic choice allowing a focus on “the characters and the looks between them and the things left unsaid.” Airlie thinks the series succeeds at being simply “a good story well told.”

“We’re not doing a series to compete with Marvel and DC. God love ‘em and if you’re looking for that kind of entertainment they’re well done and they’re on every other night of the week, so you’ll have no problem finding them,” Airlie added. “But that’s not what we’re making. I think we’re making a series for an audience that’s underserved on network TV.”

The Romeo Section airs Wednesdays on CBC.