Slow-boil mystery shows some promise

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This article was published 18/02/2017 (3506 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Another small town. Another rogue detective. Another missing kid.

These are dangerous days on television’s Canadian-cop-show landscape.

But “dangerous” doesn’t necessarily equate with “bad,” because there’s absolutely nothing negative about the arrival of several new homegrown dramas — police-themed or otherwise — on the airwaves at the same time.

CTV recently unveiled Cardinal, a simmering new six-part thriller based on a novel by Canadian author Giles Blunt; this week, CBC enters the crime-drama fray with Bellevue, a complex eight-part series that stars Winnipeg-born actress Anna Paquin (True Blood), Downton Abbey alumnus Allen Leech and veteran Canadian performer Shawn Doyle (Fargo, House of Cards).

Bellevue, which premières Monday at 9 p.m. on CBC, was shot in and around Montreal, but has the look and feel of a small-town story. The central character is Det. Annie Ryder (Paquin), who — as all cop-show protagonists seemingly must be these days — is slightly damaged goods and something of a rogue operator within her department.

The series opener begins with a drug-bust sequence that puts Annie in an undercover role that demonstrates just how far — by her boss’s account, perhaps too far — she’s willing to go in order to catch the bad guys. Shortly after that character trait is established, Annie and her squadmates find themselves scrambling to investigate the disappearance of a teen who seems to have been leading a double life — well known around town as the best player on the local hockey team, he had also been struggling with his sexual identity and exploring the possibilities of gender transition.

In Bellevue (highway-sign slogan: Where the sun always rises), everybody seems to know everyone else’s business, but there’s a pervasive level of mind-your-own-business secrecy in the decidedly blue-collar town that still makes investigating a tough grind. And for Annie, whose father was a cop who was killed on the job when she was a kid, every case stirs up ghosts.

This time, however, the past factors into the case as more than just faded memories and middle-of-the-night realizations.

As Annie gathers clues and tries to figure out the how and why of the missing boy’s disappearance, she’s suddenly confronted with actual physical items — a scribbled note here, a perplexing riddle there, a long-lost porcelain figure in a very unlikely location — that are connected to her own childhood.

As her boss, police chief Peter Welland (Doyle), pushes her to stay focused on the current investigation, Annie’s obsession with the case starts to take over her personal life, which includes a teenage daughter and an ex-husband, Eddie (Leech).

The opening episode of Bellevue is a slow-moving affair that works hard at establishing its central core of characters but doesn’t offer much in the way of actual plot advancement, which could prove to be a challenge when it comes to convincing some viewers to return for the remaining seven instalments.

But the cast — particularly Paquin and Leech — does a pretty decent job of making Bellevue’s characters interesting, which balances against the slow pace of the story enough to make it worth sticking around to observe the fine acting until the action picks up (hopefully) in Episode 2.

Dastardly (but intriguing) deeds abound these days in fictional north-of-the-border towns. That’s bad news for make-believe victims, but rather good news for viewers of Canadian TV.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @BradOswald