Made-in-Canada television dramas

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This article was published 25/01/2017 (3406 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s an unusual day on the Canadian TV landscape.

This country’s private broadcasters populate their primetime lineups mostly with imported U.S.-network titles, so it’s always a noteworthy event when a new homegrown series is added to the schedule.

Tonight, however, brings the premières of two new domestic productions in the same night — Global’s sure-to-be-controversial medical thriller Mary Kills People and CTV’s distinctly Canadian cop drama Cardinal.

The “Mary” in the title of Global’s new offering (which debuts tonight at 8 p.m.) is Dr. Mary Harris, portrayed by Canadian actor Caroline Dhavernas. She’s a talented emergency-room physician and an overworked single mom, who also finds time in her jam-packed schedule to moonlight as an “angel of death” who helps people with terminal illnesses end their lives on their own terms.

This is, of course, a topic that has been the subject of intense debate in Canada (and other countries) for decades — and some might consider it inappropriate subject matter for an entertainment program.

To its credit, Mary Kills People doesn’t paint its protagonists (Mary, plus assisted-suicide helper Des, played by Richard Short) as purely heroic; there are some significant emotional grey areas to what they’re doing, and the flat-out illegality of their practice is also a major subplot in the ongoing drama.

Tonight’s première opens with Mary and Des doing what their shared sense of righteous crusade compels them to do — helping an ailing man to bring his life to a dignified end. They serve him the requested cocktail — a lethal amount of a drug mixed into a flute of champagne — which, unlike an injection, ensures that the administration of the life-ending dose is fully a matter of choice.

But the final stages of their operation are interrupted by the earlier-than-expected arrival home of the man’s wife, and suddenly, the sombre ceremony becomes an almost-slapstick escape sequence, complete with a perilous window-leap exit and a mad scramble through the shrubbery. So much for presenting a strictly dour drama about a touchy subject.

Despite the close call, Mary and Des remain committed to their calling and the first couple of episodes follow as they plan several more assisted-suicide endings. What becomes obvious, however, is that Mary’s under-the-radar second career isn’t completely under the radar — and that there’s a real chance she could be held to account for what she’s doing.

If there’s a major problem with Mary Kills People, it’s that its writers’ effort to inject (pun fully intended) drama into the storyline leads to the creation of several sequences that take things a bit too far. Simply put, in the course of these generally entertaining episodes, Mary is placed into situations that defy the show’s internal logic and might leave some folks questioning whether she’s a character worthy of their viewing-time commitment.

Also premièring tonight (at 9 p.m.) is CTV’s Cardinal, a six-episode crime thriller based on the John Cardinal Mysteries series by novelist Giles Blunt. American actor Billy Campbell (who mostly calls Canada home these days) plays the title character, a detective in a northern Ontario town who leads the hunt for what he believes to be a serial killer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqaE2Blr00I

Tonight’s opener begins with the discovery of a partially decomposed corpse frozen into the ice in a lakeshore shack. Cardinal, whose obsession with an earlier unsolved case led to his demotion off the homicide unit, is called back to work when it becomes apparent that this latest victim could be related to the case everyone insisted he drop.

As he attempts to get reimmersed in his work, Cardinal is introduced — much to his chagrin — to a new partner, Lise Delorme (Karine Vanasse), who has only recently transferred into the local department. He isn’t interested in her help, preferring to return to the same solo-investigation strategy that has endangered his career in the past.

But as evidence is gathered and Cardinal’s hunch that this case is part of a much larger pattern begins to seem plausible, Delorme’s assistance in widening the search could prove invaluable. Still, there’s something about his new partner that Cardinal doesn’t trust — and the arrival of an RCMP sergeant who seems to be involved in an unspecified internal-affairs probe puts everyone in the department on the defensive.

Cardinal, which was shot mostly in and around Sudbury and North Bay, Ont., takes full advantage of its bleak, wintry setting by making the distinctly Canadian location as important to the drama as any of its characters. There’s a harsh beauty to all the outdoor scenes and one is left with the impression that the elements will have played an important role in both the mystery and its solution.

Campbell brings a restrained, but stubborn, strength to the title character, and Vanasse contributes an interesting measure of conflicted energy to the series’ uneasy partnership. This adaptation of Blunt’s first Cardinal novel, Forty Words for Sorrow, is only a six-episode effort, but there’s every reason to believe Cardinal will have a much longer TV life as the literary series’ other books are brought to the screen.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @BradOswald