Big city angst collides with village values in darkly moody new Canadian Drama - Black Harbour
November 17, 1996
By Sid Adilman, The Toronto Star
MILL COVE, N.S. Katherine is a star Los Angeles restaurateur and Nick, her husband, a Hollywood movie director out of work for five years. She brings him to the Nova Scotia fishing village where she was born and hasn’t visited for 17 years, because her widowed mother is ailing. And her harried brother insists she become involved in the family boat-building business he operates single-handedly.
Intending to just visit, the couple decides to stay.
Adapting to village life for which neither of them is prepared — not an uncommon situation for a growing number of Canadians these days — is the ongoing story of Black Harbour a TV drama series debuting on CBC Dec. 4 in the prime 9 p.m. Slot.
It stars Geraint Wyn Davies - the vampire turned into a human detective on TV’s Forever Knight - as the career crisis-wracked director and singer Rebecca Jenkins - a Genie Award winner as best actress for Bye Bye Blues - as the celebrity chef who comes home with unhappy memories of her past there.
The series is a huge gamble, mostly for Black Harbour’s creators, Wayne Grigsby and Barbara Samuels, the producer/writer/creators of North Of 60. Their company owns the show.
They raised the $11.7 million budget for Black Harbour’s initial 13 weekly episodes - that’s $900,000 an hour - without guarantees of foreign sales. And they are writing and producing the series.
Black Harbour is filming at a former military base in Mill Cove, south of Halifax and also at nearby Hubbards, an ocean village of summer cottages and country inns, as well as at marinas and lobster shanties in between.
“What we’re dealing with is old and new cultures,” says Grigsby, “Can you go home again?”
Samuels explains why she and Grigsby chose Nova Scotia and Los Angeles. “She couldn’t have left home for Vancouver because we wanted to find two diametrically opposed cultures in North America.
“What is the oldest kind of European culture in North America? Certainly in terms of tradition, a sense of who your father’s father’s father’s father’s father was, that is Nova Scotia. “The newest culture in North America? That’s LA, where people re-invent themselves, go absolutely tabula rasa, and say, I am who I decide I am.
“We were looking for the most bang for the buck where could you get the most explosive confrontation, and that was between those two places. Vancouver didn’t have the same make it-up-as-you-go-along, I-could-be-a queen-or-not as Los Angeles is.”
More specifically, Jenkins’ character finds her one-time teenage boyfriend now the master builder at her family’s boatyard and she must contend with her memories of him. She also must cope with her estranged mother and her angry 14-year-old daughter who, like her parents, has problems adjusting to village life.
And her jobless husband, unskilled for anything but moviemaking, gets the bright idea of transforming the business from making fishing boats to building yachts for wealthy Americans. “She senses very strongly that she is going to lose him and she figures if they take over the family business that her brother has lost all interest in, this is the way to hold her marriage together,” says Grigsby.
Black Harbour sounds turbulent and dark.
“The first episode is very dense and not particularly amusing,” admits Samuels, “because you’ve got a woman dragging her past into her present and trying to hold on to the man she adores, who’s leaving her. And her brother is throwing family bull at her. And her head is spinning and she has to make sense or else, she’s lost at sea, metaphorically.
“There are not a lot of giggles and smiles in Episode 1. It’s a fairly heavy-duty show. “Episode 2 is about adjustments and as we go on, little things happen, people collide and the couple has dark moments and light moments.”
Samuels also discloses that she and Grigsby chose the word Black in their title deliberately for symbolic resonance: “The water is dark, almost impenetrable, and Katherine can’t see past the surface of her own memories. Their lives are in shadows and nothing is as clear as they remember it or the way they think it should be.” But adds Grigsby, “There are romantic moments and kissy-face moments. “It’s not a comedy, but there are moments when people smile and have a good time. But it’s not yuks.
“If anybody’s looking for a light, user-friendly show, this isn’t it. It ain’t Danger Bay, it ain’t the Beachcombers.“
"It’s not a soap opera either." Some of the stuff probably sounds that way, but it’s just people trying to sort out their lives. “It’s a drama about family as opposed to a family drama.”
And he argues, “The spooky thing about television is that network executives want a shorthand, something people can relate to easily. We think the audience is ready for more than that if given a chance. North Of 60 was a different show (from others on the air) and people got into it”
If their characters are deeply troubled, Davies, Jenkins, Botsford and Orisini don’t show it in scenes I watched being filmed for the 4th episode. They are more bothered by high winds as they wait outside in the cold for cameras to roll in the few seconds when the wind dies down.
But Stuart Margolin, who played Angel in The Rockford Files and is directing this episode, beams, “I love this. It’s better than last week when it rained; we’ve had terrible weather.”
The other Black Harbour regulars also are Canadian: Joseph Ziegler (Side Effects) plays the brother, Alex Carter (Traders) the former boyfriend, Halifax actors Joan Gregson as the mother and Rhonda Mclean as Carter’s wife, a manic depressive controlled by drugs, who suspects her husband of infidelity.
The few guest roles in the first 13 episodes also will be filled by Canadians: chiefly Sara Botsford (E.N.G.), as the chef’s LA. partner pleading with her to return to accept the offer of a Martha Stewart-type TV and publishing career, and Marina Orisini, Quebec’s reigning drama star, playing an American yacht designer.
The series employs nearly 100 people, excluding extras, and the small communities where they film are enjoying Black Harbour’s infusion of cash during a usually slow off-season period.
And Grigsby notes, ‘We set the series here before Nova Scotia became a hotbed of production, before (the province’s film production) tax credits.”
Black Harbour will have some serious plot fun referring to the growing number of American movies now being filmed in Nova Scotia, says Grigsby
“One episode will deal with an American TV-movie rolling into town, all the people Katherine and Nick turned their backs on, an he gets back into that world when he’s asked to direct second unit on that show – the push and pull of what he’s doing now and what he did then.”
CBC programmers are reputed to make decisions slowly. But Grigsby and Samuels sold the series to CBC on the basis of two scripts, having made their first pitch 18 months ago.
What took longer, the pair says was securing an Investment from Telefilm Canada. “CBC was interested,” says Grigsby, “but back in April Telefilm was saying, ‘Can we get an American star in this? It will help us if you have a star that will help you get an American sale. That’s how we’re going to get our taxpayer dollars back’ This came at a critical period for Telefilm.” Grigsby and Samuels stuck to their plans and Telefilm relented. Other investors are the Cable Production Fund, the Nova Scotia Development Corp. and Rogers Telefund.
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November 17, 1996
By Sid Adilman, The Toronto Star
MILL COVE, N.S. Katherine is a star Los Angeles restaurateur and Nick, her husband, a Hollywood movie director out of work for five years. She brings him to the Nova Scotia fishing village where she was born and hasn’t visited for 17 years, because her widowed mother is ailing. And her harried brother insists she become involved in the family boat-building business he operates single-handedly.
Intending to just visit, the couple decides to stay.
Adapting to village life for which neither of them is prepared — not an uncommon situation for a growing number of Canadians these days — is the ongoing story of Black Harbour a TV drama series debuting on CBC Dec. 4 in the prime 9 p.m. Slot.
It stars Geraint Wyn Davies - the vampire turned into a human detective on TV’s Forever Knight - as the career crisis-wracked director and singer Rebecca Jenkins - a Genie Award winner as best actress for Bye Bye Blues - as the celebrity chef who comes home with unhappy memories of her past there.
The series is a huge gamble, mostly for Black Harbour’s creators, Wayne Grigsby and Barbara Samuels, the producer/writer/creators of North Of 60. Their company owns the show.
They raised the $11.7 million budget for Black Harbour’s initial 13 weekly episodes - that’s $900,000 an hour - without guarantees of foreign sales. And they are writing and producing the series.
Black Harbour is filming at a former military base in Mill Cove, south of Halifax and also at nearby Hubbards, an ocean village of summer cottages and country inns, as well as at marinas and lobster shanties in between.
“What we’re dealing with is old and new cultures,” says Grigsby, “Can you go home again?”
Samuels explains why she and Grigsby chose Nova Scotia and Los Angeles. “She couldn’t have left home for Vancouver because we wanted to find two diametrically opposed cultures in North America.
“What is the oldest kind of European culture in North America? Certainly in terms of tradition, a sense of who your father’s father’s father’s father’s father was, that is Nova Scotia. “The newest culture in North America? That’s LA, where people re-invent themselves, go absolutely tabula rasa, and say, I am who I decide I am.
“We were looking for the most bang for the buck where could you get the most explosive confrontation, and that was between those two places. Vancouver didn’t have the same make it-up-as-you-go-along, I-could-be-a queen-or-not as Los Angeles is.”
More specifically, Jenkins’ character finds her one-time teenage boyfriend now the master builder at her family’s boatyard and she must contend with her memories of him. She also must cope with her estranged mother and her angry 14-year-old daughter who, like her parents, has problems adjusting to village life.
And her jobless husband, unskilled for anything but moviemaking, gets the bright idea of transforming the business from making fishing boats to building yachts for wealthy Americans. “She senses very strongly that she is going to lose him and she figures if they take over the family business that her brother has lost all interest in, this is the way to hold her marriage together,” says Grigsby.
Black Harbour sounds turbulent and dark.
“The first episode is very dense and not particularly amusing,” admits Samuels, “because you’ve got a woman dragging her past into her present and trying to hold on to the man she adores, who’s leaving her. And her brother is throwing family bull at her. And her head is spinning and she has to make sense or else, she’s lost at sea, metaphorically.
“There are not a lot of giggles and smiles in Episode 1. It’s a fairly heavy-duty show. “Episode 2 is about adjustments and as we go on, little things happen, people collide and the couple has dark moments and light moments.”
Samuels also discloses that she and Grigsby chose the word Black in their title deliberately for symbolic resonance: “The water is dark, almost impenetrable, and Katherine can’t see past the surface of her own memories. Their lives are in shadows and nothing is as clear as they remember it or the way they think it should be.” But adds Grigsby, “There are romantic moments and kissy-face moments. “It’s not a comedy, but there are moments when people smile and have a good time. But it’s not yuks.
“If anybody’s looking for a light, user-friendly show, this isn’t it. It ain’t Danger Bay, it ain’t the Beachcombers.“
"It’s not a soap opera either." Some of the stuff probably sounds that way, but it’s just people trying to sort out their lives. “It’s a drama about family as opposed to a family drama.”
And he argues, “The spooky thing about television is that network executives want a shorthand, something people can relate to easily. We think the audience is ready for more than that if given a chance. North Of 60 was a different show (from others on the air) and people got into it”
If their characters are deeply troubled, Davies, Jenkins, Botsford and Orisini don’t show it in scenes I watched being filmed for the 4th episode. They are more bothered by high winds as they wait outside in the cold for cameras to roll in the few seconds when the wind dies down.
But Stuart Margolin, who played Angel in The Rockford Files and is directing this episode, beams, “I love this. It’s better than last week when it rained; we’ve had terrible weather.”
The other Black Harbour regulars also are Canadian: Joseph Ziegler (Side Effects) plays the brother, Alex Carter (Traders) the former boyfriend, Halifax actors Joan Gregson as the mother and Rhonda Mclean as Carter’s wife, a manic depressive controlled by drugs, who suspects her husband of infidelity.
The few guest roles in the first 13 episodes also will be filled by Canadians: chiefly Sara Botsford (E.N.G.), as the chef’s LA. partner pleading with her to return to accept the offer of a Martha Stewart-type TV and publishing career, and Marina Orisini, Quebec’s reigning drama star, playing an American yacht designer.
The series employs nearly 100 people, excluding extras, and the small communities where they film are enjoying Black Harbour’s infusion of cash during a usually slow off-season period.
And Grigsby notes, ‘We set the series here before Nova Scotia became a hotbed of production, before (the province’s film production) tax credits.”
Black Harbour will have some serious plot fun referring to the growing number of American movies now being filmed in Nova Scotia, says Grigsby
“One episode will deal with an American TV-movie rolling into town, all the people Katherine and Nick turned their backs on, an he gets back into that world when he’s asked to direct second unit on that show – the push and pull of what he’s doing now and what he did then.”
CBC programmers are reputed to make decisions slowly. But Grigsby and Samuels sold the series to CBC on the basis of two scripts, having made their first pitch 18 months ago.
What took longer, the pair says was securing an Investment from Telefilm Canada. “CBC was interested,” says Grigsby, “but back in April Telefilm was saying, ‘Can we get an American star in this? It will help us if you have a star that will help you get an American sale. That’s how we’re going to get our taxpayer dollars back’ This came at a critical period for Telefilm.” Grigsby and Samuels stuck to their plans and Telefilm relented. Other investors are the Cable Production Fund, the Nova Scotia Development Corp. and Rogers Telefund.
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