Picture Postcard - CBC's Black Harbour combines heartfelt drama with rustic East Coast scenery
November 30, 1996
By Andrew Ryan, TV Guide
Hour-long family dramas are few and far between on TV these days, which makes CBC’s latest entry stand out even more. Black Harbour has little in common with genre classics like The Waltons or more recent feel-good shows like Touched by an Angel. Indeed, it’s a lot closer to thirtysomething, with average people leading complicated lives in an everyday setting; like life it’s not always pretty, but it is very real.
The approach can be traced to the series creators, Wayne Grigsby and Barbara Samuels, who brought the same sensibility to the CBC series North of 60. “We’d been kicking around the idea of a series about a woman who returns to the small town she ran away from years before,” says Grigsby. “And for some reason, we always knew the best place to set a series like that would be the East Coast.”
A complicated family drama, Black Harbour is rich in images of the Maritimes, but there’s little of the sweetness that’s typical of family dramas.
Filmed on location at Mill Cove, just west of Halifax, Black Harbour is rich with picture-postcard Maritime images – including scenic harbors, long and winding beaches, barren landscapes, century-old boatyards and a wide assortment of authentic Maritimers.
Rebecca Jenkins stars as Kathy Hubbard, a woman who left Nova Scotia in her teens and became a successful restaurant owner in Los Angeles. She returns home with her husband and daughters in tow after her mother suffers a near-fatal heart attack.
The series somewhat parallels its star’s own life: She spent several childhood years growing up in Halifax, and hadn’t been back until recently. “It meant returning to a place I absolutely love,” says Jenkins. “The years I spent here were the best time of my life, and I can still remember searching the tide pools and popping seaweed bubbles on the beach. In fact, one of the first things I did when I got here was go down to the beach and pop seaweed bubbles.”
Lending weight to Black Harbour’s dramatic mix is Kathy’s husband Nick Haskell (Forever Knight’s Geraint Wyn Davies), a glib director who can’t find work in L.A. The series also scores points for its portrayal of the Black Harbour locals, many of whom are distrustful of “big city” attitudes. “If you scratch a Maritimer, it’s not long before you get to the anger and resentment beneath,” says Grigsby. “At the turn of the century it was a prosperous area, but that went away after the First World War, and they had to get handouts from central Canada. You don’t easily forget that.”
Black Harbour shares a trait with North of 60 in that all the characters are constantly evolving and bouncing off each other in intertwining storylines. “The plots definitely thicken,” teases Jenkins.
“Everyone has real interesting curves as the show goes on. There’s a lot of strong dramatic stuff, and sometimes viewers will like me and sometimes they won’t. But that’s so real about the show – and it’s what I love about it.”
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November 30, 1996
By Andrew Ryan, TV Guide
Hour-long family dramas are few and far between on TV these days, which makes CBC’s latest entry stand out even more. Black Harbour has little in common with genre classics like The Waltons or more recent feel-good shows like Touched by an Angel. Indeed, it’s a lot closer to thirtysomething, with average people leading complicated lives in an everyday setting; like life it’s not always pretty, but it is very real.
The approach can be traced to the series creators, Wayne Grigsby and Barbara Samuels, who brought the same sensibility to the CBC series North of 60. “We’d been kicking around the idea of a series about a woman who returns to the small town she ran away from years before,” says Grigsby. “And for some reason, we always knew the best place to set a series like that would be the East Coast.”
A complicated family drama, Black Harbour is rich in images of the Maritimes, but there’s little of the sweetness that’s typical of family dramas.
Filmed on location at Mill Cove, just west of Halifax, Black Harbour is rich with picture-postcard Maritime images – including scenic harbors, long and winding beaches, barren landscapes, century-old boatyards and a wide assortment of authentic Maritimers.
Rebecca Jenkins stars as Kathy Hubbard, a woman who left Nova Scotia in her teens and became a successful restaurant owner in Los Angeles. She returns home with her husband and daughters in tow after her mother suffers a near-fatal heart attack.
The series somewhat parallels its star’s own life: She spent several childhood years growing up in Halifax, and hadn’t been back until recently. “It meant returning to a place I absolutely love,” says Jenkins. “The years I spent here were the best time of my life, and I can still remember searching the tide pools and popping seaweed bubbles on the beach. In fact, one of the first things I did when I got here was go down to the beach and pop seaweed bubbles.”
Lending weight to Black Harbour’s dramatic mix is Kathy’s husband Nick Haskell (Forever Knight’s Geraint Wyn Davies), a glib director who can’t find work in L.A. The series also scores points for its portrayal of the Black Harbour locals, many of whom are distrustful of “big city” attitudes. “If you scratch a Maritimer, it’s not long before you get to the anger and resentment beneath,” says Grigsby. “At the turn of the century it was a prosperous area, but that went away after the First World War, and they had to get handouts from central Canada. You don’t easily forget that.”
Black Harbour shares a trait with North of 60 in that all the characters are constantly evolving and bouncing off each other in intertwining storylines. “The plots definitely thicken,” teases Jenkins.
“Everyone has real interesting curves as the show goes on. There’s a lot of strong dramatic stuff, and sometimes viewers will like me and sometimes they won’t. But that’s so real about the show – and it’s what I love about it.”
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