Sight Unseen is in the home stretch of Season 2 and as we approach the final third of the season, here’s the rest of my conversation with series creators and showrunners Karen (Kat) and Nikolijne (Niko) Troubetzkoy.
This season, the series has dug more into Sunny’s backstory, and it’s an arc that Troubetzkoys were excited to explore. “What I love about Sunny is this year she is determined to get out and she is kind of exploring the outside world from inside. So she becomes a greater voyeur than she ever was just riding around on Tess’s shoulder. So she ends up getting herself in trouble and she does in fact just a wee bit go beyond her boundary,” teases Kat.
“And she comes to a conclusion at the end of the season, which is unexpected and interesting. And then something comes at the very end to pierce her bubble. So she has quite a little journey.”
Sight Unseen is currently one of a handful of Canadian crime series, alongside Allegiance, Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent, and Wild Cards, so the Troubetzkoys intentionally seek their storylines in a more inward fashion. “We’re a little careful about the ‘ripped from the headlines’ because we’re finding there’s quite a lot of procedurals in Canada and elsewhere. And if we’re all ripping from the headlines and we’re looking at the fresh headlines, it gets a little samey,” laughs Kat.
“Sure, we took some inspiration from things like Die Hard, and we went very action ambitious at the first front half of the season because it’s fun to see Tess out there physically putting herself on the line. Given that she’s sight impaired, we don’t wanna hold her back. And all the episodes have a kind of immediacy, which is fun.”
“We wanted to have at least one or two episodes that really lean into Tess’s particular conundrum as a detective with sight loss. We have a wonderful episode in episode eight [coming next week], which was written by Brendan Gall and Graham Isador, who writes for The Globe and all kinds of big magazines,” shares Niko.
“It’s his second season in our writing room and he co-wrote that episode and it’s very much about one of Tess’s cases that she solved when she was sighted. Now that her sight loss is public, it’s brought up on appeal because her eyewitness testimony is called into question.”
“She has to resolve a case that she’s already solved in the past as a sighted detective as a detective with sight loss. And she has a whole different perspective on the case with Sunny [and] her new learning.”
“We want to tell regular stories, but we also want to lean into that a little bit. With Sunny with the Rear Window case in her own building, that case is very much based on sound, which is something that she learned from Tess.”
“I think one of the things that we’re always thinking about when we’re coming up with cases is, ‘How does the climax, or how does the case, really play into what is unique about Tess as a detective and what is unique about the Sunny and Tess relationship? Is there a way that we can harness that in whatever case that we’re coming up with in the room?'”
This season, due to scheduling, the production had to flip more of the shooting order. Instead of shooting Tess’s scenes first, which gave Agam Darshi raw footage to respond to when she filmed her scenes, she often had to shoot her footage first. “My heart goes out to Agam because not only was she in a room by herself acting, she’s reacting to something that is only on the page and not in front of her. She’s just a truly magnificent performer to be able to pull that off,” says Niko.
“And conversely, Dolly [Lewis], because she is in all these scenes with Sunny in her ear, it’s also just physically very arduous on her because she’s in almost every scene, every day, just like grueling, incredibly long hours. And we had to be really careful on set, whatever producer or director was on set, that if we weren’t shooting things in the right order, we really had to stick to what was on the page, think carefully about what we might encounter when we’re on location, and really try to foresee any changes or any problems that might happen so that we could keep the two sides matching as closely as possible.”
“All of this explains why when Ennis [Esmer], who plays Kai comes, Agam looks really delighted and there’s a lot of crackling energy whenever he shows up at the door,” laughs Kat. “She’s very excited to see him. They have a lot of chemistry.”
It’s the same for the Tess and Jake scenes, too. “Tess’s tightest relationship is with someone who isn’t physically there. So when Tess is with Jake, Dolly enjoys that human repartee with someone in the scene with her, too,” explains Kat. As for Jake, Kat says we will see him again through “the explosive final episode,” adding, “Stick around.”
Sight Unseen airs Monday at 10 PM ET/PT on CTV. You can stream it online at CTV.ca and Crave every Tuesday. The second season premieres in the US later this year on The CW.
Photos courtesy of Bell Media.
