[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
Y’all know I’m a sucker for sleepy small towns with a story to tell, and Murder in a Small Town checks all those boxes, turning something that I legit thought sounded like a Hallmark mystery series logline into a more modern procedural. Based on L.R. Wright’s Edgar Award-winning Karl Alberg mystery novels, the series follows the recent arrival of the newly installed police chief (Rossif Sutherland) to the small seaside town of Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast of Canada as he returns to a favorite place from his childhood in search of a personal and professional reset after his divorce.
He meets local librarian Cassandra Lee (Kristin Kreuk) for lunch at the cafe of her BFF, Phyllis (Fiona Vroom), just as he catches a murder case, and soon finds that their brewing friendship has ties to his lead suspect, George (James Cromwell) an octogenarian who’s her dear friend. Those intersecting threads make what should be an easy solve exponentially more complicated.
We also meet Karl’s department, his sergeant, Sid (Aaron Douglas), who understands the very precise way that Karl observes and deduces, new transplant Edwina (Mya Lowe), and Officer Andy Kendrick (Fritzy-Klevans Destine), plus Isabella (Savonna Spracklin), their civilian receptionist. Ian Weir, who Kreuk worked with over 20 years ago on Canadian teen soap Edgemont and in the intervening years shepherded Arctic Air and wrote Allan Hawco’s genre movie, The Breach, adapted the novels. The first episode is directed by Milan Cheylov.
Motive producer Dennis Heaton is also on board as a producer for the series, which gave me such a thrill when I saw his name, as well as Pretty Hard Cases creator Sherry White. Upcoming episodes will feature a very fun Canadian HITG list, including our Haven favorite Lucas Bryant, Erica Durance, and Devon Sawa, as well as Stana Katic, Paula Patton, Noah Reid, and R.H. Thomson.
Last week, I chatted with Sutherland and Kreuk about the show. When Sutherland auditioned for the series, he didn’t know that his father, the late, great Donald Sutherland, had pursued adapting the book series decades ago, and as he aged while the project idled, later took an interest in playing George. Sutherland said he didn’t discuss that with Cromwell, but he appreciated the kismet of becoming part of a story his dad very much wanted to tell.
“This was a long time coming. They’ve been trying to make a film version of this for a long time. And then this TV version came along. I hadn’t read the books before auditioning for this. I didn’t know that there were ties [to my dad] when they asked me to play this part,” he recalls. “I auditioned for it. Two weeks later, I got word that they wanted me to play Karl.”
“When I described the character to my dad, I understood that the history of it, that they were gonna do a film version of it with my father playing the lead suspect, which ultimately was played by James.”
“He was a gift of an actor to work with. I spent some time with him just hanging out, but I chose not to speak about it. An actor never really likes to sure to hear the other person who was supposed to play him, especially when the person who was engaging in the subject, the son of that person.”
“James Cromwell and my father had a relationship. They’d worked together before. They’re both very tall, wonderful actors. My father was already quite ill when we were shooting. James was well aware of that. And being in his presence, he reminded me a lot of my father, and he was incredibly comforting and generous. And so it was all meant to be.”
The book series, which began 40 years ago, has been updated to the present, but the nature of the characters is unchanged. The books’ author was a woman, but the books were firmly rooted in the male gaze of their time, so that POV was also updated for the series. “We tried to honor the characters as best we could,” shares Sutherland.
Although she read passages of the first book, “The Suspect,” to record the audio book as the narrator, Kreuk hasn’t yet read the source material but is bringing it into her IG book club Wednesday now that it’s being re-released alongside the series debut. “I think they were out of print. I do think that’s fascinating that a lot of the story’s very much the same,” she says.
“The crime is solved with [old-fashioned investigative skills], but what’s different is the female characters themselves. Even though it’s a woman writing the book, she’s still got the view of the time, and the times have changed a lot when it comes to what is considered acceptable for a woman’s life and, and that that does feel very different.”
She adds that when the role first came her way, she wasn’t sure how Cassandra would fit into Karl’s world and the procedural aspects of the show. “It was tough for me to understand actually how Cassandra would be a part of the storylines because sometimes she’s tied to the crimes [but mostly] she’s tied to the community. So I didn’t quite understand the space that she would have in the show.”
“But the library being a community hub, is the space through which Cassandra plans to enact whatever changes within the community that she has in mind.”
“And Rossif and I have talked about this with Ian Weir, who’s the head writer on the show, just how her ties within the community allow for there to be a lot more richness. She can bring people to Karl and he can understand people more through her. And I think that is a fascinating part of the show. It means that we live within the community and we feel the people of the community more than we would if it was just a procedural in the typical sense.”
“Cassandra is very much the cultural ambassador of that town with this detective who’s new to this little place where unfortunately crime seems to be happening every week,” he laughs. “She becomes quite the asset. Obviously there’s a love story that carries through all of these episodes, and that’s very much the heart of this show, and very necessary to our storytelling.”
Karl moves quietly throughout the investigation, more cerebral than volatile, save for one moment with Cassandra when his temper emerges. “He’s somebody who gets the truth out of people through his humanity. He’s a listener. There is a general calm to him. He doesn’t exist in the authority of his uniform or his badge or his gun. He’s somebody who reaches people through his humanity,” Sutherland says.
“That scene was certainly a stretch within that character, but he has a job to do. And just because he loses his temper doesn’t make him wrong. There was a fine line there. He’s been brought up by his mother, he’s a man who loves women and protects women. So I think he probably was mortified when he lost his temper, but he quickly calms down and he quickly leaves. Gentleness doesn’t mean passivity.”
When the series was greenlit last December, it had the luxury of a full-season order for all eight episodes, so the cast and crew knew going in that they’d be allowed to tell the whole story they wanted to tell for the first season. Kreuk and Sutherland appreciated that advantage. “I haven’t done a pilot I don’t think since Beauty and the Beast, so it’s been a little while since I’ve been dependent on that one episode to prove that this show will work,” explains Kreuk.
“There is a freedom to it, but you still have to figure out. And the first episode was originally two episodes. So there’s still a lot of machinations going on behind the scenes to make sure that that first episode serves as a pilot so that people can get hooked and be sold on it.”
“Because it wasn’t just the pilot meant that we had a few more scripts, so there was a sea of information from which we could build something and we can see the arc of where they might go,” adds Sutherland. “And all that information is quite helpful instead of just trying to make your way in the dark, trying to piece together a character and hoping that the choices make sense in the long run. So there was certainly a freedom with that information.”
Murder in a Small Town premieres Tuesday, September 24 at 8 p.m. ET/PT with an extended, 90-minute episode on Global and STACKTV. The series moves to 9 p.m. ET/PT on Tuesday, October 8, before landing in its regular day and time on Wednesday, October 16, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. In the US, it will air on FOX at the same times. Here’s a sneak peek.
Photos courtesy of Corus Entertainment; video courtesy of FOX.
