NOTE: This piece was originally published on Critics at Large on April 3, 2013. If you wish to comment, please do so on that page.
If you love TV and live in Toronto (as I do), watching American television can often be a frustrating experience. As thrilled as I am that Toronto has established itself as the go-to site for American-produced film and TV, it is often impossible to watch an episode of a favourite series without feeling that the city is being slighted, an “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” feeling which gets called up whenever a signature Toronto location is passed off as a generic street in “Pick Your City”, USA. – to single out just one recurring example, see the numerous uses of Daniel Libeskind’s striking crystalline extension to the Royal Ontario Museum in the background of scenes set in Chicago or DC. It is therefore especially gratifying when those norms are shaken up.
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| Tatiana Maslany stars in Orphan Black, on BBC America and Space |
If you love TV and live in Toronto (as I do), watching American television can often be a frustrating experience. As thrilled as I am that Toronto has established itself as the go-to site for American-produced film and TV, it is often impossible to watch an episode of a favourite series without feeling that the city is being slighted, an “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” feeling which gets called up whenever a signature Toronto location is passed off as a generic street in “Pick Your City”, USA. – to single out just one recurring example, see the numerous uses of Daniel Libeskind’s striking crystalline extension to the Royal Ontario Museum in the background of scenes set in Chicago or DC. It is therefore especially gratifying when those norms are shaken up.
This past Sunday, Orphan Black aired its
first episode, and on April 21, Showcase’s hit time-travel drama Continuum premieres
its second season on Canadian airwaves; both shows are not only produced and
filmed in Canada, but (with an appalling deficiency of that renowned Canadian
humility) are also set here as well.
With Fringe, Alphas, and Eureka’s
recent departures, there are barely any original science fiction series on the U.S. networks –
TNT’s Falling Skies and SyFy’s always delightful Warehouse 13 are
the only current exceptions. (There is, interestingly, no immediate shortage of
fantasy stories: Grimm, Games of Thrones, Supernatural, True Blood and any of that long and growing list of vampire and werewolf shows
are in constant rotation.) I won’t speculate on the reasons for the lack of
success U.S. networks have had with science fiction shows in the last few years,
even following up on the popular and critical successes of Battlestar
Galactica and Lost. Whatever the causes, American viewers and cable
networks have had to look beyond their borders to find new science fiction
storytelling: across the pond to the UK
(Doctor Who, Misfits, and the recent Utopia) and, perhaps
most surprisingly, north to Canada.
With two ambitious and entertaining series, Continuum and now
the extremely promising Orphan Black, we are perhaps entering a minor
golden age of Canadian science fiction programming.
