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.
Co-created
by writer/director John Fawcett (Ginger Snaps) and writer Graeme Manson
(Cube), Orphan Black is an all-Canadian production. It airs on
Space in Canada and BBC
America in the U.S.
and is distributed worldwide by BBC International, but it is neither British
nor American, nor would I add, is it pretending to be. Promoted by BBC America
as its second original series (the first, last summer’s Copper, is also
filmed in Toronto but the city stands in for 1860s New York City), Orphan Black is the first which
speaks, perhaps, to a whole different side of Toronto.
To add to
the potential confusion of an American viewer, while the two leads are both
Canadian (the Saskatchewan-born Tatiana Maslany, Heartland, and
Ontario-born Jordan Gavaris, Unnatural History) their characters
originally hail from England.
The British accents (which to an ear trained only by my longstanding affection
for British television sound remarkably solid) introduce a fun mix of the
familiar and the unfamiliar, but it might on those terms alienate American (or
even some Canadian) viewers.
The clone mystery, which must have begun by at
least the mid-80s (judging from the ages of Sarah and her doubles) is not
explicitly spelled out in the pilot episode. The promotional campaign notwithstanding
(Toronto’s Yonge subway station is plastered floor to ceiling with Maslany’s
face, and I feel like I couldn’t pick up a newspaper this past weekend without
seeing a clone pun in a headline) this week’s pilot contented itself with
telling the smaller stories, letting the viewer enter into its world
alongside Sarah, and keeping the potential complexity of the plot to come largely in
firm check. There is a welcome slow burn to the story so
far (especially
refreshing in this post-Lost era of gratuitous plot convolution), and I’m grateful for knowing as little as I do about what is to come. Revelations of a dark conspiracy
certainly lurk around the next corner, but no clue has been given yet to the players
or their long game. But one thing of note is that so far both of
the doppelgängers encountered by Sarah are somehow broken: Katya appears ill,
apparently with La Traviata-style symptoms of consumption, and Beth was heavily
medicated for an unknown but probably psychiatric illness.
We have yet
to really get to know Sarah’s other genetic siblings, but fortunately Maslany’s Sarah
is already a formidable anchor for the story, and hopefully up for the regular
task of acting opposite herself in convincing ways. In this first hour, though,
we only really get a brief glimpse of Beth, by way of a video Sarah’s finds in
the dead woman’s home, and our one interaction with the German Katya – played
by Maslany sporting a dollar store Run Lola Run wig and speaking broken
English in an accent more Russian-sounding than German – was one of the more
patchy moments in the pilot. Still, Katya’s arrival moves the plot forward
quickly and more than sets up some revelations soon to come: namely that Beth
was already aware of the doppelgängers and may well have already woken up a
hornet’s nest of trouble with her investigation.
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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.
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Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black |
Still, some American critics seem to be stubbornly
confused by the location of the show, even hallucinating NYPD logos in the place of the variation of the Toronto Police symbol clearly
deliberately chosen by the show’s set designers. (The round logo in a police
station is identical to TPS’, minus the word “Toronto” at the top, and I’m honestly not
sure how it could be mistaken for the triangular NYPD one) Admittedly, Orphan
Black’s opening scene – set in a fictional Huxley Station (a clever nod to
Aldous Huxley and his Brave New World), lays the groundwork for this
confusion, but it is difficult to miss the colourful Canadian money, the plane
tickets explicitly landing in Toronto’s Pearson Airport, birth certificates
naming Toronto suburbs, and Ontario license plates lining the street.
The
ten-episode first season promises to deliver an extremely thick plot. Sarah
Hawking (Maslany) is a streetwise survivor who grew up in an English orphanage
and foster care before moving with her foster mother (Maria Doyle Kennedy, The Tudors and more recently Downton Abbey) and Felix (Gavaris), her foster
brother, to Toronto
as a young teen. Returning to Toronto
after nearly a year’s absence, she is an inadvertent witness to the suicide of
Beth Childs (also Maslany), a woman who bears a remarkable resemblance to Sarah
herself. A lifelong outsider who has learned that the only way to get what she
needs is to take it, Sarah walks away with the Beth’s purse – containing the
phones, keys, and identification necessary for taking over the dead woman’s identity.
Never intending to do more than steal enough resources to run away with her
young daughter and leave her life in the city behind, Sarah quickly finds
herself immersed in mysteries beyond her understanding: most prominently, the
question of why she and Beth seem to be identical physical matches for one
another. Beth herself is a police detective with a suspicious amount of
unexplained cash in the bank, caught up in a departmental inquiry for a
questionable line-of-duty shooting of an unarmed civilian. By the end of the
pilot episode, Sarah is contacted by the German-born Katya (also Maslany), who
was previously in contact with Beth: Katya too looks shockingly, in fact
identically, like both Sarah and Beth.
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Jordan Gavaris in Orphan Black |
Though the
plot of Orphan Black promises to be a labyrinthine doozy, it is clear
from the pilot that character will also be at the forefront, and perhaps even
the very idea of character. Sarah demonstrates herself to be a survivor
and a doer more than a thinker, more invested in the short term and inclined to
making choices without attending to the longer-term consequences of her
actions. We meet her on the run from the abusive, sleazebag, drug-dealing
boyfriend who she recently ran out on – a brick of his cocaine in hand – after
hitting him with an ashtray. Taking over the life of her lookalike, Beth, is
itself a spur of the moment decision, and you can actually see her making
decision after decision in the show’s first hour, plainly without thinking much
beyond the next move or two.
Sarah is an
appealing young lead – especially in her interactions with Felix, who is her
only real confidant and friend. Gavaris’ Felix brings a lightness to the sometimes
melodramatic proceedings (“It’s you, with a nice haircut,” Felix
remarks when Sarah first shows him a photo of Beth.), and his consistent
enthusiasm and affection for Sarah helps keep her someone you can root for
despite the poor decisions she keeps making. But the season will rise and fall
on how compelling, and distinct, Maslany can make the other versions of
herself. (Of the nine
main characters listed on the show’s website,
four are played by Tatiana Maslany – with no doubt more
on the way as the show progresses.) In the alternative dimension
storyline of Fringe’s middle seasons, Fringe explored questions
of the sources of character and personal identity – over the course of its run
viewers met viewers as many as five variations of Walter Bishop (each portrayed
by the incomparable John Noble) and at least three importantly distinct
versions of Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv). Torv’s ability to differentiate each
Olivia from the other, in ways more profound and subtle than hair length and
colour (via slight mannerisms, posture, or at times simply a timely wry smile),
was a large part of what kept Fringe’s storylines so compelling, despite
a potentially confusing and ever-shifting narrative.
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Tatiana Maslany (left) and Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black |
After years of directing episodes of other writers’ scripts (from Xena:
Warrior Princess to Rookie Blue), John Fawcett is finally controlling
his own material. He and Manson co-write every episode of the show’s first
season, with Fawcett himself directing the first two hours. Fawcett has already proven with Ginger Snaps (2000) that he can
mine a story for its dark and fleshy core – drawing out that part of speculative
storytelling that shifts from metaphor or allegory into something true and
deeply human. In this era of romanticized teen vampires and werewolves, the
werewolf story Fawcett tells in Ginger Snaps is more impressive than
ever. At the time that I first saw Ginger Snaps, only Joss Whedon had
achieved anything comparable, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer: telling
stories of female adolescence, pain, power, and individual strength through the
lenses of fantasy.
From a plot description of Orphan Black, you may be hard-pressed
to distinguish it from last season’s CW’s now-cancelled Ringer (starring
Sarah Michelle Gellar, who takes over her twin sister’s life after an apparent
suicide). I tried, and failed, to stay engaged by Ringer, with its
manufactured intrigue and soap-opera-y plots – but already in this first hour, Orphan
Black points in a number of new directions: a larger and more complicated
cast of characters, a dark sense of humour, and the feeling that the show will
be taking its universe seriously. The simple fact of a near-unlimited number of genetic doubles out there
in the world leaves the story open in potentially remarkable ways. The
intersecting lives of different women – all genetically identical, but with wildly
diverse upbringings – can compel Sarah, and viewers, to call into question much
that we, out of existential necessity, often take for granted: the role that
our personal histories play not only in what we may believe, but who we
essentially are.
Orphan
Black airs Saturdays at 9pm ET on Space and BBC America. Its second episode airs on April 6.