by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology
I drove through Durham County yesterday afternoon. It was brighter than I expected. I thought of Hugh Dillon and power lines.
The show Durham County premiered in 2007, and its overall production values has none of the telltale signs that plague Canadian productions: in fact, despite some nagging familiarity, it didn't occur to me that it was set in Ontario until someone mentioned Toronto. The aforementioned passage through its namesake reminded how great the show was: a creepy and unendingly sinister tale of a rogue serial killer amidst the stiflingly ideal backdrop of a Canadian suburb. Into this mix comes Detective Mike Sweeney and his family, collectively recovering from the death of his partner and his wife's breast cancer diagnosis. The characters are infused with morbid fixations: Mike's oldest daughter reconstructs crimes scenes out of clay for fun, and his youngest, Maddy, never seems to take off the toy mask that erases her reassuring girlness into a bizarre, blank facade:
The bastardization of the once-comforting blankness of the Central Canada landscape is what earns the show's ranking as one of the better seasons of a crime drama to debut in the last few years, if not the last two decades (Twin Peaks, eat your heart out). The power lines, of course, were one of the show's best visual motifs, a bleak, commonplace reminder of the intrusions of modern life. They run through the vistas of perfect backyards; they hum in teh background buzz of important scenes; one of the characters, a mother, wonders if they're close enough to harm their growing children.
Perhaps what makes Durham County so refreshing is its wholesale subscription to the shift in cable television led by shows like Dexter and Mad Men: it doesn't answer every question upfront, and it doesn't mince on the disturbing content or flawed characters of its universe. In other words, in a medium famously created to sell soap, it's finally getting around to being an art form. In fact, the series make me downright excited for Canadian cinema. I haven't mentioned it before, but I always think of Canadian cinema in general suffering from arriving too late to the party, forced to play catch-up with a rancid bottle of raspberry vodka while the rest of the nations have been working on their buzz for hours. In other words, we came to the industry late, when the idea of film as a narrative device was fully formed, and had been exposed to too many weighty examples to emerge with our own voice fully formed.
So in conclusion, Durham County is a fun place to visit. If the show's any indicator, however, you may not want to live there.
I drove through Durham County yesterday afternoon. It was brighter than I expected. I thought of Hugh Dillon and power lines.
The show Durham County premiered in 2007, and its overall production values has none of the telltale signs that plague Canadian productions: in fact, despite some nagging familiarity, it didn't occur to me that it was set in Ontario until someone mentioned Toronto. The aforementioned passage through its namesake reminded how great the show was: a creepy and unendingly sinister tale of a rogue serial killer amidst the stiflingly ideal backdrop of a Canadian suburb. Into this mix comes Detective Mike Sweeney and his family, collectively recovering from the death of his partner and his wife's breast cancer diagnosis. The characters are infused with morbid fixations: Mike's oldest daughter reconstructs crimes scenes out of clay for fun, and his youngest, Maddy, never seems to take off the toy mask that erases her reassuring girlness into a bizarre, blank facade:
The bastardization of the once-comforting blankness of the Central Canada landscape is what earns the show's ranking as one of the better seasons of a crime drama to debut in the last few years, if not the last two decades (Twin Peaks, eat your heart out). The power lines, of course, were one of the show's best visual motifs, a bleak, commonplace reminder of the intrusions of modern life. They run through the vistas of perfect backyards; they hum in teh background buzz of important scenes; one of the characters, a mother, wonders if they're close enough to harm their growing children.
Perhaps what makes Durham County so refreshing is its wholesale subscription to the shift in cable television led by shows like Dexter and Mad Men: it doesn't answer every question upfront, and it doesn't mince on the disturbing content or flawed characters of its universe. In other words, in a medium famously created to sell soap, it's finally getting around to being an art form. In fact, the series make me downright excited for Canadian cinema. I haven't mentioned it before, but I always think of Canadian cinema in general suffering from arriving too late to the party, forced to play catch-up with a rancid bottle of raspberry vodka while the rest of the nations have been working on their buzz for hours. In other words, we came to the industry late, when the idea of film as a narrative device was fully formed, and had been exposed to too many weighty examples to emerge with our own voice fully formed.
So in conclusion, Durham County is a fun place to visit. If the show's any indicator, however, you may not want to live there.
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1 comment:
I'm trying to see where to get the masks they were wearing.
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