There's never been a Canadian cop show quite like Saint-Pierre
There's a Europe-in-North America spirit to the new CBC procedural (because that's exactly where it's set)
Canadian actor and writer Allan Hawco says he wanted to make a show on Saint Pierre — the small French-controlled island just off the coast of Newfoundland — "because it was there and it was screaming at me."
"I realized there was this opportunity to [shoot in] a really mysterious place that has qualities unlike anywhere else in the world," he adds.
The new CBC series Saint-Pierre, which premiered earlier this month, is a police procedural set on the titular island. It features Hawko, who is both star and creator of the series, as a fish-out-of-water Newfoundlander detective exiled to the island after running afoul of a local politician. Hawco says that in many ways, Saint Pierre and his home of Newfoundland feel like "relations."
We are all in together out there in the middle of the North Atlantic," he says. "We are so similar in so many ways…. It's like this really special pocket in this world that truly is unique."
Although Saint Pierre has a population of just under 6,000, it still felt like a place where you could set a police procedural, Hawco adds, because it feels much bigger than it is.
"It's in a very small, condensed area," he says. "They really have a metropolis of a town…. It very much behaves like a city."
That said, it's not. No matter how metropolitan Saint Pierre feels, it's still a small, remote island. Which means that shooting there was challenging. They don't really have the infrastructure to do episodic television. There's nowhere to rent equipment. They use different electrical outlets. Finding a place for everyone to stay is hard.
"Everything about it is really difficult to figure out in terms of … having a film crew there and accommodating them and making sure that you're making the best quality product," he says. "And making sure you're not completely pissing off the locals."
Ultimately, "anything worth doing is not easy," Hawco says, adding that the remoteness is part of "what makes this place special and that's why it's worth exploring."
Another problem with setting a police procedural in Saint Pierre is that the island doesn't really have much crime. It's a very safe place, and definitely doesn't have the number of murders required to sustain a detective story. That's one of the areas where Hawco says he took a little bit of artistic liberty.
"In the fictionalized version, just the visuals alone make you feel like something nefarious is going on," he says. "It's attached to North America … [but] if you're in there, you're a domestic flight away from the EU. There's a fictionalized perspective that leaves you yards and yards of possibilities."
Hawco says that his influences for the show were also more European than North American. Fish-out-of-water detectives and small, picturesque locations with a seemingly impossible number of murders are both mainstays of British detective shows, which heavily inform the look and feel of Saint-Pierre.
"Saint Pierre is of North America, and it's not," he says. "It's of Europe, and it's not. And that's kind of where our show lives dramatically and creatively. It's structured very much in the way of a procedural cop show, but it lives in the world of more of a European-style cop show. And part of that is, visually, that's how we shot it. Shetland was an influence. Scott & Bailey was a big influence…. We're almost in a box to ourselves, because we're combining those things, and I can't think of a show that's doing that. And that's what Saint Pierre is — and Newfoundland to some extent."
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