Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
The television show “Murder in a Small Town” completed its first eight-episode season on November 27 on Fox. Two of the show’s producers, Tina Pehme and Kim Roberts, are co-CEOs and producers at Sepia Films, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based producer of films and television shows, including “Murder in a Small Town.”
The series, which is based on British Columbia-set crime novels by L.R. Wright and features Rossif Sutherland as Police Chief Karl Alberg and Kristin Kreuk as librarian Cassandra Lee, is set in the real-life town of Gibsons, and is filmed there in the town of fewer than 5,000 residents.
The series emphasizes the tentative romantic relationship between Alberg and Lee and how they’re affected by the work demands put on Alberg, who is new to overseeing the town’s small police department. During the eight episodes, the department investigates murders and kidnappings and, as the season draws to a close, a serial killer.
Enjoy our conversation about filming on the Sunshine Coast and community meat draws.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Keith Roysdon, The Daily Yonder: The Daily Yonder really looks at rural areas, small town areas. I thought “Murder in a Small Town” has that small town feel to it, and I really like that. How did y’all come to create the series? Had you been familiar with the author’s work?
Kim Roberts: We were familiar with the author, but more than anything, we were looking for material that had these elements, the mystery elements, and it was the relationship between the central character, Alberg, who is the police chief, and the local librarian, Cassandra, and it was that relationship that kind of got us hooked on the series. And we just thought this is something that people haven’t seen before and we thought there would be an audience for it, and so we developed it as a series, along with Nick Orchard, who has Soapbox Productions in Vancouver, and so between us, we developed it, wrote a number of scripts, or had a number written, and then found financing for the series.
Tina Pehme: It really interested us also to do something on the Sunshine Coast [of British Columbia], because being from Vancouver, I spent my summers there. My parents are Scandinavian, and they felt it was very much like Norway and Sweden. And so, for my entire life actually, I spent summers in a cabin that actually had no electricity. Like, the town hasn’t changed. It’s the same. It actually, strangely, hasn’t grown. There’s weekenders from Vancouver, but there’s just all kinds of quirky characters, and the books really captured that. So I think there’s just a real, I don’t know, longing in people to be in these smaller places. And so that was something that we were very attracted to.
DY: Gibsons is an actual town, right?
Roberts: It’s an actual place, and it’s a ferry ride away. The ferry takes 40 minutes from Vancouver, and so it’s – as Tina’s saying – untouched in a lot of ways, probably because there’s a ferry ride involved in getting over there, and the people that are there tend to be people who either have grown up, work in the area, or they’re people who have cottages in that area. So it’s a really interesting mix of people in the community, and it’s really not that different than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
DY: Did things suggest themselves about the small-town setting after you had scouted it, or after you had spent some time there? Was it a matter of, “Oh, we’ve really got to feature the marina as much as possible,” things like that? What kind of opened itself up to you that you were able to capitalize on to create that small town feel?
Roberts: Well, the books were all set there in this actual location, and they were written to not only [show] the community, the people there, but very much the natural beauty of the area as well. So that was the first thing that it was really about, this area, all of these books, and Ian [Weir], the head writer, the person who developed most of the scripts, was very familiar with the area. And as Tina said, she spent her childhood there during summers. And really the question was, can we actually shoot a series in a place like that, rather than looking for a number of different locations. And then the issue was, would we be able to pull off a series shooting in that location?
Pehme: Yeah, it doesn’t have a film infrastructure like a lot of areas do in Vancouver because of that ferry ride. And I guess just because people really liked having a town that was sort of off the beaten track. There was one series that was kind of famous in Canada when I was a kid, called “The Beachcombers” and that was shot there. And nothing has been set there since. People have gone and, you know, shot for a couple of days. But it’s tough because there’s not, it’s not developed like there’s only a couple of hotels, and they’re small, so we literally took over every Airbnb in the place. And that’s actually one of our challenges – because we can only shoot kind of January through June, because the locals rely on that revenue from tourists in the summer, renting these cottages and houses and things. So, it’s been interesting as well, because we’re hoping for a season two, and we’ve been saying, Yeah, we actually need to go very soon.
DY: I was going to ask, Have you gotten any kind of indication of a pickup for season two yet?
Roberts: Well, it looks really promising right now. Fox is very happy with it. We’re getting great audiences. Our broadcaster in Canada has done very well with it as well. With the interest we’re getting from our two main broadcasters, as well as the sales we’re making internationally, we’re really hopeful it’s going to get renewed.
Pehme: People actually had a great time working on it, like the crew continues to contact us as well [about working on a second season], because I think it was a really lovely experience to kind of be out of … I mean, everyone shot in Vancouver for a long time, and it is a beautiful place to shoot, but it’s been used a lot. People liked being in a smaller place. And it was kind of like when you’re on a location shoot as well, you get much closer to the people you’re with. It’s kind of like an extended summer camp, in a way.
DY: What was the kind of feedback you got from the people that live in Gibsons? You’ve got a production, and like you said, you’re being very thoughtful about when you can take away all that Airbnb and hotel business away from them. What kind of feedback did you get?
Roberts: We have huge community support. It’s been great. And there’s been weekly gatherings at the local pubs to watch on TV the series and we’ve had so many people just say that the crew was very respectful, and I think that was kind of the key. That’s not necessarily always the case with TV series that come into a town. We had a number of people who were in the show from the community. We had a number of people on the crew who were also from the community. And I think it just created that whole feeling of, we’re here to be part of this, not to trample on your lives. And so, as Tina said, we’re getting a lot of crew who are wanting to come back, but we’re also hearing from the community, in particular, for example, the people who have Molly’s Reach, the restaurant where we shot the main restaurant scenes in our series. They’re saying that the community support is huge. So we feel like if we’re able to get a second season, we’re going to have people welcome us back, which is great.
Pehme: I think it also kept a couple of businesses going, because post-Covid, there were a number of restaurants and things that hadn’t come back. And the one where we actually had a wrap party threw us this incredible bash, because they said “it was you that kept us alive,” which was really a nice thing to know. The money that was pumped into the economy was tremendous. And I think also, as Kim said, everybody got really involved. You know, people gather there, and they have meat draws [meat raffles] and things like that. And the local crew was doing that, like, every weekend, because there’s not clubs or anything like that. It’s really a quite rustic place. There’s restaurants that close at eight o’clock, but otherwise, you have to kind of get to know everybody, and people kind of gather at people’s homes and things. And so that became something, I think, that everybody really liked. We had a couple of people that actually moved there.
DY: I haven’t read any of the books, but one of the things that I’m impressed with about the series, one of the things that I think would ring truest to a lot of people who are familiar with small cities and small towns is that you’ve got a police department that is dealing with such a variety of things, from domestic relations issues to kidnapping to homicide to townspeople who are grumpy about something that they don’t like that’s going on in the town. Did you really aim to have that verisimilitude? Your chief and your deputies might walk in to the station and any given day, thanks to the demands of the script, they might have to deal with almost anything. To me that makes it seem like a very believably small town or small city depiction. Is that something that you strove for?
Roberts: Oh, absolutely, and it was in the books, but then also with our writers who adapted the books, that was a really important part of it. I grew up in a small town, and Tina was really in a smaller community as well growing up, and we wanted this to ring true. And having one of the police officers’ wives working in a hairdressing salon and providing information about one of the suspects, that sort of thing happens in a small town. It’s just, you know, “Can you identify the person that that you saw walking down the street?” And instead of saying yeah, he had dark hair, 160 pounds, that kind of thing, “Yeah, it was Frank.” And so that’s what happens in these small towns. And we wanted to make sure that rang true, but that it also wasn’t so familiar that you couldn’t have weird things happening, or, you know, parts of the community that you didn’t actually know about sort of come to light. So we tried to have that balance.
DY: Are you all at Sepia thinking about doing – I know you’ve got a lot of things that have been produced and a lot of things that are in development – is it a given that the next project, might be something small town-focused, or is it something that that you’d like to see that would have a much bigger city setting, what’s next?
Roberts: Well, I don’t think we look for settings in particular, it’s the stories, whether they interest us. We’ve got two that we think are probably next for us, and one involves a small town and is based on a book called “Last of the Moon Girls,” and it’s great. It’s set in an East Coast town and the characters are all part of a small community. And you know what that’s like: Everybody’s got their own reputations, and everybody’s already made up their mind about what they think about these people, and we’re always trying to find sort of the hidden and unspoken aspects of these communities. But we’ve got another project now that is set in the 1960s and involves, again, a small community in Wales that produced 70% of the world’s LSD at the time and managed to get away with that for about six or seven years before they were busted. And so we’re telling that story. And in fact, the couple that produced this acid was raising sheep as you know, I guess a cover. And they actually got very integrated in the community, but they were producing all of this acid at the same time, and the police couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. So that’s the second story that we’re doing. And actually, when you think about it, they’re both about small communities.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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