Pierre pressure

Canadian drama Saint-Pierre marries a police procedural with the unique setting of a French territory off the coast of Canada. Co-creator, co-showrunner and star Allan Hawco talks to DQ about the series and how he juggles multiple roles in front of and behind the camera.

At the southern tip of Newfoundland, an island located at the very eastern edge of Canada, lies the archipelago of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon – a unique territory positioned between North America and Europe. Home to around 6,000 French citizens, the islands are the last remnant of the French Republic in North America. And they’re now the inspiration for a Canadian crime series due to debut on CBC this winter.

Saint-Pierre introduces Royal Newfoundland Constabulary inspector Donny ‘Fitz’ Fitzpatrick, who digs too deeply into a local politician’s nefarious activity and is exiled to work in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. But his arrival disrupts the life of deputy chief Geneviève ‘Arch’ Archambault, a Parisian transplant who is in Saint-Pierre for her own intriguing reasons.

The police procedural stars Josephine Jobert (Death in Paradise) and Allan Hawco (Republic of Doyle) as Arch and Fitz, respectively, two seasoned officers with very different approaches to policing who are forced together to solve a host of unique crimes in a place that is home to the worst kind of criminal activity behind its a quaint tourist destination appearance.

When DQ chats to Hawco, filming is continuing on Newfoundland on episodes five, six and seven of the 10-part series, before production moves to Saint-Pierre itself to shoot scenes for an extended six-episode block. But the actor’s role doesn’t end when the director calls cut. In fact, he is the co-creator, co-showrunner, a writer and an executive producer on the show, which is also produced by his Hawco Productions.

The idea behind the series first emerged from Hawco’s love of police procedurals, “a thing I know fairly well and something I’ve done quite a bit of.” But he didn’t want to just take on a “random” show. “As a creator, you need the show to scream at you,” he says. “It needs to scream at you so loudly that you can’t let it go – and other people need to hear it, too.”

But the concept of setting a series on Saint-Pierre only struck him when he visited the island for the first time during a location scout for another show he was producing, comedy Son of a Critch. It was then that he idea “hit me like a ton of bricks,” he says. “We had been scouting and we’d ended the day sitting in the town on one of the main drags where we were having a beer and I saw the show.”

Three weeks later, he was in development with CBC, and reached out to co-creators Robina Lord-Stafford (Wild Cards, Pretty Hard Cases) and Perry Chafe to develop the series with him. Lord-Stafford is also co-showrunner.

“I wanted the female lead to be black. I’m obviously not a woman and I’m obviously a white guy, so I wanted that to be represented properly,” Hawco says. “I knew Robina a little bit because we’d worked together on another series that I acted in, so Robina came on board and we didn’t know each other super well, but immediately we became connected at the brain, which doesn’t often happen. A year later, we were in prep. It was a very fast-moving train.”

Saint-Pierre depicts a fictional version of the real island, one where the French Gendarme isn’t in charge of policing and the rules in place that prevent people from having too much power don’t exist.

“If you in any way had a proclivity towards power, crime or corruption, you could thrive in a place like this because it’s a gateway to the world,” he says. “They’ve designed their situation so people cannot do that, but we created a police force that’s fictional where there are opportunities for skullduggery. There are opportunities to be taken advantage of.

“But our hero, Arch, is not one of those people. She’s a moral compass of the place. There’s a ‘big bad’ there played by James Purefoy. He’s the unofficial mayor of the town. He’s from Dublin and he’s got his own reasons for being there. He’s taking advantage. That’s the serialised arc of our show.”

As a fish out of water, Fitz also brings his metropolitan perspective to island life as he and Arch connect “spiritually, emotionally and mentally as equals,” Hawco continues. “It’s an interesting dynamic because, in many ways, it’s like the Wild West. It has a [HBO western series] Deadwood feel to it in that anything is possible here for the criminal element. People can disappear in a place like Saint-Pierre, if you wanted to disappear from Planet Earth, for whatever reason, and we lean into that in our show.”

The series marks the third time Hawco has juggled numerous roles on a production – he’s now into 100 hours of television as a showrunner, star and producer – but while it may be tough, he describes it as “the best job in the world.” To help him through, he has relied on support from Jobert, Lord-Stafford and the rest of the production team.

Saint-Pierre, he says, is “certainly the best experience I’ve ever had because I’ve been addressing the issues that come along the way. The first time, they feel like a train wreck; the second time, there is less of that; and by now, I don’t even deal with them. So you deal with things as they come.

“There’s also an element of luck. I believe good people attract good people, but the people who work with me on the show are truly the best people. I have a series of producers and the cast are exceptional as human beings. Robina and I also have a team of writers that are incredible. Robina is incredible. It’s been one of the most joyous experiences of my professional life.”

Saint-Pierre comes to television at a time when procedural series are seemingly in fashion again, as viewers seek comfort in familiar characters and stories that can be wrapped up in a single episode.

“These shows haven’t gone away,” Hawco says. “They’ve not necessarily been on the mainstream platforms as leading iconic shows that people are talking about at the watercooler, but they’re on those main networks and they’re still some of the most watched shows in television – and there’s a reason for that.

“There’s something about that familiarity the audience wants to feel and be connected to. Personally, as a kid, that was what I was brought up on, those 70s American procedural cop shows. Then later in life, it was the great British ones – Prime Suspect, Cracker or Rebus.”

With Saint-Pierre, which is distributed by Fifth Season, he and Lord-Stafford sought to bring something new to the genre through the uniqueness of the show’s setting and their different perspectives on character.

“It’s a really interesting setting, but it’s not just about the location. It’s about our version of the location. What’s our perspective of the place?” he says. “It [Saint-Pierre] is a character in the show, but you can overdo that. You don’t want to lean too heavily on it in a way that’s going to be disconcerting or take away from the plot or take away from the characters.

“I don’t know if we’ve successfully done that or not, but I’m confident that what we’ve accomplished is a really interesting take on what that place is from our perspective. But it really does scream at you as a place. It’s really original. It doesn’t make any sense that it exists, this tiny French territory.”

With numerous roles on the show, Hawco splits his duties behind the camera with Lord-Stafford. But even when he steps on set, “you can’t turn it off,” he notes. However, having been so involved in creating and writing the show means he has a unique vantage point when it comes to playing his character.

“I put in a fair amount of work if I’m going to play a role that I haven’t written. Countless hours and weeks of prep, and it never really stops,” he says. “You whittle it all down to what you’re thinking in the scene and what your relationship is to every other actor and every character story. But it’s a pretty exhausting process.

“When you’ve written all of it, there’s a real benefit because you’ve been living with that work for, in some cases, two years. That backstory, that drive, every thought, every feeling, every word. Everything is ingrained in you because you’ve been writing it.”

No matter who writes each episode, Hawco and Lord-Stafford are “over and across every line of action and dialogue,” he adds. “So as an actor, there’s a real benefit because you are prepped. There’s no scene that I don’t know what’s going on. There’s no scene that I haven’t been completely immersed in emotionally. So when you hit the floor, my only job is to throw that all away and to just see what the other actors bring. So that’s pretty great.”

And while there are challenging times with such a busy role, “you’re also like, ‘Holy shit, I have a show,’” Hawco says. “We feel really good about it. The people we are making it with are very special and I hope the audience feels what we feel in terms of its originality and its specialness. I’m so grateful every minute of every day that, as tough as it can be, you feel like you’re part of something that’s different from anything the market has seen before.”

tagged in: Allan Hawco, CBC, Fifth Season, Hawco Productions, Saint-Pierre