Sticky situation
Brian Donovan and Ed Herro, co-creators and showrunners behind Prime Video’s maple syrup heist series The Sticky, discuss walking the line between comedy and drama, working with Blumhouse and Jamie Lee Curtis and living in fear that someone would beat them to dramatising the real-life robbery.
Six years ago, US screenwriter Brian Donovan was at a Christmas cocktail party in his hometown of Boston when his brother-in-law made a passing reference to the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.
Until that point, Donovan hadn’t heard of the Quebec robbery that saw around 3,000 tonnes of maple syrup, valued at around C$18.7m (US$13.3m), being stolen over a two-year period in 2011 and 2012, making it the largest heist in Canada’s history at the time.
Donovan was instantly fascinated by the story and, after quizzing his Canuck brother-in-law, texted his writing partner Ed Herro about exploring a scripted series dramatising the heist.
The writers immediately began reading everything they could about the incident and soon after were mapping out a potential story. But in an era when it’s almost impossible to find a stranger-than-fiction news story that hasn’t already been pounced upon by a major streaming service, Donovan and Herro thought it was too good to be true.
“When we saw the story, we were like, how has no one touched this yet?” says Herro. “We kept assuming through the whole process that somebody was going to beat us to this gold.”
The pair set about writing a spec script, though they concede they had little to no expectation the show would get made. As they sent the script to their then agent, the hope was that it “might get us a job somewhere,” explains Donovan.
Their agent had more faith than they did, insisting it was something that could be sold to a network or streamer. Shortly afterwards it was sent out to a handful of producers. The first response came back quickly from Blumhouse, the horror-focused, Jason Blum-led indie juggernaut that has increasingly been playing in the scripted television space. Within a week of the script being sent out, Donovan and Herro were meeting with Blumhouse Television.
From there, major pieces of the production puzzle continued to fall into place. Jamie Lee Curtis boarded the project as an executive producer (through her production banner Comet Pictures) and in a guest starring role. In addition, US actor Margo Martindale (Justified, The Americans) signed on as one of the leads alongside Canadians Chris Diamantopoulos (Silicon Valley) and Guillaume Cyr (Louis Cyr).
“We always assume the worst in our careers because we’re comedy writers, but the pieces just started to come together,” says Herro.
The show is also produced by Jonathan Levine’s Megamix and Quebec-headquartered Sphere Media. As well as Donovan, Herro and Curtis, exec producers on the show include Jonathan Levine and Gillian Bohrer for Megamix; Blum, Chris Dickie, Jeremy Gold and Chris McCumber for Blumhouse Television; Michael Dowse; and Lauren Grant; Josée Vallée and Bruno Dubé for Sphere Media. Michael Dowse and Joyce Wong direct.
But while further high-level attachments were secured, and with Prime Video on board, external factors began to work against them, initially in the form of the pandemic, which threatened to derail the project, and later the US writers strike. Those delays only heightened Herro and Donovan’s paranoia that someone else would beat them to dramatising the story of the maple syrup heist.
The pair, who are co-creators and showrunners on the series, surmise that others had probably “taken a swing” at adapting the event for the screen, but might have struggled because, tonally, it is an “odd” story to tell in a scripted setting.
“It’s not immediately clear: should the maple syrup heist be done as a pure comedy? Should it be done as a serious drama? I think people probably tried those two angles,” says Herro, while Donovan describes the show as “our weird take on historical fiction.”
“The one that we found works the best is a little comedy and drama because it’s peculiar and it’s funny, but it’s also desperate, high stakes and people die. So it’s nice to have a mix of all that can happen in a story in this one crazy tale,” says Herro.
The influences upon the project were varied, spanning the Coen Brothers, whose style subverts and parodies existing genres, to Donnie Brasco and The Silence of the Lambs.
“You can kind of see the little bits of a lot of different things in here because we were inspired by stories that we love and not really worrying about the genre,” says Donovan.
Herro says this show probably couldn’t have been made 10 years ago because of its tonal ambiguity. “The industry has shifted. The streaming platforms have allowed stuff to be in the middle now, not just one or the other.”
He adds that he feels comedy television has evolved to a place where there’s a “blurred middle” between comedy and drama, as evidenced by series like FX’s The Bear. “I hope that this this meaty middle part we found thrives because I want to keep doing this for now.”
Production on the project began in early 2023, with all filming taking place on location in Quebec, close to Montreal. The showrunners say the production cycle went about as smoothly as they could have hoped, with the likes of Lee Curtis and Martindale helping to light up the set with their work ethic and passion for the project and their craft.
As for whether the show could extend beyond the initial six-episode first season, Donovan says there is “a lot left there on the table to talk about.”
“When we pitched it, we thought of it as a five-season story,” he adds. “A maple syrup heist of this size, the biggest crime at the time in Canadian history, is a complicated thing and so there’s a ton more we want to do as these characters evolve as this crime changes them.”
Until then, Herro and Donovan say they’re still worried that a different scripted series based on the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist will pop up. “We’re still living in fear until December 6 when it launches on Prime Video,” says Donovan.
tagged in: Blumhouse, Blumhouse Television, Brian Donovan, Comet Pictures, Ed Herro, Jamie Lee Curtis, Megamix, Prime Video, Sphere Media, The Sticky