Wild about Anna
Director Lea Thompson and showrunner Morwyn Brebner discuss making their upcoming wilderness crime series Anna Pigeon, finding the perfect star for the title role and why there aren’t enough characters like her on television.
For 10 years, actor and director Lea Thompson has been championing an adaptation of the Anna Pigeon novels by American author Nevada Barr. Now, after partnering with showrunner Morwyn Brebner, a 10-part series – called Anna Pigeon – is in post-production ahead of its debut on USA Network and Bell Media in Canada this summer.
Starring Chicago PD’s Tracy Spiridakos, it introduces Anna, a former city slicker who leaves her job as a New York theatre stage manager to become a park ranger after a devastating loss changes her life forever. As Anna tries to outrun her demons, her focus turns to solving crimes that have taken place within national park grounds, no matter who or what gets in her way.
Produced by Cineflix, December Films and Seven24 Films, the show also stars Paulina Alexis as park ranger Zoey Bear Child and Ronnie Rowe as FBI agent Frederick Stanton. Tricia Helfer plays Anna’s older sister, NYC psychiatrist Molly Pigeon, and Kim Coates is Jeremiah Paulson, a wealthy landowner not afraid to break the rules.
Cineflix Rights is handling international distribution of the series, which was filmed in Calgary during the second half of 2025, and is launching the show to buyers during this week’s London TV Screenings.
“I love the idea of this female protagonist that’s a little bit messy,” Thompson tells DQ. “Anna is like Mother Nature. She’s strong, she’s wilful, she’s beautiful, she’s natural. She’s fighting for justice and nature and her friends and herself. I feel like there’s not enough of those characters, especially in America.
“I know in England, there’s a great tradition of not 20-year-old women [but] 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year-old women who solve murders, and they look like regular people. America needs more of that, and it definitely needs people to stand up for nature and honesty.”
A decade on from first optioning the rights to the novels, Thompson stuck with the project because “I felt an affinity to the character,” she says. “I love that she drinks too much. I love that she falls in bed with the wrong guy, maybe, and she’s flawed, but deeply moral.”
Rookie Blue, Saving Hope and Coroner creator Brebner came on board after being introduced to Anna Pigeon by producer Todd Berger (Reginald the Vampire, Wynonna Earp) and quickly fell for the novels in the same way Thompson did.
“One of the things I really loved about them was how [Barr] writes about nature and how visual and beautiful they are,” she says. “Along with the character, who’s amazing, one of the things that I love is this beautiful, visual tone that Lea set in the pilot, where we really feel the nature. We both really feel such a connection to that and feel that audiences will feel a connection to that too.”
The duo then found their perfect Anna in Spiridakos, though Thompson originally wanted to play the part herself. “Then I got way too old,” she laughs, “but Tracy does a way better job than I would have ever done. She’s amazing. We just got really lucky. She was our only choice.”
“She’s incredible,” adds Brebner. “She’s the kind of actor you can write anything for. You put her in any situation, she’s physically so present. She does all these things in the show – she’s climbing things, she’s falling off things. She’s going to be a revelation for people.”
They were also impressed that the actor let them do away with “network TV hair,” which is “always perfect,” and embraced a natural look for the role. “She just has a ‘real’ quality, which is really a hard thing to fight for,” Thompson says. “I love that the network let us make her look real and that we were all on the same page with that.
“This was something I felt really strongly about with AI coming in, that we need to make things more real to stay ahead of AI. Real beauty is in the quirks and in the messiness. There’s something deeply important for us to relate to other real people, so we can believe in stories in a very deep way. I love that about Tracy, and we really accomplished that with the way the show looks.”
Before writing the pilot, Brebner had “many, many” conversations with Thompson in the hope of understanding her own passion for the character and Barr’s stories. “It was like a quick marriage, but a really wonderful one,” she jokes.
But adapting a book for the screen “is so weird, because you want to give it its due and honour it, and then you also want to find something in yourself that you can bring to it. It’s really hard to find these characters where you can put so much of yourself into them.”
Anna, she notes, is “really funny,” just as Spiridakos is, which meant writing the show was “such a joy.” She also found the books carry a range of tones, and that Barr’s was an “incredible world” to live in.
“She also had to create all these new characters,” Thompson notes of Brebner’s job in establishing the series. “She had to take some ideas from the book, but create all these supporting characters, and she did an amazing job. Perfect characters. She had to come up with that, which was really hard.”
“It’s hard to talk about writing, because it takes place within the confines of your skull,” Brebner says. “But it was really freeing, because the books have certain types of characters who recur, and they also have incredibly important, specific characters over 19 books.” The first season centres on Barr’s 1993 novel Track of the Cat, which first introduces Anna Pigeon, while elements of a second book are introduced in the middle of the season.
The books also go from park to park, so figuring out where it was going to be set was an immediate challenge for Brebner. “We ended up shooting on this incredible backlot in Calgary, which is part of why the show looks so beautiful, because we don’t shoot in a studio. We shoot outside,” she says. “It’s weird. You make all these decisions and gradually you go on your instincts, which we were both doing the entire time, and then gradually it starts to take shape.”
Anna Pigeon isn’t the first time Brebner has created a television series – “I think my secret is that I’m very weird” – but this one isn’t quite like anything she has worked on before, from story structure to the environment in which the show is set.
“I feel like Anna is a procedural, but it’s also the story of this woman and who she is in the world, her love for the underdog and her reason for being in a park, which is really specific,” she says. The mystery surrounding why she left New York, which somehow involves her husband, is woven through the first season.
“She’s a park ranger, it’s a very particular lens on life, so I found that fascinating,” the showrunner says. “And I found Lea’s love for big Americana and westerns really inspiring. It felt unlike anything I’d worked on before. It helps to be very curious about the material and about other people, and very curious about the world. It’s deeper than being about a park ranger who’s solving crimes.”
The show marks the first time Thompson – a director for 22 years but best known for acting roles in the Back to the Future film trilogy, Caroline in the City and Switched at Birth – has shot a series pilot. She also filmed episodes two, nine and 10, in addition to executive producing the series.
Her directing prep began with picking out locations that could provide breathtaking views within the confines of a limited budget. “I am in love with the vistas of America and the idea of protecting the outdoors, protecting nature,” she says. “It became very important that we had enough resources that we could get these beautiful shots.” That meant Anna Pigeon became a “drone workout” as Thompson got to grips with the flying tech. She also immediately decided she wanted to use sun flares, with the ambition of further highlighting the show’s natural settings.
It was an approach Brebner supported. “She wanted to make breath and space and time for the nature,” Thompson says, “and it feels like a breath of air to watch the show. It’s like you’ve gone on a little vacation.”
From their homes in LA and Toronto, respectively, Thompson and Brebner “met in the middle” and spent five months together during production in Calgary, an experience Brebner describes as “epic.”
“You drive to the backlot every day, the sun is rising, the mountains you can see are turning red some days, some days they’re turning pink, and there are deer in the road,” she remembers. “We both really spent this intensive time along with all the other artists and craftspeople who worked on the show bringing the show to life. It was an epic journey. It was really something. There was such a sense of everyone bringing everything they had to the show. We’ve just lived through this incredible time, and I feel so lucky.”
Brebner’s pilot script gave Thompson “a really great blueprint” to set up the show, which was filmed in two-episode blocks. “That was nice, because they would inform each other,” the director says. “Sometimes you shoot a pilot and you come back in six months and you start shooting episode two. When I did Caroline in the City, I lost 50 lbs from the pilot – I’d just had a baby – so we didn’t have that. We just jumped right in.”
Then once production began, there was no let-up for Spiridakos, who is in almost every scene. “She was this incredible rock star, allowing Anna to grow and flourish and change through the season,” Brebner says. “She was a cool person to take that journey with.”
Did Thompson join her on set for a cameo? “No, I was busy enough,” she says.
Meanwhile, Brebner was getting to grips with filming beside rivers and overseeing cougars, which appear in the first episode.
“Your challenge is always time and your physical constraints,” she says of filming. “In the end, you realise you have to write to what you have. You can’t be like, ‘The river is full’ if the river is an inch of water. So there are days when you’re just like, ‘OK, the sun’s dropping like a rock. This is what we can get.’ It was just like this outdoor roller coaster, really.”
Now adding the finishing touches to the series, Thompson says that with Anna Pigeon, she and Brebner made a show they want to watch. “And we’re cool, so what can I say?”
When viewers get to meet Anna Pigeon, Thompson wants them to feel that “there still is a possibility of justice, kindness, goodness, and to have this really powerful, beautiful, complicated woman at the forefront.” She adds: “It’s also really sexy, it’s funny, it’s exciting, and there’s a juicy little mystery to solve. People love that stuff. It’s got everything I want in a TV show.”
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tagged in: Anna Pigeon, Bell Media, Cineflix, December Films, Lea Thompson, Morwyn Brebner, Seven24 Films, USA Network