Last night, ION Television took a big leap of faith with a new original series called Durham County. New to American audiences, anyway, since Toronto-based aired in Canada several years ago. The leap is not in showing a Canadian series to an American audience — Flashpoint proved that would be no problem.
The leap is in the subject matter and the style of the series, a sort of suburban Twin Peaks with a touch of Hitchcock. Let me be clear here that this show is not for everyone. One reviewer even said watching it made him uncomfortable and I’d agree. It makes you feel like a perverted voyeur and that’s something we don’t often see on network TV.
The show stars Flashpoint’s Hugh Dillon as Mike Sweeney, a homicide detective from Toronto who is looking to start over after his partner was gunned down and his wife nearly died of breast cancer. He moves his family to suburban Durham County but instead of Astroturf lawns and block parties, he gets a forest of electrical towers and a neighbor who might be a serial killer.
Justin Louis, who play neighbor Ray Prager, has been a staple on Canadian TV since the late 80’s. He’s currently working on Stargate Universe, but has also been a regular on 1-800-Missing and The Fighting Fitzgeralds. Louis is a great foil for Dillion’s Sweeney. He seems like a regular, working class Joe, but that’s just a mask to hide his true, demented personality.
And speaking of masks, one of the most disconcerting things about the show is actually one of the most innocent. Sweeney’s youngest daughter likes to wear one of those full anime heads that the cosplay kids wear. It has the huge eyes and the head is out of proportion to her body and it is creepy. At one point in the pilot, she meets a friend who is also wearing an anime puppet head and I have to think this is all in her imagination. The two of them sitting together talking about murder is very bizarre!
The most unusual element of the series is the Hitchcockian way it deals with the violence and there’s plenty. Where most crime shows have no problem showing a murder on screen, Durham County hides it by showing it through the eyes of Prager who is hidden in the woods. We see what he sees, snatches of two teen girls having a flirty picnic with an older man. Flirty turns to kinky, and kinky leads to rape and murder. Though you only see snippets through the trees, it’s truly horrifying maybe even moreso because Prager allows it to happen. What happens later, though, is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen on TV in a long time. And it’s funny, after a summer of watching people be eviscerated, snapped in two and burned alive on Harper’s Island, I didn’t think there was anything left that could give me the shivers but Durham County did just that.
If your taste in horror runs is more psychological thriller and less psycho slasher, watch Durham County on ION. They’ll be rerunning the pilot episode numerous times this week with new episodes running every Monday at 10:00 for eleven more weeks.
Photos: ION Television
L-R: Mike Sweeney (HUGH DILLON) and Ray Prager (JUSTIN LOUIS)
Ray Prager (JUSTIN LOUIS) and wife Traci (SONYA SALOMA) recline in chair
Tue, Sep 8, 2009
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