


Dark city

Leading man Paul Leyden plays Spence McKay, a psychiatrist as troubled as his patients, in Canal Road.


Bridget McManus
April 10, 2008

There's not a tram or a palm-lined esplanade in sight in Nine's new made-in-Melbourne drama series Canal Road. Instead, a dirty great Connex train steams into Southern Cross Station, aerial shots sweep ominously over the city's night skyline and sinister figures lurk in graffiti-covered laneways. The big brown river appears as itself, murky and swirling, with anxious young professionals running by it and rowing on it.

The overall effect is of a dark and brooding city where pale and beautiful people struggle against an undercurrent of danger and despair.

With its dramatic, filmic production quality and interwoven plotlines of sorrow and manipulation, Canal Road is in keeping with a sharp shift away from sunny series that have been the hallmark of Australian television drama. Recent shows such as Nine's gangland drama Underbelly (still banned in Melbourne owing to ongoing legal action involving its real-life stars) and Showcase's brothel drama Satisfaction paint a very different Australia to the one that sparkled by the sea in Ten's The Secret Life of Us, or glowed by rural twilight in McLeod's Daughters.

Melbourne is the location of choice for producers of television noir. Along with Underbelly and Satisfaction, US miniseries Nightmares and Dreamscapes, from the stories of Stephen King (which aired here on pay TV last year) was shot here.

Filmed in the middle of winter, in and around the Banana Alley Vaults underneath Flinders Street Station, Canal Road shines a flashlight on another seedy side of the city - the machinations of a busy medical-legal drop-in centre where heroin addicts, homeless people and cash-strapped city workers collide.

"(The location) is so gorgeous," says co-producer Susan Bower. "We don't understand why people haven't shot there before. We're showing Melbourne like it's never been shown. The Yarra features really heavily in this - bodies come up from the Yarra, people contemplate by the Yarra, people come to work in some of those little canal boats. The Yarra has a personality... The Secret Life of Us made Melbourne groovy and we haven't gone for that look. We've gone for inner-city apartment living, not suburban or beach living."

Bower, who took over as executive producer of Ten's Neighbours this year, and whose credits include Nine's Sea Patrol and McLeod's Daughters, says Canal Road was 10 years in the making, at least in her mind. A former nurse who got her scriptwriting break through providing medical information for A Country Practice (on which her sister Lynn Bayonas was producer), Bower was inspired by her own experiences, and those of her colleagues working in medical-legal centres.

"We're exploring the top and the bottom end of town," says Bower. "Because of the physical area that it's in, you're going to get your professionals, lawyers, PAs, anybody who needs their flu injection, the Pill, anyone who is ill, going overseas and needs injections, or who has a rash, and they have no health cover because they spend all their money on their social life, their clothes and their drugs and their holidays . . . you'll have homeless and disadvantaged people coming in but you'll also have lawyers who are Pethidine addicts or heroin addicts. These centres exist, they're all over the place. We have had dramatic licence with ours. I sat in at the one in Crown Street, Surry Hills, in Sydney, but there's another called North Yarra in Collingwood and it can be anybody who walks through the door."

Bower admits the premise is a bit of a mystery. Descriptions of the synopsis can cause confusion about whether it is a medical drama, a legal drama, a psycho-thriller or, at times, a romantic mini-soap.

"The medico-legal thing throws you," she says. "It's not a medical show. We don't do immunisations, we don't do stories about people with headaches or a stroke victim or anything like that. It's a bit like (US legal series) The Practice in as much as it is a law story, but it's also about the people and it isn't your normal open-and-shut cases. It's not at all like MDA . . . The idea is that nothing is what it seems, that there is always intrigue, that there is mystery to everything."

The plot centres on handsome young psychiatrist Spence McKay, played by LA-based Australian actor Paul Leyden, a household name in America thanks to five years on US soap As the World Turns. Grieving the loss of his wife and son in what he mistakenly thought was an accident, Spence is angry and alone. He can find no comfort in the arms of his female colleagues at the Canal Road centre, despite their fawning affections. Instead he employs the services of a glamorous prostitute (Klara Lisy), who, it seems, is also enamoured of him. ("Can't you find someone to do that to for free?" she asks incredulously when time is up.)

When not gazing dreamily at Spence, the women at Canal Road are ensconced in their own tormented personal lives. Workaholic GP Olivia Bates (Diana Glenn, Satisfaction) could "run a small country" but can't find love. Corrections officer Holly Chong (Peta Sergeant, Satisfaction), is being stalked by a criminally insane client. The hard-partying ways of community nurse Bridget Keenan (Brooke Satchwell, Dangerous) find her in embarrassing situations, such as being handcuffed naked to a hotel bed by a Siberian backpacker. And the cyber-infused world of dizzy receptionist Skye Brady (Alyssa McClelland) is about to unravel horribly.

Over at Spence's Collins Street private practice, patient Daina Connelly (Sibylla Budd, The Secret Life of Us), a high-flying lawyer, is playing a dangerous game with her shrink, one that, given she is a sociopath, will no doubt end in somebody's tears.

Thrown into the mix are disgraced lawyer and current legal aid worker Steve Yunnane (Patrick Brammall), flirty physiotherapist Tom Squires (Charlie Clausen), personal care assistant and petty criminal Henry Walter (Sam Anderson) and brash ladies' man Detective Ray Driscoll (Grant Bowler, Outrageous Fortune, Lost).

"Ray is very much the counterpoint to that storyline," says Bowler. "When I discovered I was playing the foil to a psychiatrist, I thought, wouldn't it be fun if the nemesis of the psychiatrist was the most dysfunctional, facetious, sarcastic, type-A dominant male we could possibly find? He operates purely on sarcasm, everything's about a competition, and it's great."

As Wolfgang West on Outrageous Fortune, New Zealand's answer to Shameless, Bowler experienced the twisted side of television, something he wishes was more prominent in the Australian industry.

"Outrageous Fortune is a far more politically incorrect show than anything I've ever done, but Kiwis have a different sensibility," he says. "They're far less conservative than we are. I also think because (television productions) there are far more heavily government-subsidised (than here), and because they've got such a small market in their local product, what they make tends to have a far greater cultural identity to them. I think Aussie television can get a bit earnest, a bit Dudley Do-right. Everybody wears their seatbelt and salutes and does all the right things at the right time, and though that's lovely and laudable, I don't think it's necessarily reflective. Complex characters and difficult situations are really nice to see on screen.

"In commercial television especially there's an enormous temptation not to offend anyone and what we tend to do is dampen things down. I think reality television gave us practitioners a good kick up the bum. Now there are shows being made where there's a lot more unpredictability. You look at the stuff we import, like Boston Legal, Prison Break, 24, all of these huge smash shows are all about surprise and unpredictability. They're all about people behaving badly. They're horribly flawed, almost completely non-functional but we can't help but fall in love with them," Bowler says.

Sibylla Budd says that although the Canal Road script brought to mind The Sopranos, at first she had trouble envisaging how it would work on Australian screens.

"It was hard to imagine this dark, fictitious world and how it would play on television," Budd says. "But it's great, it's really edgy and you can relate to all the characters. It's good character drama as well as having a film noir feel to it."

The challenge with making Canal Road, says Susan Bower, is that the concept evolved as filming progressed. "Our brief from Nine was that there was to be no serial content as such. It wasn't like, 'You must watch next week to find out what happens'. What ended up happening was that there is serial content, but if you were to tune into episode nine, you wouldn't be confused. But there is a 13-part murder mystery that unfolds, with loose ends being tied up by the end of the series. The reward, if you watch it every week, is that it will build on things."

Bower says the finished product is "a very different animal" to her original idea a decade ago.

"As an independent producer, you keep looking at the trends. You keep seeing what's working, you see that someone's taken your idea, so you paint it yellow instead of blue and you just keep moving with it . . . It's still based on lots of real stories. Some have been taken out of the newspaper. Some are really well known. We've gone for the top-end stories, the tabloid stuff, and it will be our gift and our curse because people will watch it and go, 'What?' And whether they go, 'Nah!' or they go with it is entirely up to them but it's heightened. It's not a story you would find on All Saints or even City Homicide."

For a producer who has built her career on the lighter side of Australian television drama, Bower is enthusiastic about the darker, murkier series on our screens.

"I think you'll always have your Sea Patrols, which is tried-and-true storytelling, " she says. "There's been a resurgence of drama and it's because I think the general public got the idea that we weren't going to see any of our actors or hear our own voices telling our own stories on television. I think the journalists got behind us and it was a case of, do you not want to see your Country Practices and your Sullivans and your All Saints and all of those things that we know and love?

"I think it's terribly important that we keep hold of our culture. The French have a minster who just looks after television and film because it's their culture, they recognise that. Australia is very 'Oh she'll be right, mate' about our culture, until it's gone. Just because there's a generation that loves video clips, they'll still sit and watch television. They might download it but they'll watch it. And we have to give them things that they want to watch."

Canal Road airs Wednesday at 8.30pm on Nine.

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