Vancouver Complication

English Canada's best TV dramatist: Chris Haddock, creator of the new CBC series, Intelligence. (Haddock Entertainment)

Lounging in a Toronto hotel suite, fizzing Perrier in hand, TV producer Chris Haddock still manages to resemble a honky-tonk minstrel. This should come as no surprise, given that Haddock, who is on the road promoting his new CBC crime series, Intelligence, has been working the cool shadows of bright, beautiful British Columbia for nearly half a century.

“I played a fiddle on Vancouver street corners when I was eight, in 1960,” Haddock recalls, threading his hands through lank, shoulder-length silver-brown hair. “In high school, I borrowed a Bell and Howell eight-millimetre camera to make a documentary about homeless people on the Lower Eastside for social science.”

Haddock also busked liquor stores and played in bar bands up and down British Columbia. A friend got him writing for TV and soon he was shuttling from Vancouver to Los Angeles, labouring on ’80s crime shows like MacGyver and Mom P.I. In the ’90s, the prodigal returned home to produce his most acclaimed social science project, following fictional coroner Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell) along a career path littered with dead bodies.

“Da Vinci’s Inquest was a response to the B.C. media’s rampant tourism,” Haddock says.

“The press is bereft of good local coverage. Everything is always ‘groovy’ here,” he sighs, making imaginary quotation marks. “I wanted to make a true, adult series about the city I knew.”

Based on a 2005 TV movie, Intelligence, like Da Vinci’s Inquest, is set in Vancouver, but the scope of the 13-part series extends beyond city limits. Organized Crime Unit (OCU) boss Mary Spalding (Klea Scott) has made a deal with the devil, recruiting a marijuana millionaire, Jimmy Reardon (Ian Tracey) as a star informant. She’s hoping for information on international crime rings — intel that might allow her to advance within the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). In return, Jimmy wants immunity from prosecution, along with the occasional heads-up on biker gang rivals who are murdering his grow-op workers.

Though Haddock’s new series deals with international crime, Intelligence is arguably the most personal work of the filmmaker’s career. The show also offers a rustic western hero who might be the spiritual son of Bruno Gerussi’s garrulous freelance entrepreneur, Nick Adonidas, on the ’70s TV hit, The Beachcombers.

Dark prince of pot: Marijuana dealer Jimmy Reardon (Ian Tracey) is also a police informant in Intelligence. (CBC)

“When I was in a band, there really was an ideal that many people [in B.C.] had about ‘living free,’” the filmmaker explains. “I felt that way myself. And yeah, there were beachcombers. Fishing or working seasonally in the lumber industry were career options for people who didn’t want careers.

“But when fishing and lumber jobs disappeared in the ’70s, some rounders, men like Jimmy Reardon, took to selling pot to survive. Well, they did more than that. B.C. bud is now a thriving, $4-5 billion [annual] industry.”

Haddock laughs when asked if it was hard imagining the life of a covert drug dealer. “Hey, I pretended to be an American in Los Angeles. Canadian filmmakers have been smuggling cultural goods into Hollywood for years.”

Intelligence is also personal for Haddock in that the series represents the summation of a lengthy apprenticeship in TV. “There is a lot to figure out about the serial TV drama,” he says. “Dedicated craftsmen improve. Look at David Chase, who was writing The Rockford Files in the ’70s and is now doing The Sopranos. There are skills, tricks that you acquire.”

For some reason, perhaps it’s the magnanimous hippie in him, Haddock doesn’t mind sharing his own tricks. Asked why his new series parades characters through shadowy hallways behind partially drawn blinds, the filmmaker smiles.

“When I did The Handler [a 2003-04 dramatic series for CBS], I worked with a director, Mick Jackson, who showed me that when you’re trying to draw the viewer into a sinister story, you place objects in their path to make them feel like they too are hiding, spying on characters,” Haddock says. “They feel complicit in your espionage.”

Haddock drafted Ottawa actress Klea Scott from the Michael Mann TV series Robbery Homicide Division to play Intelligence’s OCU boss, Mary Spalding. He also provided the character with a familiar conversational tic. “Mary ends her sentences with a question, ‘Yahh?’ It’s something Helen Mirren’s character used in Prime Suspect to trick underlings into acknowledging her authority. It worked so well in Intelligence we kept on using it.”

Haddock also incorporates dark bits of Vancouver lore into Intelligence, drawing upon a scandal that affected British Columbia’s Co-ordinated Law Enforcement Unit (CLEU). In 1998, the agency disintegrated when a Hong Kong recruit was found to be passing information back to Asian gangs. Later, the B.C. government created a new force to combat organized crime, importing a female RCMP officer from Saskatchewan, Beverley Busson, to lead the unit. Busson would become the model for Haddock’s own interloper, Spalding.

Crime-fighting partner: Mary Spalding (Klea Scott), director of Vancouver's Organized Crime Unit. (CBC)

Only a gifted magpie could perform the trick of combining so many voices and bits of storyline into an urgent drama, and the first episodes of Intelligence indicate that Haddock has, if anything, improved upon his reputation as English Canada’s most persuasive TV dramatist. Pensive, stylish and lightning quick, the series boasts an array of addictive characters. Mary’s nemesis in the department, squinting, scheming Ted Atlas (Max Headroom’s Matt Frewer), is great fun as a demented Clint Eastwood type. And Camille Sullivan (Suki in Da Vinci’s Inquest) is quite touching as Jimmy Reardon’s lost and lonely party girl ex-wife. Best of all, we have millionaire dope dealer Reardon and his unlikely partner in crime fighting, Spalding, fatalistic loners engaged in a high-wire professional friendship. A relationship that we sense will, at any moment, flame into a romance that destroys them both.

Klea Scott and Ian Tracey (who played Mick Leary in Da Vinci’s Inquest and Da Vinci’s City Hall) offer authentic, charismatic movie star turns in the series — a twin accomplishment that turns writer-producer Haddock into a fan. “I just love watching them together on screen,” he said. “You can’t write chemistry. It’s them.”

Haddock is just as enthusiastic explaining why he feels compelled to put what’s happening in the dark corners of Vancouver on TV. “What I want to do is create rock and roll television!” the filmmaker exulted.

And for a moment you can see the dreamy musician who covered the B.C. waterfront in the ’70s, playing in a thousand small-town bars. “That was the great thing about rock and roll. You could write a song about what was happening on Thursday, go into a studio Friday, and the record would be out in two weeks. To do that with television, man, that would be fantastic.”

The first episode of Intelligence airs Tuesday, Oct. 10 on CBC-TV.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.

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