Walking through downtown Hamilton, you see aged buildings grin with broken windows subbing in as punched-out teeth. Loitering pedestrians fill the sidewalk, occasionally jaywalking to catch a lumbering bus or duck into a nudie bar.
It’s a beaten-down town, but it’s trying to fight its way back. Just like Jimmy Burn (Luke Kirby, Slings and Arrows), an insurance adjuster at a cutthroat Hamilton firm in Showcase’s original series Crash & Burn.
Jimmy’s the kind of guy you feel for, an Everyman who grabs at his dreams of middle-class comfort – wife, picket fence, the whole deal – yet is haunted by his shady past and pinched by the current economic climate.
Not to mention questionable clients, scheming lawyers, two-faced colleagues, the constant threat of downsizing and a certain Russian Mob boss.
“We’re never sure which way he’s going to go – whether he’s going to be a crook or a solid citizen, or whether he’s going to make it,” says Malcolm MacRury (ZOS: Zone of Separation, Deadwood), Crash & Burn’s executive producer, creator and showrunner.
“Every office has a family structure and hierarchy and politics, and every criminal organization does too. We discovered the world of con-men and insurance adjusters are symbiotic. No one would need insurance if there weren’t crooks. We wouldn’t pay for security if there wasn’t risk.”
Revelling in grit and corruption, yet allowing for dark humour, Crash & Burn sits apart from other Canadian productions, like CTV’s Flashpoint, CBC’s The Border, or Global’s The Guard. It helps that the 13-episode series was originally intended as an HBO project.
“We’re one of the few cable-type shows, so we can hopefully go further than more mainstream shows, in terms of character development, the kinds of situations and the ethics,” explains MacRury. “We don’t have to wrap things up neatly. Our aspirations are more along the lines of Mad Men, The Sopranos.”
Crash & Burn also has timing on its side. “It might speak to the current economic climate – definitely in the last year you hear more conversations about fiscal or money uncertainty,” 31-year-old Kirby muses in measured sentences, on the show’s Mississauga, Ont., set (it was also filmed on-location in Hamilton).
Filling out the cast are Leela Savasta (Battlestar Galactica) as Jimmy’s fiancée, Caroline Cave (The L Word) as an in-house lawyer, Clark Johnson (The Wire, The Shield) as an insurance investigator, and Steve Bacic (The Guard) as the aforementioned Russian Mob boss.
“Everyone in the story has some kind of aloneness; they’re just trying to get by," says Kirby, who was born in Hamilton. "[There] may be some accidental comedy. There are definitely some things that are heavy, but it’s reality. Hysteria, hilarity, sadness.”
Kind of like those gap-toothed grinning store fronts filling Jimmy’s industrial milieu.
“Hamilton is comfortable with rust and decay, and it’s a little bit refreshing to see that rather than a façade of perfection," murmurs Kirby. “There’s no beauty in perfection.”
Crash & Burn debuts Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showcase.
melissa@tvguide.ca
