"I think when you can clearly identify with the adventures of the heroes and the antiheroes, you can really have a good time, and that's entertainment. So I'm mixing it up. There's times when you can sign on completely with the adventure, and there's other times when you think, 'wow, would I do that?'"
Played winningly by Ian Tracey (Da Vinci's Inquest, Milgaard), crime boss Jimmy Reardon is "a good bad guy," a devoted father who struggles with the violence and deceit of his criminal activities. He's fiercely protective of his family, which is both his most endearing quality and his biggest vulnerability.
"He plays this hard guy to perfection, but he's also got a lot of empathy, so he's really easy for people to identify with, that essential good nature of him," Haddock said of his charismatic leading man.
He was similarly full of praise for Klea Scott (Brooklyn South, Millennium) as spy master Mary Spalding. "I was looking for somebody who could really represent the struggle it is for a woman of colour to work in a bureaucracy and rise to the top and not be held to a lower level of competence, and really evolve into a leader."
The head of Vancouver's Organized Crime Unit, she is vying for a promotion to CSIS, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. She'd landed Reardon as her prized informant by the end of the Intelligence movie.
The series will explore that precarious relationship, as Reardon uses the information she feeds him to his advantage, and Spalding tries to balance her need for Reardon's cooperation with the possibility of giving him too much power.
Despite the intricate plots and numerous supporting characters, Haddock isn't worried about losing an audience who might not want to make the commitment to a serialized show. "People will watch it for the characters, and the plots are not the first and foremost only thing about the show," he said. "I made a conscious decision to write it in a certain style so it's more about the characters and their lives than it is about the specific details of the plot. But it does have a taste of the procedural in it, because we're talking about intelligence and the criminal world."
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