When writer Laurie Finstad Knizhnik moved from Toronto to Pickering as an adolescent, "It felt like the world had been cut off," she said in a recent interview on the TV, eh? on Blogtalkradio.
The eerie, atmospheric Durham County she co-created with director Adrienne Mitchell is a six-part series that will air on Global television beginning Monday, May 19 at 10 p.m., and a product of her "adolescent resentment." It's a world where power lines dominate the grey landscape, and carefully manicured houses and lawns contrast with the turmoil of the families who live there.
Hugh Dillon (right) stars as morally ambiguous cop Mike Sweeney, who moves the suburbs with his wife, Audrey (Helene Joy), a nurse recovering from breast cancer, and his two daughters. He's not overjoyed to discover that his former nemesis Ray Prager (Justin Louis) lives across the street – less so when he begins to suspect the charming Ray is a serial killer who's 
getting a little too friendly with his wife.
"We weren't so interested in plot or investigation so much as we were interested in what it was to be in that situation," said Finstad Knizhnik. "We were hugely interested in the characters."
The characters are brought to life by a stellar but unexpected cast, headed by former Headstones frontman Dillon. Mitchell recalls meeting him for coffee at when they were still on the outline stage, before the scripts were even written. "This was when he still had hair; he had this jet black hair," she laughed. "He was totally blown away by it and really wanted to get involved."
At his audition, he was the unanimous choice for the role. "But he surprised us, because he came to the audition bald. We were all missing the hair. And now of course we think we couldn't have had it any other way."
"He's had such a fascinating and difficult life, coming back from the pit of despair and now just motoring," she marveled. "He's had a lot of hard knocks. He's had problems with addiction. So he has this edge to him, this internal tension of 'I could relapse but I'm not going to.' That's such a wonderful tension for our detective, and he connected to it so well. "
Article comments
1 - Diane Kristine
Thanks for doing so yourself. As I wrote to you privately, I did not mean to exclude you or anyone else involved in Durham County, but I interviewed co-creators Adrienne Mitchell and Laurie Finstad Knizhnik and needed to distinguish their roles, so refered to Adrienne as the director and Laurie as the writer. They credited you in the interview and praised you highly, but like many parts of the live interview, it didn't make it into my article. It is linked to here though.