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Canwest News Service
Television
Cra$h & Burn
When and where: Wednesday nights at 9 on Showcase
There was a learning curve for the Vancouver players among the cast of the Hamilton-filmed TV series Cra$h & Burn.
The series, from sometime Deadwood writer Malcolm MacRury, is a black-comic drama that follows a team of insurance adjusters and investigators. The show stars Ontario's Luke Kirby as a rookie adjuster for a private insurance company, with Vancouver's Caroline Cave as the company's hard-boiled lawyer.
Cave, whose own father is a personal-injuries lawyer in Vancouver, says the show's world of rival insurance types verbally duking it out over car-accident scenes was new to someone raised in the land of ICBC.
"The private insurance companies lobbying for work, these big advertising billboards up all over southern Ontario — when I first moved here I thought it was totally bizarre, how commercial it is," says Cave, who nonetheless got some input from her dad on the legal world. "There's stuff I don't understand that he's been able to answer. I grew up meeting female lawyers, watching them. I've seen how they had to operate — it's a male-dominated world, they have to be tough."
Also among the B.C. actors in the show's cast are Leela Savasta as the girlfriend of Kirby's character, Steve Bacic as a crooked auto-body shop owner, and Jane Sowerby as the insurance company's sardonic office manager. As well, Vancouver director Anne Wheeler was behind the camera for the premiere episode and several others.
The first two episodes set up some multi-faceted characters and complex situations with tight writing and subtle performances — Clark Johnson (the hero newspaper editor of The Wire) is a standout as the world-weary company investigator.
The plots include paper-driven insurance-fraud schemes and some more direct criminal ventures, as when the auto-body gang remove a dentist's teeth to persuade him to join in a medical-insurance scam.
Cave's role as lawyer Angela Wyatt has the theatre-trained actor stretching her chops, as Wyatt keeps up the tough front at work while her personal life hits the rocks.
"I knew they could take my character a lot of different places," Cave says over the phone from a small town outside Hamilton, where they're just finishing episode 11. "She's groomed to be this hot-shot Toronto lawyer and she finds herself in Hamilton. She numbs out with booze and sex, then she gets to a place where she's quite clean and present, and falls in love."
Filming wraps in early December, and then Cave heads back to Vancouver for a planned New Year's Eve wedding to her accountant fiancé.
"It's kind of nice to have people who do totally different things," says Cave, who will have to balance the gypsy actor's life with married life.
That gypsy life played a role in the New Year's Eve wedding date at her mother-in-law's waterfront West Van home. "We didn't want to wait until next summer, and this is when everybody has time off.
It's romantic and it's a good beginning."
Cave last appeared on a Vancouver stage in January of this year as a 1960s southern belle who seduces her father's black chauffeur in a production of Miss Julie: Freedom Summer. In a total switch, she was also among the victims in this fall's Toronto-filmed Saw VI. For now, home is a Toronto condo, and married life will be split between two cities.
"If this show goes another season, which I hope it does, then he'll come here, but I think eventually home will be Vancouver," says Cave.
A second season of Cra$h & Burn would likely start filming in the spring.
"But again, who knows? You have to be comfortable with the unknown," adds Cave.
gschaefer@theprovince.com
