Westerns have long been told from the perspective of the fortune-hunting white male living the “Go west, young man” dream.
Sure, women (not to mention minorities) sacrificed and bled for Canadian westward expansion, too, but we haven’t heard their stories – at least, not until now, and we’ve got the national broadcaster to thank for this historic moment.
In the aftermath of well-publicized budget cuts, CBC Television is making a bold statement with Strange Empire, the groundbreaking series from the mind and pen of veteran TV scribe Laurie Finstad Knizhnik (Durham County).
Set on the Alberta-Montana border a couple of years after Confederation, Strange Empire goes where no western has gone before, delving deep into the dark and twisted lives of a trio of complicated women.
There’s Kat Loving (portrayed by Cara Gee of Empire of Dirt fame), a would-be rancher turned righteous gunslinger; Dr. Rebecca Blithely (Melissa Farman), a cold and curious surgeon raised in a laboratory as an experiment in female intelligence; and Isabelle Slotter (Tattiawna Jones), a driven, purportedly psychic madam and wife to Captain John Slotter (Aaron Poole), the lone male lead whose extreme choice in the pilot episode – to kill off all of the men of a stagecoach party, thus stranding the women in Janestown, his mining camp – sets the high drama in motion.
Though it’s filmed in and around the Aldergrove studio that once housed Arctic Air’s interior sets – and, according to the unit publicist who accompanied Westender on a recent set visit, 60% of Strange Empire’s crew worked on the now-cancelled adventure drama – that’s where similarities to any of the CBC’s other series end.
The characters occupy a grey zone of moral ambiguity more befitting an HBO or Netflix show than the safe family fare we’ve come to expect from the national broadcaster. Strange Empire’s heroines and heroes can each in turn be violent, vile, vulnerable, vain, selfless, kind, and seductive, sometimes all of these in a single moment.
“The mortality rates made life not life. Life was survival and in order to survive, you had to make really difficult choices you had to live with, and in many ways, those choices were either going to turn you into a hero or a villain, most likely both,” says Farman, seated in one of Janestown’s whorehouses, referred to in the conceit of the show as “cribs.”
Finstad Knizhnik says she always wanted to do a western, because “I like genre, and for writers, genre is a wonderful scaffold for all sorts of stories.”
In Strange Empire, she gets to tell stories from our nation’s past that have long gone untold: about women, miners, railroad builders, Civil War refugees, mystics, the Metis, and the grim realities of life and death in the wilderness.
“It was a great thing to essay upon, the western in Canada, because it’s a very American genre, and we haven’t really looked at it,” says Finstad Knizhnik. “We’ve always had this very starched and tidy idea of our history, and it’s not really very tidy. There are all these stories, particularly from this era, that were never told, and they do need telling.”
Her actors are reveling in the nuances of their untidy characters.
“With [Finstad Knizhnik], she’s fascinated with the minutiae and motivation. Everyone says they are, not many people actually are, and even fewer are to the extent that she is,” says Poole, his character’s signature black cowboy hat perched on his head. “There’s a lot of empathy and you can understand why [my character] makes the choices that he does. I’m not a caricature. I have a black hat, but that’s about where it ends.”
Despite the fact that Strange Empire is largely populated by women, the actors and show-runner are loathe to label it a “women’s western” or feminist drama. “It’s not about being a woman, and it’s not ‘rah, rah, rah, girl power in the Wild West’ at all,” says Gee.
“The three women aren’t exactly on the same team, and they are varying degrees of good and evil, and they’re complex, as women are, and as men are,” says Gee. “This is a story about the people who were actually there and whose stories have been completely written over. The dark, moving truth of that.”
Watch for featured performances by Vancouver acting dynamos April Telek, Ali Liebert, Anne Marie DeLuise, and Terry Chen.
Strange Empire airs Monday nights at 9pm on CBC. #strangeempire
ABOUT THE SET
The Strange Empire set is located on a sprawling farm/studio hybrid in Aldergrove. The main studio building houses many of Strange Empire’s interiors, while the grounds surrounding the studio play host to Janestown (a gritty and convincingly old-timey concentration of newly built shacks known in the vernacular of the show as “cribs”), the camp where the Chinese railway workers live (and through which several show chickens roam freely 24/7), assorted tents, and the façade of the Slotter’s mansion. The show’s horses live and play in a spacious pasture on the property.
MELISSA FARMAN ON DR. REBECCA BLITHELY
“I play Rebecca Blithely and she is a surgeon in training. She grows up between an asylum and a laboratory and she’s educated as an experiment to test female scientific ability. So she’s very much an outsider to the Victorian society around her, even though she very much feels its repressive norms, and here she is all of the sudden in this wild west, this land of complete lawlessness, and for the first time she’s free to discover what autonomy and freedom mean to her. It’s very exciting for her and at the same time daunting to realize that she has a journey to take in terms of realizing who she is and who she wants to be.”
CARA GEE ON KAT LOVING
“I think she’s definitely one of the strongest characters I’ve ever played. She’s pretty fierce. If we put all of my characters that I’ve ever played into a battle royale, I think Kat would probably win. At the opening of the whole thing, she’s travelling west with her family to start a ranch. Things go horribly awry pretty much right away, and she finds herself alone in this lawless land just fighting for survival.
“The things that she survives – if I had any of the experiences that she has, I’d be curled up in a corner! She’s very strong, and that’s what it would have taken to survive those circumstances. She’s very moral, and she wants truth and justice, and she becomes a bit blinded by that, I think. What is the line between strength and rage?”
AARON POOLE (JOHN SLOTTER) ON SIMILARITIES BETWEEN NOW & THEN
“We live in a heavily compromised time now. All of us exist in a privilege that comes from a compromise that we choose mostly to ignore, and I think that the characters in our television and our entertainment reflect that secret that we don’t talk about.
"And this show in particular addresses the relationship with the land where we’re digging stuff up out of the earth in order to make an income to survive. It’s no different from the kind of things that we’re fighting about in the news now, with the things that we’re talking about Canada overseas about.”
LAURIE FINSTAD KNIZHNIK ON WHY SHE LIKES GENRE STORYTELLING
"[I] like genre because I can take it apart. In Durham County, I wanted to take a look at a serial killer, and instead of treating it like the serial killer as scapegoat, I wanted to look at what we’re trying to scapegoat, our own violence and so on, and so I wanted to create a protagonist and the antagonist and just explore that. So with the western, I wanted to do the same thing. There are the same conventions and stereotypes and tropes and clichés, and particularly where women are concerned, and minorities.”
