The stuff that nightmares are made of
Tassie Cameron’s own bad dream about daughter being kidnapped led to Ten Days in the Valley
It all started with a nightmare. Every parent’s worst nightmare, in fact.
In the dream, Canadian scribe Tassie Cameron would be working in her writing shed in the middle of the night, her 8-year-old daughter Sadie safely asleep in the house just feet away. But when Cameron returned to the house after finishing a script, the doors would be locked and her daughter gone — kidnapped without a trace.
Sunday night (CTV, 10 p.m.), that scene plays out almost identically on the debut of Ten Days in the Valley: the 10-episode series starring Kyra Sedgwick that Cameron wrote after she’d had the dream half a dozen times.
“The dream was obviously born out of guilt about being a working mother. I mean that’s what my shrink and I decided it was, and that felt pretty accurate to me,” says Cameron, who at that point had just wrapped showrunning six seasons of Rookie Blue.
“You’re torn. You’re pulled away from your kid to do this really complicated job and that’s where the show started. I began thinking about who would be in that kind of woman’s life who might have a secret, and I just made a list of all these different characters and what their secrets could be, and I realized we had something potentially really interesting here.”
That working-mom guilt became a predominant theme of the series, which ABC picked up in full without even shooting a pilot.
Audiences meet busy TV showrunner Jane Sadler (Sedgwick) on the day her daughter is kidnapped, with each subsequent episode serving as another day in the case. At the same time, the show presents an array of questionable characters in Jane’s life (the nanny, the assistant, the ex-husband, the cop giving her juicy information to help feed her show’s storylines), all of whom could potentially have something to do with the kidnapping thanks to the secrets they harbour.
“I’ve never played someone who is quite like Jane before, who is such a seemingly complicated, almost slightly duplicitous, contradictory kind of character,” said Sedgwick, who also came on board as an exec- utive producer and had input on everything from casting to storylines.
“I was really excited about the concept of a good mother that’s not in the package of what you perceive as a good mother. That’s a conversation we need to have and should have,” she told TV critics in Los Angeles. “If I’m going to do television it’s always about reality for me. I’m not going to come into a living room and show a version of a woman that I’ve never met before.”
Cameron promises that by the time the show wraps audiences will have a clear idea of who kidnapped the girl and why, but several other storylines could serve as potential second season jumpoff points should the series prove successful. Meanwhile, she also puts another parental fear to rest: the child-in-peril theme that’s be- come so predominant on television these days.
“We follow the daughter throughout the season as well,” she promises. “I would turn the show off if I felt like there was a chance that this kid was going to be found in a dumpster, dead somewhere.”
Cameron says writing the series has been cathartic and her nightmares have since died off, making this a strangely fulfilling experience.
She admits she was nervous to create an unlikeable female lead and to place her in such a meta Hollywood situation given that audiences typically don’t respond to those types of characters and settings, but at the end of the day this was something she wanted to do for herself.
“My agents told me, ‘Don’t make her a showrunner.’ But I wasn’t writing this for anybody; I thought it would just be a sample. I thought, ‘I’ll just have fun with this and break all my own rules and just do it for me.’ It took me about a month to write the first draft and the nightmare stopped, I never had it again.”
Now let’s see how Jane’s own nightmare shakes out, shall we?
“I was really excited about the concept of a good mother that’s not in the package of what you perceive as a good mother. That’s a conversation we need to have.” KYRA SEDGWICK