‘Coroner’ takes on pandemic in new season
Season 3 premiere focuses on hard-hit long-term-care homes
Bobby is a devoted personalsupport worker toiling in a nursing home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The home is often short of PPE, so Bobby makes homemade masks for co-workers to bridge the gap.
Still, day by day, more and more stretchers are wheeled out of the home, containing the bodies of COVID victims.
Bobby is not a real person; she’s a character who figures prominently in the Season 3 premiere of the CBC drama “Coroner.”
Like many dramas returning during the pandemic, “Coroner” has chosen to incorporate the crisis into its plot lines.
“We never considered ignoring it,” creator Morwyn Brebner said during a phone interview. The show is “about a woman who tries to find truth for the dead and there’s so much death happening as a result of COVID.”
The pandemic has played an onscreen role in everything from comedies like “Superstore” and “The Conners,” to legal dramas like “All Rise” and “Law & Order: SVU.” But medical dramas already set on the front lines of health care are in a special category.
“Grey’s Anatomy,” for instance, had its main character, Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), contract the virus, while another doctor, Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson), struggled with a parent catching COVID in a seniors’ residence. “The Good Doctor” devoted a couple of episodes to the earliest days of the pandemic and “The Resident” had its doctors grapple with the virus in flashbacks in the season opener before moving to a post-pandemic future.
When Brebner wrote the Season 3 “Coroner” premiere, she considered not just how to portray the pandemic “in a substantial and poignant way,” but in a way that felt true to Toronto, where the show is set.
“I wrote a brief outline for … a hospital overflow situation, where there was a tent and stuff happening. And then it became apparent that that wasn’t the story that we were living in Toronto,” she said.
“Who has been the hardest hit and where this unbelievable death toll is, is very specific here” — hence the episode’s focus on a PSW and a long-termcare home.
And yet Brebner, along with director and executive producer
“It’s unbelievable and pretty heartbreaking that this is still where we’re at.”
MORGAN BREBNER
CREATOR OF “CORONER”
Adrienne Mitchell, never imagined that an episode in the works since last spring and shot last fall would have such ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy this February.
“We started shooting this in September and there was a lot of wonder about, ‘When we air will this still be relevant? Will people feel like this is kind of an ancient history they don’t want to remember?’ but you can’t forget something you’re still living, and it’s unbelievable and pretty heartbreaking that this is still where we’re at,” said Brebner.
Indeed, the death toll in Ontario’s long-term-care homes has exceeded 3,300, with more than 1,500 succumbing during the virus’s second wave here.
Future Season 3 episodes of “Coroner” won’t be as pandemic-centred, but the outbreak will continue to exist in the world of the show.
Serinda Swan, who stars as titular coroner Jenny Cooper, said it was important to find a balance “so we weren’t completely ignoring that there was this reality that was happening, or being so deep in the trenches of telling the story of COVID that people just felt even more bogged down.”
Her character attends a death scene in the premiere double masked, with gloves, a face shield and a bunny suit (the protective coveralls worn by front-line workers). Wearing all that gear gave Swan an appreciation for the “physical toll” experienced by real health-care professionals.
“You’re on set for five hours before you have a lunch break and you can take it off,” she said. “The only place that I actually was able to have my skin touching the air was from my chin to my forehead, and that’s with two masks on, goggles and a face shield. So just being able to be put in that reality of what people are going through. When I got home I was just a zombie.”
“Part of telling a story for us as actors is using our facial expressions,” said Roger Cross, who plays Detective Donovan McAvoy in the series. With a mask on, “your voice is a little more muffled and so, in some cases, you have to make sure you overenunciate a little bit just to make certain that you don’t have to do a ton of ADR (postshoot dubbing).”
Body language can compensate for not seeing mouths and noses, Mitchell said, but “at a certain point you do want to see those faces,” so the team would negotiate during “mask meetings” which scenes would have them and which wouldn’t.
The one instance in which use of masks is non-negotiable is in interactions among the cast and crew on set. The production hired a health management team to handle its COVID protocols, with two nurses always on set. Except when they’re removed for scenes, masks have to be worn at all times, even outside — and it goes without saying there are no more buffet lunches for cast and crew.
“There’s a lot of stress and strain around that, because they’re used to interacting with people, laughing with people, being intimate and close with people. It helps with the stress of shooting,” Mitchell said. Cross echoed that.
He’s known some of the “Coroner” crew for years, since they worked together on sci-fi series “Dark Matter.”
“We’ve all gotten very close to each other and give each other a hug, and sit and talk with each other,” Cross said. “You can’t be that way anymore.
“At the same time, we’re like, ‘This is the way to do it,’ because at the end of the day we want to be safe and we all want to get home to our families.”
For Swan, even though pandemic reality has sidelined some of the camaraderie, it hasn’t diminished the caring on set. When her beloved dog died during shooting, “our head of wardrobe went to our head of COVID and said, ‘I need to give Serinda a hug, how do I do that?’ And he showed up outside of my trailer in full PPE, like cape, mask, shield, gloves — you could not see an inch of his skin — and he knocked on my door and he just put his arms out, and I was able to just walk into his arms and cry and get a hug from him and have that personal contact,” she said. “Coroner” Season 3 premieres at 8 p.m., Wednesday, on CBC and CBC Gem.