64 | Television
An eerie new crime series stars Anna Paquin as a risk-taking small-town detective with a messy private life.
The useful metaphor of a bleak mining town in decline is in full effect in new and spooky crime noir Bellevue (Sky Box Sets, Sky 009, Saturday, from 7.30pm), although for once the setting isn’t Denmark.
We’re in Canada, and the backdrop is a real defunct asbestos mine in Quebec where “the hauntingly beautiful asbestos mountains evoke this idea of a looming shadow over the community’s life”, according to co-creator and director Adrienne Mitchell.
Those mountains certainly feature in the first episode, looming over Anna Paquin (returning to her Canadian roots) as she searches for a missing teen at a scrapyard.
As this is Canada, there is also hockey, religion, a First Nations reservation, dense woods and lots of warm clothing. The missing girl (Sadie O’Neil) happens to be the town’s best hockey player and is transgender.
Paquin, in her first messed-up detective role, plays Annie Ryder, haunted by the death of her cop father, who killed himself following the failed investigation of a 14-year-old’s death. Twenty years later, the new case appears to be connected, and there’s also the mystery of someone who stalked Annie as a kid.
Despite the stereotype of a risk-taking detective with a messy private life, Paquin thinks “Annie is kind of everything that you don’t normally get to see in female characters in mainstream TV or films”. As she told the CBC, “She makes choices that are a little bit risky and sometimes a bit dangerous, but it all comes from a deeply, passionately connected place of wanting to do her job and wanting to have justice be served and wanting to take care of her town.”
She does have a good relationship with her daughter (Madison Ferguson) and ex-husband (you’ll hardly recognise Allen Leech, Downton’s
Tom Branson) and she has known her boss, Bellevue’s police chief (Shawn Doyle), since she was small.
The transgender story is also one Paquin believes is important. Casting directors no longer cast non-trans people in trans roles and O’Neil, who plays missing teen Jesse, is no exception. “I don’t think there’s probably anyone better to embody that than somebody for whom that experience reflects their own,” says Paquin. However, Jesse “confuses a lot of the town’s small minds”.
Ultimately, Bellevue is a human drama, “an exploration of these people and their choices, a character piece, dressed up in an exciting, suspenseful, scary, spooky way”.