There had better be love triangles
Forget the so-called death of the rom-com. Check out the small screen, where romance shows like ‘When Calls the Heart’ and ‘Sullivan’s Crossing’ are thriving
Actor Kevin McGarry jokes that he specializes in entertainment that has the word “heart” in the title.
“That’s kind of my thing: ‘Heartland,’ I’ve done this show called ‘Open Heart,’ I’ve been on ‘When Calls the Heart,’ ” he said over the phone from an airport restaurant while waiting for a flight to Vancouver, where “When Calls the Heart” is filmed.
McGarry, a native of Kincardine, Ont., plays Mountie Nathan Grant in that series, a period romance drama about a schoolteacher in a fictional coal mining town in Western Canada in the early 1900s.
As Season 11 kicks off Sunday on Super Channel Heart and Home, fans can expect the slow-burn, will-they-or-won’t-they romance between Nathan and teacher Elizabeth Thornton (Erin Krakow) to continue.
“When Calls the Heart” is just one of several shows fuelling an ongoing boom in television romance.
Forget all those think pieces about the death of the rom-com; those folks have been looking at the wrong screens. Romantic movies aren’t packing multiplexes like they used to, but love stories are thriving on TV.
Take “Virgin River,” a huge hit for Netflix: Its fifth season ended in November and a sixth might not debut until 2025, but a prequel is being developed. The popular “Bridgerton,” which got its own prequel in the well received “Queen Charlotte,” returns for its third season in May. And “One Day,” a tortuous romance between two people who spend years denying their feelings for each other, was Netflix’s most streamed show globally the week after its February debut.
And it’s not just Netflix. PBS recently premiered its own series about lovers who keep pulling apart and coming back together in “Alice & Jack.”
As far as McGarry is concerned, you can’t call this a new development because shows and movies about love have always been with us and they always will. “I think there’s always a need for it and there’s always a want for it,” he said.
That’s good news for one of the newer players in the TV romance field: “Sullivan’s Crossing,” which debuts its second season April 14 on CTV. Like “Virgin River,” it’s based on a book series by Robyn Carr.
B.C. actor Morgan Kohan plays Maggie Sullivan in “Sullivan’s Crossing,” a neurosurgeon who flees Boston after a scandal for her hometown in rural Nova Scotia where, inevitably, she meets a handsome stranger, Cal Jones (Chad Michael Murray), and is torn between him and her doctor boyfriend Andrew (Allan Hawco).
Kohan also starred in a “When Calls the Heart” spinoff titled “When Hope Calls” and several TV romance movies, and said it opened her eyes to “the thirst for that kind of storyline.”
“Sullivan’s Crossing” fans (who don’t yet have their own nickname like the singularly devoted “Hearties” of “When Calls the Heart”) have told Kohan “that they’d like to see more of Maggie and Cal” — no surprise there — but also, “people really appreciate the community aspect of our show and how that plays such a huge role in it. That’s a whole relationship in itself,” she said in a phone interview.
We’ll revisit that idea of community, but let’s get back to the romance.
Roma Roth, the London, Ont.born creator of “Sullivan’s Crossing” as well as an executive producer on “Virgin River,” said in a video interview the key ingredient of a TV romance is the love triangles. Heck, Jane Austen was writing them into her novels way back in the early 1800s.
“Unrequited love is basically tantamount to what makes a romance show successful because, unfortunately, in our world we equate pain and suffering with love,” Roth said.
But not too much pain and suffering: “The audience really wants them to come together, you know? I think that if you wait too long, then some people would lose interest because they do want to see them kiss,” said Roth.
The trick is to give viewers the satisfaction of love requited without getting rid of all the tension.
“You just continue finding new ways to put obstacles in their way,” said Roth. “Not just between the two of them, but also just in their lives that they have to overcome. What you really need to do for a romance series is to hook people in the first few seasons and then, they become so ensconced in the lives of these characters that they continue the journey with them.”
Hooking them is, to a large part, dependent on the chemistry of the actors involved and Roth figures she hit the jackpot with her leads.
“Someone like Chad Michael Murray appeals to men and women,” said Roth of the American actor who gained heartthrob status in his early 20s on “One Tree Hill.”
“When you’re looking for your lead you want somebody who is not perfect because if someone is too perfect then it’s hard to believe that they exist in the real world … Those leading men are hard to find that have that chemistry and aren’t working on a Marvel movie.”
McGarry hasn’t been in a Marvel movie (yet), but he had just lost a theatre job when he got hired for doctor show “Open Heart,” which lasted one season, then booked a role on “Heartland,” another longrunning, Canadian-made, familyfriendly show. That was supposed to last one or two episodes and turned into six seasons, which led to some Hallmark movies, then “When Calls the Heart.”
His “Heart” character, Nathan, has already declared his love for Elizabeth — who’s the widow of another Mountie, Jack, who was killed off when actor Daniel Lissing left the show — but she got engaged to someone else. That engagement ended in Season 10, clearing the way for Nathan and Elizabeth to continue their slow courtship.
(Incidentally, McGarry found real love on the series with co-star Kayla Wallace, who plays Fiona.)
McGarry said he and American actor Krakow are close friends and have built up a trust and comfort level that helps when they have to pretend to be yearning for each other.
Pretending to be in love onscreen, Kohan said, is “part of the job and it’s kind of the fun and exciting part of, like, how can we make this as true onscreen as possible? How can we make this feel as real as possible for people watching this?”
But it’s not just romantic love that keeps viewers coming back.
Lindsay Sturman, the showrunner on “When Calls the Heart,” noted in a video interview that there are “so many warm relationships that we can show. It’s touching on not just community, love, friendship, which I think is the most important thing in life; it’s also touching on ideas of ‘What is forgiveness? What is redemption?’ ”
Shows like “Sullivan’s Crossing” also give viewers a sense of community they might be missing in their daily, screen-dependent lives, added Roth. “I think it allows people to kind of go back to the way things used to be, where we would actually sit down and talk to people face to face.”
For Sturman, it’s about kindness as much as love.
“When ‘Ted Lasso’ came out, my feeling was that it’s sort of the era of kind TV,” she said. “We’d had a lot of cynicism and some very dark, violent shows … but I think that what was missing (was) shows like ‘7th Heaven’ and ‘Joan of Arcadia.’
“People want to see people working through problems that don’t involve, you know, beheadings … It’s about love. It’s about doing the right thing rather than a scary, terrifying world where bad things always happen.”
“WHEN CALLS THE HEART” SEASON 11 DEBUTS SUNDAY AT 9 P.M. ON SUPER