Actor Hamza Haq writhed on a stainless steel table in a fake veterinarian’s office — a favourite refuge of injured television bad guys everywhere — while Stephen Amell stood over him trying to get him to keep still.
“Stop f—king moving,” Amell’s character, police officer Henry Roland, told his friend, criminal Tommy Hawley, while animal doctor Pete (Diego Klattenhoff) tried to staunch the bleeding from a stab wound.
In the TV world, Henry and Tommy, high school pals with a deep bond tied to an even deeper secret, were in a crime-ridden Thousand Islands town, the setting for the new CTV and Crave drama “The Borderline.”
In reality, the actors were inside a studio in Etobicoke in November 2024 — although they had already done location shooting in the actual Thousand Islands town of Gananoque and other parts of Ontario.
The border setting appealed to series creator Graeme Stewart because of the region’s long history with the smuggling of everything from alcohol, drugs and guns to people, and because he spent summers there as a boy visiting his grandfather — a professor of creative existentialism and self-described “horse exorcist” — on the American side of the St. Lawrence River.
“As a boy from Waterloo going down to the Thousand Islands, it always felt like this kind of heightened reality, this special place full of strange people, especially my granddad, who was a very odd man,” said Stewart.
“When I was writing this and thinking about a place for it to be set, it just seemed like the perfect location.”
Stewart got his start as a writer on medical drama “Saving Hope” before moving on to Canadian crime shows “Burden of Truth” and “The Detail.”
For this, his first show as a creator, he has scored a serious cast.
Besides Toronto actor Amell, known for “Arrow,” “The Flash,” “Code 8” and “Heels,” and multiple Canadian Screen Award winner Haq (“Transplant”), “The Borderline” stars Tamara Podemski (“Outer Range,” “Reservation Dogs”), and British import and Oscar nominee Minnie Driver.
CTV and Crave are bullish enough on the drama to give it the coveted post-Super Bowl spot for its launch on Sunday.
“I think it’s important to stretch the boundaries of what we can do and to capture a bit of the ambition that we’re seeing out of America,” Stewart said.
‘It’s such a crazy story’
Back in 2024, Haq, sitting in a rundown faux motel room, talked about the “freedom” of playing Tommy: a criminal involved with cross-border drug smuggling who’s “charming and clever and manipulative and ruthless.”
Haq is best known for portraying a troubled but principled Syrian refugee and ER doctor in “Transplant.”
“With the indie films that I’ve done and especially with ‘Transplant,’ there was a nobility with certain of the characters,” Haq said, “and Tommy’s a guy who doesn’t have much nobility, but he’s got a lot of beauty in him in very harsh circumstances that it was fun trying to find.”
When viewers meet him, Tommy’s in the trunk of a car that’s just been driven over the U.S.-Canada border when violence erupts — setting off a chain of events that sucks Henry ever further into Tommy’s world, threatening his identity as a police officer and family man.
“They’re both very complex figures that have behaved in ways that are both vicious and heroic,” Haq said of the friends. “The good that’s in Henry, it’s in Tommy as well, and the bad that’s in Tommy, it’s in Henry as well.
“Henry had certain opportunities that Tommy just didn’t and Tommy kind of sacrificed his own life so that Henry could have his, and now he’s pulling out receipts and he wants a little bit of reciprocity.”
In a separate interview in the fictional police chief’s office, Amell echoed Haq’s comments about the enjoyment of playing the characters.
Henry, he said, “looks very put together and buttoned up when in reality things are very far from put together and buttoned up.”
Though he is ostensibly a good guy, “where does his loyalty lie? Does it lie with his father-in-law, who’s the chief of police? Or does it lie with his childhood friend, with whom he has shared experiences and lifelong memories and maybe some promises made?” Amell said.
“As this story gets deeper and more twisted, Henry becomes more and more exposed and laid bare. And that was really fun for me. Also, it’s such a crazy story that it reminds me of ‘Ozark’ or the first season of ‘Fargo,’ where these crimes are so out there that you have to imbue a sense of humour into the proceedings. Otherwise, the entire thing is just too dark.
“I was really excited for that because I haven’t had a great deal of opportunity in the past 12 years or so to show my humorous side,” Amell added. “It does exist, I promise.”
For Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi actor Podemski, there was novelty in the darkness of “The Borderline.”
While it’s not graphically violent — at least not in the two episodes made available for review — the bodies pile up quickly.
“It’s not the world that I tend to dabble in (but) maybe at certain times in your life you’re ready to tell a different kind of story,” said Podemski.
Her character, border intelligence officer Erica Ross, who’s new to the area, is the closest thing “The Borderline” has to a good guy.
“She really does believe she is the hero,” said Podemski. “She is the one that will call out the lies and the corruption … Is she gonna get a little dirty though? Oh yeah. I don’t think there’s anyone that can stay clean in this world.”
For one thing, Erica develops a relationship with Driver’s character, May Ferguson, who’s the head of a British crime family that’s muscling in on the Thousand Islands drug trade.
(Also playing against type, English actor Thomas Craig, who portrays Chief Constable Brackenreid in “Murdoch Mysteries,” is May’s henchman in “The Borderline.”)
Podemski wouldn’t give any spoilers about Erica and May but called their relationship layered, as is Erica’s with Henry.
She and Henry are “kind of at each other’s throats all the time and yet there is some play there. So we’ve been trying to find balance between the play and the aggression.”
‘A deeply Canadian project’
Stewart grew up reading Elmore Leonard novels and watching Martin Scorsese movies. When it came to writing his own TV series, he said, “I knew that I wanted to do something that was focused in the crime space … but it’s not really a cop show.”
He first thought up the Tommy character years ago when he passed a GTA auto body shop and envisioned someone stuck in the trunk of a crashed car.
He eventually ditched the crash, but the man in the trunk remained. “I wanted to follow that person’s story rather than having a show that’s so focused on the police investigation,” Stewart said.
Haq noted that we’ve seen drug running and friends on opposite sides of the law on TV before, “but when you throw in the element of the Thousand Islands, when you throw in the fact that it’s inherently a Canadian show, when you throw in the human element of everybody in the cast … those ingredients are what make it unique.”
Amell, who’s an executor producer of “The Borderline,” called it “a deeply Canadian project.”
Many of his roles have been in American productions — in fact, he was flying to Los Angeles later that day to begin work on “Suits LA.” But he said everyone working on “The Borderline” “is just as talented and as capable as anyone that I have worked with over the past 12, 13 years in the United States.”
“It’s just that maybe we don’t take the opportunity to puff our chest out and go, ‘Look at what we’ve made.’”
That seems to be happening with this show.
Crave, Amell added, is excited about it, as is production partner Shaftesbury, the Toronto studio known for gentler fare like “Murdoch Mysteries” and “Hudson & Rex.”
Shaftesbury CEO Christina Jennings, Amell said, “was like, ‘I kinda wanna make (something that’s) a little bit of a departure and brand it as a cool TV show and we’ll see what people think.’”
