Canadian television has changed by leaps and bounds since the days of The Trouble with Tracy. I remember enjoying Night Heat in the mid to late eighties, loving the fact that I could pinpoint Toronto landmarks like the downtown Greyhound station, simultaneously hating the fact that all destination points announced in the background at the station were American.
There is something about Canadian fictional television that uniquely portrays the Canadian experience, warts and all. Production values are comparable to those of American television, but the stories have that Canadian je ne sais quoi. This is particularly true of Family Law.
A Canadian Cast
The first thing I loved about Family Law was its entirely Canadian cast, headed by Jewel Staite (whom I’ve followed since Stargate) and Victor Garber (of Alias and Legends of Tomorrow fame, not to mention countless others). As Abigail Bianchi, Jewel conveys volumes with a well-timed look at the camera, a sneer, or a roll of the eyes. Jewel and Victor are supported by Zach Smadu as Daniel, Abigail’s half-brother, Genelle Williams as Lucy, Abigail’s half-sister, and Bobbi Charlton as Jerri, Harry’s (Victor Garber’s) best friend and firm office manager. These actors, all familiar faces on Canadian television, are what made Family Law amazing.
Character Arcs
The best part of the series was the character arcs. All characters, no matter how minor, experienced satisfying character arcs over the course of the series. Abigail struggles with her sobriety. Her father employs her when no one else will. Over the years, Abigail grows up. She learns to put her needs aside for her children, forgives her father for abandoning her as a child, and forges a relationship with the half-siblings she has always resented. Through it all, she remains true to herself, never losing her sarcasm and sense of humour. But her true measure of growth is how she sacrifices her plans to open her own firm for her brother’s happiness and takes over Svensson and Svensson so her father can retire after re-marrying her mother.
A terrible philanderer for much of the series, Harry Svensson mellows over the years. He accepts responsibility for his failed marriages and his children’s resentment. He also realizes that you can’t think in black-and-white when dealing with people, and that everyone, including himself—and especially his children—is a shade of grey. In what is perhaps Harry’s finest moment, he sacrifices his firm’s merger for his relationship with Abigail. When told that the deal hinges on firing Abigail, he calls off the merger for his daughter’s sake, something he would not have considered four years prior.
Throughout the series, Lucy, the baby of the family, matures and stops accepting her father’s support. She opens her own practice, finds love, and co-parents her daughter from her first marriage. Self-centred Daniel learns to support his future “baby momma” and child. After revisiting his journal, he finds the courage to break free from Harry’s practice and open one of his own based on collaborative family law.
The End
All good things must come to an end, and so does Family Law with the fourth season. I’m not going to lie: I’m disappointed. But my disappointment is tempered with the beautiful send-off the writers gave the characters. All four Svenssons are messes at the start of the series. They come into their own by the end of the final season, but it’s not enough.
Ten episodes a season was also never enough.
And don’t even get me started on the final minute! I know it was meant to be a cutesy way to end the series, but I would pay to see Nathan Fillion join the cast. I don’t want it to end! Not now. Not ever!
RIP Family Law. You will be greatly missed.
The last book I released, I Was, Am, Will Be Alice, is a time travel fiction (largely inspired by The Time Traveler’s Wife), as is my as of yet unfinished manuscript, tentatively entitled Cat and Mouse: A Love Story, largely inspired
The future is a dystopia, largely due to the fact that a meteor will hit Earth with devastating consequences. They have figured out how to transfer consciousness back in time with the help of a large supercomputer. A team of scientists have their consciousnesses sent back in time to change the past and make the world a better place. To do this, the supercomputer–known as the Director–pinpoints the moment of a host’s death and transfers the future consciousness in the seconds before the host dies. This show is made interesting by the characters of the hosts, which include an FBI agent with a failing marriage, a mentally impaired woman and her social worker, an addict, a teenaged football player, and a woman who is fighting for custody of her son with her abusive, police officer husband. Eric McCormack, a long time favourite of mine since Will and Grace, stars.
When a seemingly bad guy steals a time machine from a top secret think tank, a historian, a soldier, and a pilot chase him through time in an effort to preserve the timeline. In the first episode, misunderstood Garcia Flynn (expertly played Goran Visnjic) introduces the Rittenhouse Corporation, a Mafia-like group of people who have infiltrated every aspect of government and power corporations for centuries. Through the course of the season, we learn that Flynn is only out to stop Rittenhouse to save his family (whom he believes was murdered by members of Rittenhouse) and make the world a better place. Abigail Spencer, Matt Lanter, and Malcolm Barrett have such incredible chemistry as the team of heroes out to stop Flynn, that by the time they realize they’re fighting for the wrong team, they can do no wrong in the viewers’ eyes.
Based on the movie by the same name, Frequency supposes that a ham radio can connect the present to the past. In Frequency, police officer Raimy Sullivan learns she can talk to her father over his old radio. The only problem is her father died 20 years ago. Raimy gives her father advice which saves him from the accident that took his life. She goes into work the next morning only to learn that her mother–safe before Raimy had saved her father’s life–went missing twenty years ago and her bones are on the coroner’s table. Her mother, it seems, was a victim of the Nightingale Killer. As if to make matters worse, she is a stranger to her fiancee. Raimy and her father, Frank, spend the season as partners as they try to catch the Nightingale Killer on both ends of the time continuum.
I remember seeing Time After Time, the movie, as a young adult. I loved the fact that H. G. Wells was portrayed as a time traveller. The Time Machine reads more like a journal, after all, documenting the travels of a scientist into the past and incredibly distant future to check in on the evolution of mankind. It’s not hard to imagine that the novel was Wells’s actual journal. In Time After Time, H.G. Wells invents a time machine that is immediately appropriated by Jack the Ripper who goes forward in time to escape capture and continues his murderous ways. The show is more cat and mouse thriller than time travel epic as Dr. John Stephenson (Jack the Ripper) taunts Wells, daring him to follow through with his threat to capture him before his next kill.
A time travelling duffle bag is absurd on the face of it. Even so, I could accept it provided the show did something smart with it. In the first two episodes, Dan goes back to make sure the American Revolution happens, only to find that the founding fathers are even dumber than he is, and though they love their guns and will only be riled when the British threaten to take them away (cue the political satire), they refuse to do anything more than threaten to take the guns and aver their love for guns. There’s a love affair (as in Time After Time), false identities with modern names, and claiming of song lyrics that won’t be written for centuries (as in Back to the Future). Though there may be a few moments that made me smile, this was even more groan-worthy than Legends of Tomorrow at it’s campy best.
Elise Abram 
