Canadian TV

In Canada: Wednesdays, 8pm, CBC

When Burden of Truth started, I did mock it a little. It sees big city lawyer Kristin Kreuk return to the small town where she grew up to deal with a claim that an HPV vaccine is making local girls sick. When she gets there, she soon finds:

1. She’s not very popular not just because of what she’s trying to do but because her dad did something bad when he was in town
2. The vaccine isn’t the real cause – something else is.

Soon, she’s deciding to switch sides and find out the true cause of the problem – so that she can sue the heck out of whoever’s causing it and stop people spitting at her whenever she walks past.

Anyway, I mocked it a bit, because firstly, we had ‘lawyer as epidemiologist’, with our Kristin apparently keen to do all the science herself. Secondly, we had such obvious emotional manipulation going on, together with an obvious romance being set up with small town boy turned lawyer Peter Mooney, that it felt like we were in the middle of a Hallmark Channel movie.

Oddly, though, the show has since decided it really is going to be about epidemiology. I mean really. Episode three actually had a hydrologist turn up. Not just for a couple of minutes to hand over a report, mind, but for the whole episode. He explains ground water flow and sources, he does experiments and tests. He drills holes.

Meanwhile, Kreuk seems to know – from previous cases, rather than Wikipedia – some actual law and some actual science: biology, chemistry, physics. She knows about benzene and its side effects. She’s coordinating everything, she’s looking at real-world implications for legal precedents, she’s acting like an actual professional with experience and skills.

Indeed, even by the end of episode three, the quest to find the true source of the problem afflicting everyone is still ongoing. This might take all season. This is… practical science and practical law. Gasp.

It’s like I started watching one of the Good Witch movies, only to discover that it was a guidebook to modern pagan rituals, complete with a discussion of the correct way to honour the triple goddess. It’s genuinely bewildering.

Burdened

I’d probably keep watching on the strength of the science, in fact, were it not for the writing of these small town characters. They’re dumb. To be fair, so are the obvious moustache-twirling big city characters. It’s only Kreuk, Mooney and their contractors showing signs of mental capacity. Everyone else is either sketchy or on the verge of shouting out another emotive speech that explains Very Big Things. Or both.

And dumb is what they are.

So Burden of Truth‘s title wasn’t just an obvious play on words about its plot – it was actually a description of the show’s own problems with its characters, who have so much truth that they have to share it, obviously and frequently.

Barrometer rating: 2

 

In Canada: Wednesdays, 8pm, CBC

TV seems to think that any professional is a master of all trades. See those Crime Scene Investigators? They’re not just scientists, they’re great at doing police investigations, interrogations, you name it, according to CSI. Paramedics? Who needs them when the fire brigade can do it all for them in 9-1-1?

Lawyers, of course, are well known for investigating and solving crimes themselves on TV. But until now, we’ve not really had “lawyer as epidemiologist”.

Burden of Truth sees Smallville‘s Kristin Kreuk playing a high-flying lawyer at a firm run by her dad. A golden opportunity to win the custom of a big pharmaceutical company comes along, when a group of girls in a small town start suing the firm, claiming that its HPV vaccine is making them ill. All Kreuk has to do is get them to stop their claim and she wins the business. Trouble is, it’s the same small town she grew up in and which she and her dad were hounded out of 17 years earlier for reasons not as yet revealed.

Reprehensible?

For a while, Burden of Truth looks to be a pretty reprehensible piece of work. Despite Kreuk’s vehemency against ‘anti-vaxxers’, all signs point to the show becoming Big Pharma Is Bad and Kreuk switching sides when she finds out the truth. Numerous scenes have Kreuk trying to pay off the locals, all while she dishes out mealy mouthed “temporal proximity does not indicate causality” responses to the touchy feely “your vaccine made me sick” girls and their families.

Fortunately, about halfway through, it becomes clear that actually, the vaccine’s fine and CBC isn’t about to cause a Canada-wide public health crisis. Hopefully, viewers will indeed learn that simply because you did something and you got sick afterwards, it doesn’t mean what you did made you sick.

What the show then becomes is Kreuk deciding to go Erin Brockovich, and stay in town to work out what really caused the illnesses and to somehow make amends for whatever it is her dad did that still has people punching her and spitting at her 20 years later. Whether she’ll be fingering Big Mining, Big Chemical, Big Agro or Little Chinese Herbal Medicine (warning: may contain traces of anthrax) as the true cause is the mystery that will drive the rest of the season.

Burden

That still leaves a show that’s makes you feel like it’s sent you an envelope of incriminating photographs, such is the emotional blackmail going on. The lawyering is all slightly perfunctory and the show’s heart is really in having Kreuk feel bad.

Numerous are the scenes in which children curse Kreuk for offering them $50,000 and opine things like “I always wanted to be a lawyer but now I’ve met you I don’t” or “You may have worked for a big company but I thought you were a human being. But you’re not.” Kids, hey? Thick as mince, the lot of them.

Meanwhile, police officers unexpectedly pull up and say things like “I never thought I’d see a Hanley in this town, not after what your dad did.”

The show has all the subtlety of a Hallmark movie about single mothers.

Amiable

Manipulative it may be, but it’s reasonably amiable manipulation. Kreuk is more plausible here as a big city lawyer than she was as a big city police detective in Beauty and the Beast. She also has decent chemistry with Peter Mooney (Rookie Blue), who plays the town’s hero lawyer and her former High School sparring partner. And despite all the emotional blackmail, it’s always nice to see a show about people being nice, even lawyers.

So I might keep on watching this. To be honest, I really just want to find out what caused the sickness. Even thought the trailer below suggests it’s something else, I do hope it’s the Chinese Medicine store. That would really dick up the anti-vaxxers (“They’re natural remedies, you know?”).