MRH: The locations were quite inspirational to the development of the story because you do see the giant hydro towers typical of Ontario, and around Toronto itself.

Janis Lundman: The suburb where I grew up was in the Ajax-Pickering-Durham Region. Originally we wanted to shoot out there ... They had a lot of hydro towers there, they had a mini-putt golf course built right underneath the towers, and we just felt that there was something about that visual motif that just spoke to the underlying darkness about what was really happening in the suburbs, but in the end we couldn’t shoot there for financial reasons.

We also have a company in Quebec, so we started doing some location searching around there, and found this amazing suburb of Saint Julie that was built up after the 1998 Ice Storm. It has this park with all these hydro towers behind the houses – it was perfect. We were very, very lucky.

MRH: I think the atmosphere definitely comes out. There are some playground sequences, and a baseball game that’s surrounded by those hulking hydro towers. You have a leg from a massive tower maybe two feet away from the end of the third base and is really intrusive. I also get the impression that the intrusiveness increases as you progress through each season.

Adrienne Mitchell: Season 2 was all about what happens in the aftermath of a tragedy, like Mike’s daughter, Sadie, being kidnapped and mentally and physically traumatized by Ray Prager.

The families are dysfunctional, the families are fragmented; there’s a sense of everything falling apart, of things not being in the right place. We’re working with those kinds of ideas metaphorically - like the baseball game behind the hydro towers, a couch nestled in the middle of a hydro tower - to echo the family which is in an unnatural state.

MRH: You mentioned some of the concerns about the suburban lifestyle also stem from your own personal experiences. What sort of aspects did you find disturbing about the suburbs?

Janis Lundman: Well, it’s this odd thing: as a child growing up everything seemed to be… perfect, you know?

Every family has its own form of dysfunction, and then as you get older, you realize ‘Oh my God, the family living next to us the man is beating his children and his wife. I see that now, and all the divorces that were happening, and the affairs that were happening, and the teacher across the street [whose] wife killed herself.’

You start understanding that the suburbs aren’t necessarily reflecting (or trying to reflect) the reality of what’s going on tin the world. [We’re] playing with that dichotomy.

MRH: I understand you spent a great deal of time developing the series?

Adrienne Mitchell: Yeah. Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik is the writer of the entire series and she is a brilliant writer. She lived with these characters for a year. She absolutely had to map everything out – what was going on with these characters over the six episodes – but it was just a wonderful opportunity for her to do that.

It’s like a really, really long feature film, in a sense. She’s able to go back to episode 1 after she’s gotten to episode 6 and sort of tweak and go back and forth and work through it all. [That’s] difficult to do when you have to do a regular conventional series where you’re churning them out because you have a huge deadline.

MRH: Was Durham County’s 6-episode length taken from the British model where a concept is developed, stories are mapped out, characters are refined, and what gets produced is all that’s necessary, as opposed to the U.S. network model where filmmakers are stuck having to deal with filler episodes because they’ve got a 20 episode slate to fill?

Janis Lundman: We were thinking of the model like the Prime Suspect model, and we loved that idea of being able to tell a very intense story over a well-crafted, shorter period of time.

The pay networks were completely on board with that... We were originally going to be doing [just] the first season, but people got hooked into the characters, and the network certainly liked it. Season 3 [started airing October 25th], and now they want to do a movie.

MRH: I guess I could see it working as a film, but from your standpoint, did you feel that by the end of Season 3 the series’ arc had come to its end, or do you feel there’s actually a whole other season you can develop?

Janis Lundman: No, there’s a whole other season that we could develop, and we actually had spent quite a bit of time on it. The thing is, we’re working with characters that are so complex and multi-layered and working in a world of crime that constantly changes; they change along with it, [and] we could just keep going with these characters.

I mean, a lot of it depends on Laurie as well - as the writer, and what she wants to work on thematically. She thinks she’s got a bit more left.