Murder in a Small Town wraps its first season Tuesday night on FOX in the US and Wednesday night on Global TV in Canada. For US viewers, it’s been a neat addition to the usual FOX fare to have a slower-paced, small-town murder mystery with a parade of CdnTV peeps dropped alongside the procedurals. The eight-episode season, based on L.R. Wright’s books, follows the investigations of a newly arrived sheriff, Karl Alberg (Rossif Sutherland), whose cerebral methods of investigation and interrogation prove equally effective.
The season finale tees up a potential serial killer case and a couple of red herrings while Alberg and Kristin Kreuk’s Cassandra figure out where they are in their relationship. Haven fans will be happy to know Lucas Bryant is back for his third appearance this season. If you’ve missed an episode, they’re streaming on Hulu.
When the series launched back in September, I was delighted to discover Motive, The Order, and The Unusuals series creator Dennis Heaton was on board as an executive producer for part of the season. Last week, I jumped on a call with him to chat about the show, episode six, which he co-wrote with Pretty Hard Cases creator Sherry White, and winning a Canadian Screen Award for Tubi’s The Amityville Curse.
Murder in a Small Town was adapted for the screen by Ian Weir, who was also showrunner for the season. Heaton enjoyed stepping in after the show was stood up to help execute on Weir’s vision. “I was under consideration for a development room and I had just missed getting into that. Then production started and Ian wanted some extra hands for production, and that’s when they reached out and asked me if I was available to help out on that front. And I said absolutely,” he recalls.
“So I came kind of late to the game [to] help out on set and help out with pages in the room. It was hectic at the point that I was brought on because I still had a lot of catching up to do in terms of getting my head into the tone that Ian wanted and all that, but I still got to co-write episode six [“The Madness Method”] with Sherry White and that was a lot of fun.”
For this project, Heaton was happy to wear the producer hat without bearing the weight of a showrunner. “I love showrunning. I love it when it’s my baby. I’m not sure my staff love it as much, but I love it when it’s my baby,” he laughs. “But I also love being the sort of the deckhand kind of thing, coming in and being like, ‘What do you need? Here it is. What do you need now?’ And servicing somebody else’s work. They’re both enjoyable.”
“When you’re showrunning, I’m making this show, for better or for worse, for the audience. It’s me and then the broadcaster. I’ll always answer to the broadcaster. But when you’re working on somebody else’s show, you get to sleep a little bit more at night.”
Heaton was drawn to the show precisely for its small town aesthetic and the opportunity to craft richer characters. “For me, it really was that dichotomy of cozy mystery, but with a bit more edge to the mystery. You still had that small town vibe. I love to write small town. I just love the way characterization works when you’re dealing with people who have a more intimate knowledge of the town in general. There’s more opportunity to write in [backstories like] a longstanding grudge between two characters over something kind of thing,” he explains.
“You can add a little more distinctness to the characters. When I was doing Motive, especially, that was something that I was always really passionate about. If we’re gonna have this witness at the crime scene, and it’s their one scene in the episode, let’s make it fun, let’s give that character an opinion. [Think about] original recipe Law and Order. So many of those scenes were Briscoe and Logan talking to a delivery man, and it’s just, ‘We’re gonna ask you a bunch of questions, you’re gonna give us a bunch of answers. You’re carrying a box of avocados.'”
“That’s the story. Briscoe’s gonna say something funny and Logan’s gonna be all angry, but that was really all you got. I always felt bad for the guy with the box of avocados because there’s no personality there. So I love being able to bring that kind of personality to the characters. There was a character in 106 who I just loved. I wrote the scene for him. He picks up the killer and he doesn’t know he’s picked up the killer who’s just hitchhiking and, he just thinks, ‘Hey, I’ve made a new friend. He’s just a happy go lucky mushroom forager, but he’s got an opinion about the cops. He tells them, ‘You guys are a bunch of fascists.'”
That episode featured a cat and mouse game between Alberg and a duplicitous psychiatrist played by Paula Patton, and most of it happened inside the police station. Heaton was excited to tackle the challenge of writing the episode within a specific set of parameters. “It was fun, but it was complex. We knew going into that script that it was going to be this little dance between Alberg and the good doctor,” he shares.
“And you never have everything fully baked when you start a script. But what we didn’t really have fully baked was the immediacy of the episode, which is what we really needed because there was a bit of a production incentive with this episode to be a bit more of a bottle show to compress the timeline and give an extra day or two to the finale. That is why there’s so much in the station, there’s so much in the interview room, and there’s so many two handers.”
“I love that technical requirement to a script. I really do love it when you know that it can’t be more than 36 scenes, and it’s kind of weird when you do a bottle show and it’s part of a block [of shooting more than one episode]. We’re going to other locations for the other episodes anyway, so couldn’t it be a bottleesque show? What we do is we just make sure we’re piggybacking on every location that you need.”
Heaton says they also played a bit with the whodunnit timing. “Where the real challenge came is, when does Alberg know she’s a villain? What’s the trigger for that? When does the audience know that he knows, and we really played with that a lot. I think there was a version of the script where he knew when she walked in the door [that he couldn’t trust her],” he says.
“And then there was a version where Alberg didn’t know til the end, but the audience knew. And all of this was going back to the question of, ‘What is the show’s story engine? What is the show’s storytelling philosophy?’ And that ended up really affecting it in the end — when he suspects and when he figures it out, the two stages kind of thing.”
“We end up playing with that a lot more in this show’s investigative engine than in other police procedurals that I’ve worked on. Usually it’s a dogged investigation of clues and resolution at the very end. But with Murder in a Small Town, there’s often more of a dogged investigation and suspicion of a singular person and how do we prove that kind of thing, which allows you to spend more time, especially when it’s a guest star villain. You really want to have that character and Alberg in a longer dance in the episode.”
Earlier this year, Heaton won a Canadian Screen Award for writing Tubi’s The Amityville Curse, a chaotic horror film with a healthy dark comedy edge to it. He’s no stranger to fancy awards, winning the Writers Guild of Canada’s Showrunner of the Year Award at a virtual award ceremony during the pandemic, taking home the Showrunner of the Year Award. “I was up against four Christmas movies, so that to me was the most fun. I was stunned. I’m the only Amityville mainstream award winner,” he laughs.
The project came around in an unusual way, a story Heaton delightfully shares, because he discovered a local connection to the 80s classic horror movie, Terror Train, and hatched an idea for a short film. “There’s a Montreal-style smoked meat deli on Salt Spring called Buzzies, owned by Howard Bussgang, who’s a writer and showrunner and standup comic from Montreal. I was at home one night watching Terror Train, the original 1980 Jamie Lee Curtis slasher film. It’s all these fraternity brothers plotting this nasty prank against a pledge.
I’m watching it and I realize that guy looks familiar. And so I yell at my wife, Cynthia, and ask if her if that’s Howard and she says yes. So we go to the end credits, and [there he is]. So I go down and I’m talking to him about the fact that he’s in Terror Train, and we’re laughing about the fact that he had done this horror movie back in the day.
While we’re having the conversation, I come up with this idea for a short film, because there’s been all these legacy sequels where it’s like Halloween, it’s 40 years later and now Jamie Lee Curtis is a grandmother and the killer’s coming back for her kind of thing. And so I pitched to Howard, ‘Let’s do a short film where your character from Terror Train survived. And he’s mad that all of these legacy killers are coming back to go after their legacy final girls. And they’re ignoring all their other victims who survived. And you’re jealous. And so you’re trying to get yourself killed.’ And his response was, ‘I still have the jacket I wore in the movie.'”
With his greenlight from Busgang, Heaton started to track down the OG’s film rights, which led him to Tubi, which was already underway on its own adaptation (with his pals and mine, Aaron Martin and Ian Carpenter). Intrigued but not interested in another property from the same IP, Tubi asked him to write The Amityville Curse instead. “I got the book. I read it, I put a pitch together, I sent it to them and I thought I was pitching to get the job. And they said, ‘No, you’ve got the job. Start writing.” Tubi premiered the film last year, but it’s no longer on the site. You can get a taste of it here.
The Murder in a Small Town Season 1 finale airs Tuesday at 8 pm/7c on FOX in the US and Wednesday at 10 pm/9c on Global TV in Canada. The first season is now streaming on FOX and Hulu in the US and STACKTV in Canada.
Photos courtesy of FOX and Dennis Heaton.
