[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
Following last week’s dedicated Zooey outing, this week on SurrealEstate, in “The Gardener,” it’s Lomax’s turn as she heads home to help her folks with the mortuary business and they present her with an interesting proposition. She runs into Rita in an unlikely place, while Luke has his own run in with her.
Susan’s latest clients are Jan and Paul (Kirsten Comerford and Sergio Di Zio), a divorcing couple who are still sharing their home, which is seemingly an amicable arrangement until new neighbor Blake (Nck Name) starts entrancing Jan while she’s out in the garden, in increasingly creepy ways. Luke gets pulled in to consult when Susan can’t completely get a bead on the situation, which also forces him to ease up on Augie and recognize he’s well worth the investment his skillset requires.
He also finally says what he wants and needs to say in a conversation with Megan. And Tag continues to prove himself to be a worthy gamble. Paolo Barzman finishes out his block of episodes, bringing us to the halfway point of the season, and Justin Rawana wrote the script.
This week I caught up with showrunner and series creator George R. Olson to chat about the new season, and in our first installment, he talks about relocating to Ottawa from Newfoundland, with new locations and a new crew. He knew about the shift just as they were getting started, so he was able to tee up stories to suit the new location.
“[I found out] just shortly before the writer’s room opened, so we were able to approach the stories with the knowledge that we were gonna be somewhere else. And I even had a chance to go out, Since we’re a show about real estate, it really helps to have a feeling for what kind of houses they have,” he explains.
“It’s very different from Newfoundland, but really terrific. It’s much bigger. You’re going from a place with about 250,000 people to a million people. That’s a lot more houses. And the location people in our crew in Ottawa were wonderful at listening and delivering us the kinds of locations that we really wanted to put into our stories.” One such find, a property that included a home with a beautiful stone fence and adjacent woods, is front and center in tonight’s episode.
“A wonderful surprise was they have all of these areas within an hour of Ottawa. And for the kinds of stories that we wanted to tell and the kinds of things that we wanted to do, it was really terrific from both the economy of time and economy of economy, and to have those big shots and the really beautiful homes that were not all mansions. The diversity of the housing stock in Ottawa was a real boon to us,” he explains.
Alongside Paolo Barzman, TW Peacocke, who directed a bucket of Haven episodes back in the day, shard five-episode blocks for Season 3 – while also running concurrent crews. “I was so pleased to have Paolo be able to join us. He did such a great job in Season 1. And we did this episode in two blocks, so it was really important that we have really experienced directors because we were gonna have to be moving really quickly and be very smart about how we budgeted our time and our budget. And Paolo is just so good at looking at stories and looking at scripts and saying, ‘Okay, that’s not going to work within our parameters, what can we do,'” shares Olson.
“In the second block, TW was just wonderful. Again, very experienced, very smart, very attuned to how to make something that is very, very cool, but also doable. And we started, as we always do, with a theme of, ‘We don’t want to do anything that we can’t do [well].’ We want to tell stories that are really fun and emotional and sometimes scary and sometimes poignant and all of those kinds of things, but we need to move like a really well-oiled machine.”
“And both Paolo and TW were just so good at balancing that aesthetic vision and that creative vision that any good director has and needs with that eye towards moving quickly and being very, very smart with how we spend our time. Identifying those moments that really deserve every bit of love and every bit of time and everything that we can give them, and making sure that everything else looks great. We really budget those really important moments to be sure that we have the time and the resources to do them properly. So both Paolo and TW were just such good partners in that and great collaborators. I feel very fortunate.”
Both directors were supported by a crew Olson raves about. “Our Ottawa crew were just so good. They’ve shot a lot of stuff and they really got into our show. One of the really great things about our show, if I say so myself, is that we really give the props people and the locations people and the makeup people and the wardrobe people a fun challenge every week,” he says.
“We really let them operate at the very top of their game. And every one of them just stepped up and they just were so collaborative and so creative. I felt like a very lucky guy. I think they enjoyed working on the show, I hope they enjoyed working on the show, as much as I did.”
“We went into this knowing that it was gonna be a very aggressive schedule and we made it very clear, an aggressive schedule is no excuse for not doing really fun stories. I don’t want to compromise on anything. I want everything to look great. I’ve gotta give a lot of credit to Blue Ice, our production company and our producers Haley Wiseman, Samantha Levine, and Armand Leo, who did just a great job. Everybody on the ground in Ottawa.”
SurrealEstate Season 3 airs Thursdays at 10 pm/9c on Syfy in the US. The first two seasons are now streaming on Hulu. For our Canadian friends, you can catch Season 1 and 2 on Crave, and Season 3’s third episode, “Death Does a Refi,” airs this Thursday on CTV Sci-Fi. Here’s a sneak peek, and ICYMI, all our coverage for SurrealEstate is here.
Photos courtesy of Albert Camicioli/SE3 Productions Inc./SYFY and video courtesy of SYFY.
