Orphan Black: shockingly Canadian, shockingly alright.

Orphan Black is a new series by BBC America and Bell Media that centers around Sarah, a rogue, coke-dealing British street hustler with an edgy personality and even edgier friends. And by “edgier friends” I mean an asshole ex-coke dealing boyfriend and a sassy, artsy, sex-selling BFF who just happens to be gay. While standing on a train platform speaking with someone on the phone, Sarah witnesses someone who looks exactly like her jumping in front of the train, effectively destroying her peace of mind and flooding Sarah’s curious nature with what seems like inconceivable questions. Because her moral bar is pretty low, while a railway worker is chasing down the train with the bloodied body of her lookalike, Sarah snatches the poor woman’s purse and runs away.

What does she do with said purse, you ask? Well, I’m glad you brought that up! Sarah sneaks into the woman’s house, learns her doppelgänger’s name is Elizabeth, learns her boyfriend is a boring dude named Paul who is away in some American city that starts with a ‘C’, and learns that hey, Elizabeth is super rich! Wow! Instead of doing what a normal person would do (run away, very far away), Sarah decides to study her dead doppelgänger’s visage, pretend to be her and steal $75, 000 out of her bank account.

Gee whiz, I can relate to this character already! She saw this woman get plowed to death by a train, and the first thing on her mind is to usurp this dead woman’s identity so she can make a quick buck. Of course, because life isn’t as easy as this, Sarah gets caught up in a police scandal because apparently Elizabeth was a detective who, according to what limited gossip Sarah was able to collect, shot someone. A waitress? A villain? A random passerby? We never really learn for sure (as giving everything in the first episode away would be a bad writing move), but we do know that Sarah will go to the lengths of chugging hand soap and puking on a conference table to avoid the situation.

So far, I am really intrigued Orphan Black. I like the concept and I like Sarah’s actor, Tatiana Maslany. Tatiana does a really great job of portraying the wayward, rough-around-the-edges Sarah and seems pretty confident taking acting risks. For a Canadian-made show with a Canadian cast, this show is pretty edgy. There’s sex, full nudity (I can’t remember the last time, outside of Queer as Folk, that I saw a character’s totally naked ass on Canadian television) violence, graphically detailed corpses, sex work, cocaine… really, the list goes on.

Temple Street Productions is the company behind Orphan Black, previously of Being Erica, and the difference between Being Erica and this is astounding. For any Canadian folk who watched Being Erica, it was a cutesy, rom-com time travel series that centered around hopelessly over-educated, middle-aged Erica Strange and her time travel dalliances through various points in her life with help from her therapist, Dr. Tom. Orphan Black is what happens when you take shows like Being Erica, inject them with heroin, throw them in a tar pit, set them on fire, take them out and display them in a museum.

The cinematography in Orphan Black is stunning. It’s crisp, contrasty and dirty, yet still maintains a beautiful quality. The production designer, Ian Brock, and the Director of Photography, whose name I couldn’t find anywhere, really nailed the urban quality of Toronto without sterilizing the scenes too much. I find that a lot of shows set in Toronto tend to fail at capturing the the city as the bustling metropolis as it really is. Sure, shows like Flashpoint amp up the excitement and flashiness of our great city’s downtown core, yet don’t really do enough set dec, allowing the city streets to become too sanitary and false looking. Orphan Black does just the opposite of that, it allows the audience to see the grittier parts of Toronto alongside some of the more upper class areas.

My biggest problem with Orphan Black is that beside Sarah, the side-characters are shallow, stereotypical and borderline offensive. Sarah’s gay BFF, Felix, is every queer person’s worst nightmare. As a lesbian who was actively involved in Toronto’s queer scene while she lived there, I knew many people like Felix, so that’s fine. But when the only LGBT characters you see on television are sassy, cisgender men who flip their hands around and sell coke, it begins to get transparent and a little irritating. There is so much you can do with a LGBT character, yet writers tend to fall into this lazy trap of writing the flambouyant male BFF who likes to wear scarves and lots of lip gloss. There have been positive LGBT character portrayals in science fiction, such as Madam Vastra from Dr Who and Helena Cain on Battlestar Galactica, but those portrayals seem few and far between these days. On top of that, Jordan Gavaris is a terrible actor whom I wish never to see my on screen again. His idea of a British accent is pathetic and annoying, added on top of everything else I already dislike about him.

To add to Orphan’s Black shallow stereotype of queer folk, we have the “angry, abusive, coke-dealing, emotionally-stunted brown dude” and the “suspicious, rough, Uncle Tom black sidekick” as our only non-white options, which are also tired and lazy archetypes that can’t seem to quit. Sarah’s boyfriend, Paul, is wonderbread bland with a side of “who the hell cares”, yet has an ass that just won’t quit, so the producers decided to feature it in episode one. I wonder how all the loving family-types watching this directly after Dr Who appreciated two fully nude actors sexing it up on a kitchen island?

In general, Orphan Black was a fun watch and I’ll tune in next week. I’m going to cut the writers a little slack on their failures with the side characters, as this is the pilot and even Star Trek: The Next Generation, one of my favourite shows of all time, had a pretty terrible pilot. Decent shows tend to shape up about six episodes in, so I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that Orphan Black doesn’t fuck it up.