The murder is just the beginning. There’s always a motive and Vancouver homicide detective Angie Flynn (Kristin Lehman) will find it. Filming wrapped last Friday on Motive’s thirteen-episode first season.
Motive debuted in a prime but delayed post-Super Bowl slot on CTV to 1.23 million Canadians, the culmination of an unprecedented publicity campaign by CTV for a Canadian show. Normally, only CTV’s American simulcast shows get this scale of rollout. And in a sweet twist, American network ABC has picked up the Vancouver crime drama for broadcast this summer.
Ratings held steady after Motive’s move to its regular 9 p.m. on Sundays slot, dipping for the second episode but rising back over one million for the third episode, to give Canada’s #1 new drama a series-to-date average of 1.06 million viewers.
Instead of a regular whodunit that focuses on who did the crime, Motive is a whydunit that focuses on why the crime was committed in the first place. The Killer and The Victim are revealed to the audience at the top of the show and we follow detectives Angie Flynn (Kristin Lehman) and Oscar Vega (Louis Ferreria) as they uncover the reasons behind the murder.
In the premiere 1×01 Creeping Tom, The Killer is high school student Tom (Tyler Johnston, the tortured angel on Supernatural) and The Victim is his high school teacher (Joey McIntyre of New Kids on the Block). The Homicide Department follows several leads but ultimately determine that Tom used his offtime thrill of creeping into houses and stealing mementoes as a way to retrieve a revealing notebook that his teacher had confiscated from him and then killed the teacher when he was caught creeping.
Related: Motive’s Kristen Lehman films 1×02 Crimes of Passion at the Olympic Village
