Published January 23, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome
Mega-producer J.J. Abram’s new sci-fi mystery island series Alcatraz premiered last week in back to back episodes with the final big set piece on the roof of the Dominion Building downtown. Alcatraz, which is about a secret agency dedicated to finding and catching inmates from the infamous San Francisco prison gone missing 50 years ago and reappearing today, opened to 10 million viewers and a 3.3 rating on FOX, making it the second biggest drama premiere this TV season. next to modern fairy tale series Once Upon a Time on ABC. So the two biggest new hit American dramas both film in Vancouver. Coincidence?
“302 Vanished. 3 Must Find Them” is Alcatraz’s tagline. Of the 3, petite blonde-bobbed Sarah Jones is the surprise action star : chasing a suspect who turned out to be her Alcatraz inmate grandfather in our introduction to her police detective character Rebecca Madsen in the pilot. She’s the one doing the running, the jumping and sassing her superiors with classic lines like “Thanks for being a dick about it”. Her partner Jorge Garcia as Alcatraz expert Dr. Diego “Doc” Soto has a way with a sharp wisecrack, “You’ve built the Bat Cave underneath Alcatraz” (as you’d expect from Lost’s Hurley), and her mysterious new boss Sam Neill as Emerson Hauser makes a great mean face as he looms above a drugged Rebecca with the ominous words “Welcome to Alcatraz”, but neither man is one for action.
Apart from the 3, the other person of note in this secret squad is Hauser’s equally mysterious partner Lucy Banerjee played by Parminder Nagra of ER, who is shot by the sniper convict Ernest Cobb during the filming of the second episode and then revealed to have her own past life on Alcatraz as hasn’t-aged-a-day Dr. Lucille Sengupta. I spotted the Gastown alley crime scene but haven’t seen Nagra on location yet.
I wrote about and photographed the filming of some of the first half-dozen episodes in my YVRshoots series post Read More »YVRShoots Series – ALCATRAZ Blows up Victory Square