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CTV Orders New Vancouver-Set Procedural MOTIVE to Series

The yet-to-be-cast 13-episode CTV series Motive, about a “feisty female Vancouver detective” solving murders, is the latest TV drama series to let Vancouver play itself. We’ve gone from zero to four in a very short time–  possibly five if Endgame is resurrected.

Why now? Some credit the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games for making our city “cool” and recognizable the world over.

While CBC’s hit adventure series Arctic Air mainly films its Yellowknife interiors on permanent sets in Aldergrove and its exteriors in Yellowknife, when the action is in our city, as it was in the wonderfully-titled episode Vancouver is Such a Screwed-Up City, then Vancouver plays itself.

And Showcase’s out-of-the-box hit Continuum features not one but two Vancouvers. In the part sci-fi, part procedural Continuum, a future police officer travels back in time from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, swept up in an escape by a group of terrorists — Liber8 – who plan to change the future from the past by targeting the corporations that will come to rule the world. Here’s Rachel Nichols’s officer-from-the-future at the Vancouver Public Library.

Over at SPACE’s upcoming sci-fi and procedural series Primeval: New World, we can look forward to seeing apartment-building-sized dinosaurs and other primeval creatures rampaging through our neighbourhoods like Stanley Park, Coal Harbour and the Olympic Village. Here’s Sara Canning’s animal expert investigating such an attack at Harbour Park.

After Showcase cancelled Vancouver-set  procedural-with-a-twist Endgame last year, it found new life on Hulu in the U.S. Talk is that our eccentric Russian chess-master-turned-sleuth Arkady will return to solve more crimes from inside the Westin Bayshore Hotel.  Here’s Shawn Doyle as the agrophobic Arkady forced outside the hotel and  about to do the final scene of the series so far.

Upcoming Motive’s twist on procedurals is to reveal the killer at the start of each episode and then let us follow along a Vancouver detective’s efforts to solve the murder and uncover the reasons behind it. “The audience navigates the twisted and complicated maze of each murder and solves the puzzle alongside the detective and her team,.” according to the CTV release. Daniel Cerone from The Mentalist and Dexter will write the pilot and Trish Williams direct it. Motive is produced by Vancouver’s Foundation Pictures and Lark Productions.

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