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Joe Morton

START DATES: It’s American TV Pilot Season – AGENT X, THE FLASH, SEA OF FIRE, WARRIORS, PROOF, EXPOSED, iZOMBIE, BLOODLINES, ONLY HUMAN & BACKSTROM Reshoots

[sz-youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0ukYf_xvgc” /] Are TV pilots a waste of time and money? Kevin Spacey (Netflix’s House of Cards) challenged American TV networks in his keynote address… Read More »START DATES: It’s American TV Pilot Season – AGENT X, THE FLASH, SEA OF FIRE, WARRIORS, PROOF, EXPOSED, iZOMBIE, BLOODLINES, ONLY HUMAN & BACKSTROM Reshoots

BIG READ: EUREKA Series Finale

Published September 19, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

The fourth season of life in the charmingly-eccentric and scientifically-dysfunctional town of Eureka ends with a big emotional cliffhanger tonight on the Syfy network in the U.S. We will have to wait three more weeks in Canada to start seeing the back half of season four on the SPACE channel. And the fifth and final season of Eureka won’t air until sometime next year in either country (apart from the animated Christmas episode this December). That’s why it feels so strange to write about or show anything of the Eureka series finale, which wrapped filming in Vancouver before the Labour Day weekend. Everything is a potential spoiler.

A month ago, Eureka crew transformed two blocks of Wellington Street in Chilliwack into the Main Street of their fictional town for the very last time: erecting the large Sheriff’s Office and Cafe Diem facades, adding the fake bronze statue/fountain of Archimedes and putting their own signage on the Teddy Bear Dreams clothing store (the owner told me Eureka star Salli Richardson-Whitfield bought several items there over the years). Production also set up running tabs at two downtown Chilliwack institutions: the Decade Coffee House and Sticky’s Candy, where a young salesgirl showed me the empty vats of ice cream consumed by Eureka crew in a day’s filming.

Cast and crew seemed just as verklempt at that last shoot in Chilliwack as the fans who’d come to say goodbye. I saw Salli Richardson-Whitfield hugging the Eureka stunt coordinator and Tembi Locke snapping photos with her camera phone of her TV husband Joe Morton. One of the Eureka producers brought his fancy DSLR to play set photographer, posing Colin Ferguson and Salli Richardson-Whitfield on a bench ahead of their big scene together. Director Matt Hastings couldn’t resist photobombing that beautifully-staged shot, which made everyone laugh and then cry.

Laughter and tears. Everything about that day in Chilliwack seemed bittersweet. Syfy had renewed and then cancelled Eureka earlier in August, belatedly coughing up enough money to film this last-minute wrap-up episode. Read More »BIG READ: EUREKA Series Finale