'The Guard,' adrift
at sea, or maybe not
Series about Canada's Coast Guard breaks rules
By Tom Conroy
Mar 10, 2010
There’s such a thin line between incompetent and clever. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell whether the creators of a TV show have made an odd artistic choice because they wanted to mess with our preconceived notions or because they didn’t know what they were doing.
The Canadian drama “The Guard,” making its U.S. premiere on Ion with two episodes starting at 9 p.m. this Saturday, is full of such moments. If one is willing to accept the possibility that the producers are trying to push the envelope, the show can be entertaining and even interesting.
But often the odd choices are merely distracting, and one starts to think that maybe Canadian TV producers need the discipline and bigger budgets that come when their shows are made for the American market.
“The Guard” centers on four Canadian Coast Guard/Garde Côtière staffers patrolling the seas near British Columbia. They’re led by Miro Da Silva (Steve Bacic), a big lug with TV-star good looks who apparently can’t find a date and spends all his money on the internet chatting with a Russian girl. (Quirky writing or miscasting? You make the call.)
Also on board is Laura Nelson (Claudette Fink), who resents the fact that Miro was promoted above her and is alternately insubordinate and blandly supportive. She lives with a resentful teenager and a guy named David (David James Elliott from “JAG”) who suffers from multiple sclerosis.
After one brief, rather puzzling scene in the premiere, Laura’s home life vanishes in the next episode. (Is this an interesting choice reflecting the discontinuity of real life, or was this plotline dropped from episode 2 when it got too long?)
A crew member named Carly Greig (Zoie Palmer) has problems with drinking and commitment. In the first two episodes, she becomes involved with a recovering substance abuser named Wendell (Ryan Robbins), whose exuberance is either a gentle mockery of 12-step types or a combination of overwriting and overacting.
The fourth crew member, Andrew Vanderlee (Jeremy Guilbaut), is a married father who suffers from guilt after a failed rescue attempt in the premiere. Like most characters dealing with similar traumas on TV, he keeps seeing dead people. Usually, this is meant to suggest remorse, but these visions are so tediously persistent that they may be hallucinations.
The first two episodes leave many other nagging questions unanswered: When Miro meets a potential love interest while the team is putting out a fire on a nude beach (woo-woo!), why is she played by an actress who in most TV shows would be playing Miro’s mom?
Why does Andrew raise the possibility of foul play in the incident that so traumatized him and then never investigate it further?
And why, in both of the first two episodes, do the climactic rescues occur off-camera? (One is tempted to speculate about Canadian TV budgets.)
It’s usually a good thing when a drama keeps you guessing, so let’s give the show the benefit of the doubt. After two episodes, the mixture of comedy and drama shows signs of achieving at least internal consistency. Carly becomes more interesting the more we learn about her background, and one begins to root for her and Wendell to get together.
Clearly, having scheduled this series on Saturday nights, Ion isn’t reaching too high. By those standards, “The Guard” is a modest success.
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