A Beach resident is responsible for penning a new dramatic CBC series that has been getting a lot of critical buzz. Tracey Forbes, whose past credits include Flashpoint (for CTV and CBC), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (for Fox), Spider-Man (for MTV), and ReGenesis (for TMN) teamed up with Toronto Emergency Task Force (ETF) officer Calum de Hartog to create Cracked, a police drama that tackles sensitive cases involving criminals with mental illness.
After he suffers from an embarrassing nervous breakdown, police detective Aidan Black is reassigned from SWAT to Psych Crimes. There he teams with a female forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Daniella Ridley, to investigate psychologically complex crimes. Readers may remember the tragic events that unfolded near Toronto East General Hospital when an escaped patient was fatally shot in a confrontation with police. It’s cases like these that the team from Cracked are called in to investigate. Forbes said the character Dr. Ridley’s back story was developed around the time of that incident.
“We imagined what it would be like for a similar shooting to have taken place outside our fictional hospital, and for our character, Daniella, his doctor, to have witnessed it,” Forbes said. “We wanted to explore how traumatic experiences like this impact everyone involved, in all capacities.” Co-creating the drama with a real-life cop lends the series a palpable air of authenticity. Forbes said that de Hartog worked his regular shifts with the ETF throughout the production cycle of Cracked’s first season.
“Much of Cracked was developed while Calum and I met for a drink at the Gull & Firkin, or over coffee at Starbuck’s at Queen and Waverley,” Forbes said. “Or we’d walk the whole length of the boardwalk chatting about the characters and their dynamics.”
You can catch Cracked on CBC every Tuesday at 9 p.m. For more information on this exciting new television series visit CBC.ca/Cracked.
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