TV Series ‘When Calls the Heart’ Part of Period-Piece Resurgence
Heartwarming family drama set in fictional B.C. town
By: Bill Brioux The Canadian Press, Published on Sun Dec 08 2013
LANGLEY, B.C.—About 45 minutes south of Vancouver, on a farm field surrounded by vineyards, sits a village from another century. The place is called Coal Valley, a fictional frontier town built this fall for the series When Calls the Heart.
Production designer Brentan Harron walks a few reporters through a series of row houses hammered together in less than a month. Each is spacious enough for cameras but designed to look like the kind of modest dwelling one might have found in a coal town circa 1910.
That’s the setting for When Calls the Heart, a heartwarming family drama coming early in the new year to Super Channel in Canada and the Hallmark Channel in the U.S.
The series is based on characters created by Alberta native and inspirational fiction author Janette Oke. Her “Love Comes Softly” series has been adapted into numerous Hallmark Channel Original Movies.
When Calls the Heart is the latest indication that after a decade of dark dramas such as Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy and Dexter, viewers are ready to embrace programming that is more heartwarming than harrowing.
It may be no accident that some of these shows hearken back to another time and place. Murdoch Mysteries, another turn-of-the-century drama, has exploded in its sixth and seventh seasons to become CBC’s No. 1 series. Heartland, shot and set in rural Western Canada, had been a steady million-a-week Sunday draw for years.
Not that all period shows today are wholesome family dramas. Others come with an edge, especially HBO’s often violent Boardwalk Empire. PBS’s frothy soap Downton Abbey, which returns for a fourth season Jan. 5, is like Dallas in Edwardian garb.
The executive producers behind Bonnie & Clyde (the second part airs Monday on History and Lifetime), John Rice and Joe Batteer, know theirs is far from a wholesome family series.
“There’s just a lot of gunning going on with those two. It comes with the territory,” says Batteer of the notorious outlaws from the ’30s.
What Bonnie & Clyde” has in common with When Calls the Heart, says Rice, is an openness at the networks to show more period dramas.
“We’ve had enough of one show after another being a procedural cop show,” he says. With modern digital technology helping to recreate towns from the ’30s, period dramas have become quicker and cheaper to produce.
Back in Langley, Harron says he had a crew of about 25 working on building Coal Valley. A small wooden church building was repositioned at the end of a street where a saloon/schoolhouse, a Mountie outpost (complete with jail cells), a mercantile establishment and a cafe were erected, along with offices and other buildings.
These are all more than mere facades, with full interiors, all stocked with oil lamps, nickel-plated cash registers, hand-cranked Victrolas and other antique period pieces. Everything is scuffed and soiled to look like well-worn structures from a coal mining town.
Toronto native Charlotte Hegele plays Julie Thatcher, a young city girl not quite ready to join her big sister, schoolteacher Elizabeth (Erin Krakow), in this soiled and sloppy western town.
Daniel Lissing, an Australian who plays main Mountie Const. Jack Thornton, also stars.
Hegele — best known for another Canadian period piece, Bomb Girls (returning in a just-shot TV movie) — was amazed at the size and detail on the sprawling outdoor set. “They built an entire mine shaft!” she says.
Why does she think period pieces are back in style?
“It’s so romantic,” she says. “There’s something about being transported back in time. You can look at a show and go, ‘Wow, that’s what my great-grandparents were like.’”
Hegele certainly looks the part, sitting in an ankle-length full skirt, with a big, busy, floral hat held in place with “a hundred pins.”
The actress has been told she has a good face for period drama, and finds she keeps getting called back for these kinds of parts. She’s fine with that. Friends have said, “’Charlotte, you know how many actresses would kill to do period work and they can’t because they don’t have the look?’”
Besides, she adds, “I get to wear these cool hats.”