“Three years have passed since the sudden murders in Blackmarsh Cove. Bureaucracy and secrecy have kept information at arms length from the public – that is until a hopeful podcaster, April O’Mara (played by Zoe Cleland), starts to piece together the mystery. With the help of reluctant survivor, Laura Noseworthy (played by Ruth Lawrence) and former sheriff, Mary O’Quinn (played by Mary Walsh), the trio set out to uncover the truth.” – a quick synopsis of Season Two, Only the Night Knows

What can you tell us about this series?
This is the second season of Only the Night Knows, sort of a murder mystery. 
written by Francois Van Zyl, and directed by Brad Gover, and Brad’s company and my company co-produced it. I’s five episodes, 60 minutes. The first season, it was six episodes, the second, we made the episodes a bit longer, so it’s just five. It follows the aftermath of an investigation in Black Marsh Cove, which is a very thinly disguised Pooch Cove, where Mary Walsh plays the sheriff [Mary], and I play a former police officer [Laura] who was mentored under Mary, but had a lot of issues, because in my younger years, my sister was one of the people who was murdered in that cove. So in season one  I come home, after my father dies, to sell the house and pack up my past, basically. And no sooner am I home before the accused murder, who was never convicted, gets killed. And Mary says, It would not be advisable to leave, right now, you’re a suspect. So you may as well stick around. And very quickly, I convince her that I’m not actually a suspect, and she lets me help informally join her investigation. And we sort of solve that mystery, but there’s a few loose ties at the end of it. Season two picks up a couple years later after Mary has been let go in disgrace from the police force, and I’ve been divorced as a result of a lot of turmoil, from the trauma that I went through that summer, so we are brought together when this young podcaster  (Zoe Cleland) decides that there’s more to the story than the public knows, and she’s doing a Somebody Knows Something sort of podcast. And she starts digging up stuff, and digs up quite a bit that, somehow, Mary and I both missed, and helps kind of reopen that case.

Did you always hope or plan to do a second season?
Francois and Brad always planned for maybe three seasons. And I kept saying, My God, don’t do that, because what happens if you never get three seasons? You’ve got to leave people with some kind of solid ending. And so they did make that first season a little bit more of a solid ending, but with the room to do a second. And the second does tie things up, but you can see that if you pull out another thread, something else could be exposed. So that’s how they’ve constructed it, which I think is really smart. Like, there’s just enough brought in and just enough resolved to keep you satisfied for a full season. And it was really fun to do. We only went back to Pouch Cove for a day or two of shooting,  we shot it mostly in St John’s, but there was just something about the characters in this one, for sure. I think because there was that little bit of distance again, from season one to season two, because we didn’t do it, like, one year after the other, they had almost two years to plan that second season. They just had more time to et it simmer and percolate.

And this isn’t the only such project you have a producing role with.
No, yeah. I produce a lot of these Bell Fibes.  I think I did five the first year, and it ranged from children’s entertainment to lifestyle, to sort of light children’s drama. The Missus Downstairs came next. And I produced that with Mary Walsh. Because Mary and Dave [Sullivan] had an idea, and I said, that’s perfect for those Bell Fibes, and Mary was already talking about it being a series, so I just played matchmaker at first with them. And then Mary said, You need to come on to the show, and I said, You don’t need me. And four seasons later, I’m still working on it with Mary. So that turned out turned out to be a much bigger part of my life than I thought it was going to be. The third year I did a comedy series with Renée Hackett, produced and directed, What Odds, that was really fun. A comedy series that Renee wrote, really beautifully, and it got a CSA Award, and nominations internationally. And Missus Downstairs has a raft of awards, gotten so much recognition. It really was the little train that could. That series just took off, and was the top-rated show on Bell Fibe.

How do you get something like this off the ground?
So that very first year, I have to credit Jake Thompson, who was 16 year old years old at the time, and he messaged me about two weeks into the pandemic, and said,  I’m looking for a producer for a show. Great. And I want to pitch it to Bell Fibe. I’ve been talking to [senior producer] Paul Gardner. Which, of course, for them, was a pivot, because they’d only been doing sports coverage pretty much in Newfoundland; they were doing all of these kinds of community development shows all across the country, except for here. And so Jake Thompson got in touch with them, Paul said yes and said, let’s have a meeting. Who do you want to be your producer? And that was when Jake pulled me in and through the jigs and reels I said, yeah, okay, I’ll try that. I don’t know much about it, but I’ll try. We did a season of Jake’s show, The Adventures of Gary and Lou. A really sweet puppet show developed and written by him. And we had such a grand time with that, and Paul Gardner, in one of the meetings, said, you know, we’ve greenlit this, but we have money to do other things in Newfoundland. Do you know anyone with a show? And I said, Paul, it’s a pandemic. Everybody is home. Everyone has a show. What are you looking for? And he kind of laughed, and suggested I look at their offerings, and especially watch the shows from Hamilton, because it’s about the same size and licence fee and demographics as here. So I did. I watched tons of stuff. And as I was watching it, I was writing down, okay, there’s a brewery tour. I knew Nick Masters had one of them. There was kids’ programming. I knew Mom’s Girls and Andy Bullman had their sights on writing something. And Santiago Guzmán had a show about immigration. Anyway, I basically just reached out to everybody who crossed my mind as I was watching those shows. and said, hey, just putting this in your head, you should look into this. You should pitch it. And tweak the pitch this way. And they all pitched. And some of them were greenlit within 24 hours. And they went and got licenses. And then every single one of them came back and said, I don’t know how to make this, will you? And I was like, I can’t. It’s too much. But as it turned out, Paul kind of made the licenses work for over two years, so it worked for me. And so that’s how I got into it. I got a lot of experience in those first two years, in producing. And it was great. And then tons of other people went and pitched and got shows. It’s pretty amazing. There’s a lot of shows here.

So my last question is what are you up to now, and you can only say five things.
Okay. I’m just starting to edit of a lifetime movie for Elemental Pictures that I just directed. 
We shot it in 10 days, wrapped on Friday, so I’m in the edit for that. It’s called In Another Life. It may or may not keep that title, but I think it’s a great title for that. Rob and Peter Blackie produced that. So that’s one thing. I’m in the sound editing stage for a piece that Lisa Moore wrote, and Cheryl Hickman produced for Opera on the Avalon. That’s a 40-minute experimental opera, a theatre film piece. I’m about to direct two short pieces for Opera on the Avalon. We’re doing a music video for The Mobile Goat, which is a homage to Joan Morrissey. And the fourth one is a beautiful piece that Cheryl wrote about Vera Perlin. We haven’t shot it yet. And then I guess the fifth thing is, I’m writing a new movie with Emily Bridger, about a fashion designer, whose ambition gets her into trouble. And that’s called Mine All Mine. We’re in the pitching stage and the writing stage for that. It’s good you said five, because I have other things I feel bad not mentioning, but that’s a good cross section.

Only the Night Knows Season Two premieres August 20 on Bell Fibre TV1.

Need to catch up on Season One? Click here.