An insurance company may not seem like the most exciting setting for a gritty Canadian drama, but like most things, there’s a darker side to insurance that most people wouldn’t suspect. Cra$h and Burn, the new Showcase drama from Paul Gross, seeks to expose the seedy underbelly of Hamilton’s insurance game and the people trying to keep the industry going.
“I learned from this show is that there’s this huge world of organized crime around insurance fraud,” says star Caroline Cave, who plays Catherine, the in-house lawyer for Cra$h and Burn’s insurance company. “It totally didn’t occur to me! It’s a huge criminal world.”
Naturally, as a Paul Gross production, the people are even more dysfunctional than the company they work for – Cave’s character, especially, is in a downward spiral after divorcing a man who turned out to be gay.
“I think when we meet Catherine, she’s in this consumption stage, where she’s numbing herself and riding this high,” Cave explains. “She’s using substances to avoid. She’s on her own after her divorce and living in this rebellion – against whom, I’m not sure, but it’s like a teenage rebellion. It’s a lot of sex, a lot of sleeping around, but it’s an avoidance technique that catches up with her.”
Cave’s own father is a personal injury lawyer in Vancouver, B.C., so she took a bit of inspiration from him.
“In terms of his manner, his officiousness, his sarcasm and his intellectual confidence, I grew up with that my entire life, so in some ways, I’m playing my dad in a skirt,” she jokes, adding: “Although my dad’s much more of a devoted family man, a more upstanding citizen than Catherine.”
Actor Luke Kirby plays the show’s titular character Jimmy Burns, an insurance adjuster who desperately wants to help people – but, just as equally, doesn’t want to get fired.
“I think Jimmy is a guy who trying to do right by an idea that he has. An idea that is kind of untenable to him,” says Kirby, who also starred on Gross’ previous television series Slings and Arrows. “He can’t actually grasp it. He’s in a bit of denial about it. He’s trying to live what he thinks is an ideal, middle-of-the-road life but isn’t actually cut out for it yet.”
But, Kirby insists, Cra$h and Burn isn’t all bleak.
“I think that there’s a fight, though. A fight against it,” he explains. “I think Jimmy is at least trying to keep his head above water and that’s what kind of counts.”
Setting the series in Hamilton was an ingenious move on the writers’ parts, Cave says, because it’s also a city that has multiple faces. Cra$h and Burn treats the Ontario city like its own character, much as the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire showcased the city of Baltimore.
“There are some beautiful, beautiful parts of Hamilton, and then it’s also a town that’s been left in the dust as the economy’s changed. It switched from being this steel and manufacturing town to…not,” Cave says. “And the writers, they’ve taken this underdog city and put it in a new light.”
Cra$h and Burn premieres Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 9 p.m.
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