There is no mystery as to why the âMurdoch Mysteriesâ television series grows its fan base every year.
Set in Toronto at the dawn of the 20th century, each one-hour drama explores the intriguing world of William Murdoch, a methodical and dashing detective who pioneers innovative forensic techniques to solve some of the cityâs most gruesome murders.
Inspiration for each episode is born in a room where six scriptwriters toss ideas about, latching onto the ones that have the most general appeal.
One of the showâs successful scriptwriters is Salmon Arm Secondary 1976 grad Paul Aitken, who will be returning to the community in May as a presenter to the Word on the Lake WritersâFestival.
âWe call it the hive; different brains operating in the same space and talking freely generate ideas in other people,â says Aitken, noting he rarely goes into a new season with episode plans. âYou get way more ideas from other people and way more solutions become apparent.â
Aitken says the hive gets episodes off to a good start, an integral part of the process as 18 episodes are written and filmed in six months.
Stoked with ideas from the collective âbrain,â scriptwriters break off to independently to write the scripts for their assigned episodes, very occasionally collaborating with another writer.
Research is key, a good measure of which is accomplished by searching the Web, often via Google and Wikepedia â except for political information, which is often skewed by contributorsâ own agendas and false information, Aitken says.
âWe donât have the resources to hire a lot of staff so we do our own research; itâs a fantastic way to waste time if you are disinclined to write,â he laughs. âYou learn a lot of stuff you didnât know and itâs a pleasurable activity in and of itself. Getting into embedded links is a great way to spend a chunk of your day.â
Writing less costly but more challenging âbottleâ episodes, which are shot in one location and have other constraints are very appealing to Aitken.
These are a little more dense because the story is all thatâs being sold â no big scenes, no action scenes, no big sets, he says of the more complex characterization process that goes into writing a bottle episode.
The process, although more difficult, is much more satisfying when the manuscript is complete and ready for a return to the meeting room.
âWe meet together to go over the scripts and weâre really mean with each other as we correct the manuscripts,â Aitken says. âProduction (department) decides on whatâs filmable and whatâs not, how many people can be hired and film locations.â
Each episode has its own production limits, which vary on how difficult the plot is to break (figure out the plotting) and the type and complexity of the world in which the episode takes place.
Production for the new season of âMurdoch Mysteriesâ starts in the third week of May, so members of âthe hiveâ are now breaking stories for eight different episodes.
Aitkenâs road to the series began when a friend with an in, got him an introduction and a great opportunity, he says of life after university.
After graduating from SASS, Aitken attended University of Victoria, where he followed a curriculum that included âeverything and nothing.â
âIt was, he says, a good way to spend his youth. Following university, Aitken moved to Toronto in 1986 to try his hand at writing for television.
He and his friend with the in were successful in pitching a script for âThe Campbellsâ, a Scottish-Canadian television drama series, produced by Scottish Television and CTV from 1986 to 1990.
âItâs good money. Iâve developed a craft of writing for TV so I enjoy that,â he says of his ensuing successful career. âWhen you do anything long enough, thereâs pleasure in exercising a skill that youâve learned. Itâs also one of the few jobs where you necessarily have to do something different every time.â
As Murdoch Mysteries enters its 11th season, 150 episodes have aired to an increasingly larger fan base.
âI would say every person likes something different about the show; most are fans who love the history, so we all dig into the history,â says Aitken, who has been writing for âMurdoch Mysteriesâ since 2007 and written somewhere between 32 and 35 episodes.
In between writing for âThe Campbellsâ and securing a long tenure with âMurdoch Mysteries,â Aitken says he bounced around from show to show, something scriptwriters do when they are not involved in a longtime project.
The show has hosted a few celebrities over the years, including Stephen Harper.
âHe has been a fan, at least while he was prime minister, and his daughter wanted him to be on the show,â says Aitken. âHe pulled some strings so, yes, we wrote a part for him in 2004 and he appeared on screen.â
Aitken says the network is always looking for marketing value and having celebrities appear on the show tends to bring in larger audiences.
âItâs always a good quid pro quo to have people we know make appearances,â he says noting former âDragonâ Arlene Dickinson of âDragonâs Denâ fame, appeared on the show in a 2012 episode called âInvention Conventionâ as a possible investor,
An international component comes from the inclusion of actors from England, whose appearance on the program help UKTV sell the program.
âAmazingly, the show does very well; every year it has been on, more people come to watch the show than leave the show,â he says, pointing out most television programs have short lives and that even the ones that qualify as hits donât usually make it past nine seasons. âGoing into the second season, we thought we had picked all the low-hanging fruit and were asking ourselves where would we get new ideas.â
By the third year, everyone was feeling more comfortable and Aitken says he canât see any reason not to keep churning out great stories for the showâs fans.
The only scriptwriter to have been with the show since its debut is Aitken. While others have left to start their own shows, or in the case of one very talented writer and âreally good guyâ died, the hive is a relatively stable place.
âGenerally people get on a show like this, they tend to stay. Itâs a very pleasurable way to spend your day â in the company of people who are funny, bright and interesting, in a job where you make people laugh and come up with ideas,â he says. âSometimes I get weary of the show and the stress it places, because when the machine is humming, we have to meet the need of that machine and itâs a constant stress.â
In his presentation to the Word on the Lake Writersâ Festival, Aitkenâs goal is to actually create a writersâ room in which participants create an episode.
âI have never tried to break a mystery in a couple of hours; I donât know how that will work,â he laughs.
Aitken also plans to explain why certain decisions are made in the production of âMurdoch Mysteriesâ â the kinds of things that have to be accomplished in a mystery that wouldnât be done in another show.
âThere are demands that are not in other shows, there are certain constraints in the form,â he says. âWe take more liberties than others and I will talk about what the process is for breaking a mystery and how we do it in the âMurdoch Mysteries.â
Word on the Lake Writersâ Festival runs May 19 to 21 at the Prestige Harbourfront Resort and Okanagan College.
Sessions will include both skill development workshops and open forums with authors based on questions and answers in an intimate setting.
A Friday night âcafĂ© litâ will feature presenters reading from their published works and a gala banquet is always a popular part of the Saturday night program.
For more information or to register, go to wordonthelakewritersfestival.com.
