Sky Atlantic’s three-series crime drama casts Tim Roth as Jim Worth, a recovering alcoholic ex-London detective who becomes police chief of Little Big Bear, a postcard-pretty Alberta town suddenly swollen by a North Stream Oil refinery. The arrival of thousands of migrant workers uncorks drugs, prostitution and organised crime, forcing Worth to confront both external predators and his own booze-triggered alter-ego, the sadistic Jack Devlin. Christina Hendricks plays Elizabeth Bradshaw, North Stream’s VP of Stakeholder Relations, whose slick corporate diplomacy frays as body counts rise and her moral compass wobbles.
Shot around High River, Waterton and Dorothy between June and December 2016, the show turns the Rockies into a moral frontier where pipeline money poisons every relationship. Genevieve O’Reilly is Angela Worth, the wife who watches her husband’s personality split, while Abigail Lawrie’s Anna, her daughter, becomes collateral damage in a turf war that escalates from bar fights to cartel executions. Oliver Coopersmith’s baby-faced killer Whitey Brown and Ian Puleston-Davies’s Frank Keane personify the creeping criminal infrastructure, and Sarah Podemski’s First Nations officer Denise Minahik keeps uneasy order inside a force that barely outnumbers the vultures.
Created by Rowan Joffé, the 25-episode run aired 7 September 2017 to 24 December 2020, each instalment stretching 43–67 minutes as the violence migrates from oil camp to reserve to Worth’s own living room. Adrian Corker’s score underlines the chill, while editors Amy Hounsell and Mark Eckersley splice blackout sequences that leave viewers unsure whether blood was spilled by Devlin or merely imagined by Worth. The final shot of the third series leaves the Rocky Mountain horizon littered with graves and pipelines, the land richer and emptier than when the rigs arrived.
Production Details
Sky Atlantic / 3 Seasons / 25 Episodes / 2017
Created by: Rowan Joffé
Writer(s): Rowan Joffé, Nathaniel Price, Thomas Martin
Producer(s): Jonathan Curling[1]
Main Cast
Tim Roth as Jim Worth / Jack Devlin
Genevieve O'Reilly as Angela Worth
Abigail Lawrie as Anna Worth
Christina Hendricks as Elizabeth Bradshaw
Ryan Kennedy as Nick McGillen
Sarah Podemski as Denise Minahik
Oliver Coopersmith as Whitey Brown
Christopher Heyerdahl as Louis Gagnon
Ian Puleston-Davies as Frank Jackson
Jenessa Grant as Rosa Nickel
Myles Peterman as Joe
Julia Carlile as Kayden Ferguson
