Returning for a second smash season, Haven is a Showcase Original series about a somewhat psychic female FBI agent and some strange shenanigans in small-town Maine. One of the most unique adaptations of the works of Stephen King, it's loosely based on the horror master’s 2005 unsolved-crime novella The Colorado Kid, and cooks up a secondary level of mysteries — an entire town’s worth — around the original story. Season one ended with the town’s ‘troubles’ being (mostly) explained, but uncovered a whole new problem: Not only is it likely that FBI Agent Audrey Parker is related to the Colorado Kid, but she also might not actually be Agent Parker after all. Confusing yet captivating? Of course it is. After all, it’s Haven. Welcome back, you’d better sit down for this.

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HAVEN, Season 2 - Blog #4:
FEAR PLAY: BEHIND THE SCENES IN HAVEN (FEAT. THE HAVEN POLICE DEPARTMENT)
by Gary Butler

You could tell from the title alone that this week's episode was going to be a tough one for Haven’s plucky heroine: “Audrey Parker’s Day Off” proved to be anything but a day off and, in fact, in story length lasted much longer than just a day [WATCH EPISODE SIX HERE]. To that last point, without getting spoileriffic on those of you who have yet to see what might be my favourite episode to date, suffice to say a reference is made to Sheriff Nathan Wuornos’s “second-favourite Bill Murray movie” -- never mentioned by title but, based on the events in the town of Haven, clearly Groundhog Day.

Watching Audrey retrace, retrace and retrace her steps throughout the episode gave me a certain sense of déjà vu as a viewer. A lucky viewer, at that: I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of days in “Haven” recently, visiting the show’s set in Nova Scotia (versus, Maine, East-coast USA, where the show technically takes place).

Clever Canadian viewers will long have realized that Haven’s stand-in exterior is the beyond-picturesque town of Lunenberg, a UNESCO World Heritage site located about an hour outside of Nova Scotia’s central urban hub, Halifax. It would be an error, though, for those aforementioned canny Canucks to assume that the show is filmed in Lunenberg.

Granted, some scenes must be shot in the town, for the beauteous (and, boat-ious) backdrop more than anything else. But most of the shooting occurs in a town that I cannot name here, but is to Lunenberg what Lunenberg is to Halifax. (So: much smaller, and another hour away.)

On the day of the main set visit, the weather had turned ugly: it was raining like the wrath of Haven itself -- whatever that wrath is -- all-but sequestering us on the set of Haven’s police department. Which, per the magic of TV, is much smaller than the show suggests, but much bigger than anyone familiar with TV productions might expect. Case in point: The set is located in a decommissioned curling/hockey arena that boasts two ‘rinks’; I could almost have skipped the quotes there, because in one of the rinks, the boards are still up (you would have seen the area in question in the “Love Machine” episode [WATCH EPISODE SIX HERE]. The rinks branch off of a main hub, perpendicularly, forming an ‘L’ shape from overhead.

The Haven PD interior is a permanent installation that takes up approximately half of one of those rinks. Even so, with three offices and a main hall, it’s roughly as big as the footprint of a typical Tim Horton’s. When filming is taking place in any one of the areas of the Haven PD interior, equipment and people -- in both cases, by the dozens -- is moved around and when silence descends on the set, you’d best hope your stomach doesn’t grumble.

To come back, finally, to Audrey’s déjà vu on her ‘day off,’ in the Haven PD interior I was allowed to become a slightly overweight fly on the wall, and watched the same sequence filmed over and over, for the better part of an hour. The episode in question was “Sparks & Recreation,” and the scene involved Nathan, Audrey and a police assistant trying to track a vehicle by security camera footage [WATCH EPISODE FOUR HERE]. No actor missed a beat, but still the scene was filmed, refilmed and refilmed.

This blog post has gone on long enough already; it would take an entire extra series of them to describe everything that I saw on set (I was allowed to wander freely). I filled most of a notebook with my observations. Here are a few, in no particular order:

--The “Indiana Jones ball” (my term) from S01E02 is here, possibly for a return? It’s not as if they are storing all of their props at this location. Stranger still: there are TWO of these balls.

 

--These rinks are cool bordering on cold. The aircon has been long decommed, but it’s still hard to keep the heat in. With circumferences slightly smaller than that of a hula hoop, giant flexible heat pipes stretch in to the set from all directions (vaguely reminding me, later, of the “Roots” episode two weeks ago [WATCH EPISODE FIVE HERE]) and pipe in heated air.


--On Nathan Wuornos’s desk, there is a police report documenting the crevasse that opened behind Audrey’s vehicle in S01E01. This is a ‘serious’ report, in the sense of being written out fully, even though they must have known that it would show up on TV peripherally at best.


Visiting Haven was a blast (and not just a blast of snaked-in hot air). When the interviews started, I was apprised that the majority of the cast members had been filming to beyond midnight the day previous. You would never have suspected the fatigue given the level of energy. Who says you need sunshine to be happy in Haven? I sure didn’t.

COMING SOON TO THE HAVEN SEASON TWO BLOG:
More cast interviews, including Emily Rose and Jason Priestley, and plenty more backstage scoops and shenanigans.