The 2025 Leo Awards were held at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Vancouver on July 12th and 13th. Nick Orchard was nominated for Best Dramatic Series for Murder in a Small Town.
Here is our conversation with Nick Orchard.
HNMAG: You’re in the UK now?
Nick Orchard: That’s correct.
HNMAG: How often are you in Canada?
Nick Orchard: About fifty to sixty percent of the time. My work is in Canada for the most part.
HNMAG: When did you move part-time to the UK?
Nick Orchard: In 2022. My wife retired after a career in the Federal Courts, and as we have friends and family in London, we thought we’d move here. We were always coming over for one thing or another, and also we like to travel across to the continent. It made some sense to have a base here in London.
HNMAG: That’s lovely.
Nick Orchard: Of course, the moment we made that decision, Fox picked up Murder in a Small Town.
HNMAG: That’s how it goes. Isn’t it?
Nick Orchard: The first book of the series Murder in a Small Town is called The Suspect and won the Edgar Award for mystery writing. L.R. Wright (known as Bunny) was the first Canadian to win that prestigious award. So, I picked up the option over 30 years ago to make a feature film. She approached me around 1995. The rights had been with someone else, and she wasn’t happy with them. When those rights expired, I was working with a wonderful Director of Photography (DOP) named Doug McKay and he was friends with Bunny’s family, and he suggested she talk with me as he seemed to think that I was a nice guy and a good producer.
HNMAG: Perfect.
Nick Orchard: She came to me with the idea that they would do this as a small family production, and she would write the script. Her husband John Wright was head of the theatre department at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and had done some film directing. I told her at the time that I thought it could be a tough project to finance, as John’s film directing experience was limited and she’d never written a screenplay. But I read the book. I just loved it and was very excited. So, I tried for a year to sell that package but as I predicted I couldn’t finance it. So, I bought the option. That was 30 years ago, and the pursuit of that film lasted many years. At one point, I had Donald Sutherland attached to play the old man.
HNMAG: Great.
Nick Orchard: William Hurt was going to play Alberg, the detective. Kristen Scott Thomas was attached at some point as well. We had a great package. We also had wonderful directors attached as well. Anyway, about five or six years ago, it occurred to me that the way to get it done was to do it as a series. There were nine or ten novels with Alberg as the chief detective.
HNMAG: That made sense then.
Nick Orchard: At that point, Bunny had passed. Her family ran her estate and agreed to option the whole series. At that point, I ran with that and found enthusiasm from some of the original producers I had contacted about the feature.
HNMAG: Where were the books originally set?
Nick Orchard: The Sunshine Coast. The only difference was that the books were set in Sechelt. I worked on the original Beachcombers so I knew the coast well. Sechelt is a lovely town but it’s less cinematic than Gibsons. It’s flat and straightforward. Gibsons has beautiful hills and slopes. It’s much more scenic.
HNMAG: It was set in Gibsons then.
Nick Orchard: The series was set in Gibsons. One of our producers, Jeff Wachtel, took it to Fox, and they loved it. After six or eight months of looking at it and meetings, we were able to secure the first season.
HNMAG: You worked on Beachcombers for a long time. Was that your first job in Film and TV?
Nick Orchard: Oh god, no! I began as a child actor. I was in Cariboo Country with Robert Clotier who played Relic on The Beachcombers and did various other TV and radio dramas along with theatre.
HNMAG: That was a Canadian show?
Nick Orchard: Yes, produced in the CBC studios in Vancouver in 1960. That was the first place Vancouver started to develop homegrown crews. After high school I did a film and theatre degree at UBC. After a brief stint in radio, I ended up at BCTV, which was the CTV affiliate at the time. I started in audio and then became a floor Director. In 1979, we went to London, and I quickly got a job as an Assistant Director (AD) with the BBC, and on returning joined a studio that was producing Let’s Make a Deal with Monty Hall.
HNMAG: He was Canadian, too.
Nick Orchard: Yes. 200 episodes we did. Mind numbing, to be honest. After that, I moved on to The Beachcombers. At that point I was working as a production manager. In 1985, CBC had to make some layoffs thanks to government cuts, so I went back to the BBC and became associate producer for Eastenders and later Brookside. Those shows were very popular with younger audiences and inspired me to create Northwood back in Canada. Ian Weir joined me as a writer on that show and he is still with me on Murder in a Small Town.
HNMAG: Was Northwood set in Canada?
Nick Orchard: Oh yeah. The odd thing is that I’m actually living now in the London suburb of Northwood and was living here in the 80s when I did Eastenders. I just needed a nice-sounding neighborhood name where these kids were living, so I used it. Northwood was the first show for my production company, Soapbox Productions, with of course multiple other dramas, comedies and documentaries over the last 35 years.
HNMAG: Is there enough being done to help set TV shows in Canada?
Nick Orchard: About twenty years ago, CTV would not promote its Canadian content. Most of their efforts focused on their US programs. Now it’s different. CTV realizes that if the Canadian shows are of high quality, and you promote them, they will do well. And of course, CBC has always stood behind their shows.
Nick Orchard is one of Vancouver’s most experienced and prolific showrunners and has a long history of working in television both in Canada and the U.K.. There is no one else more familiar with shooting television in Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast. You can see new episodes of the second season of Murder in a Small Town now on Global and Fox, as well as previous episodes in Canada on Stack TV.