'Moonshine' creator Sheri Elwood mines Nova Scotia family roots for CBC dramedy | iNFOnews | Thompson-Okanagan's News Source
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'Moonshine' creator Sheri Elwood mines Nova Scotia family roots for CBC dramedy

Cast members from the television show "Moonshine," (left to right) Anastasia Phillips (playing Rhian Finley-Cullen), Alexander Nunez (playing Sammy Finley-Cullen), Emma Hunter (playing Nora Finley-Cullen), Tom Stevens (playing Ryan Finley-Cullen) and Jennifer Finnigan (playing Lidia Bennett) are shown in a handout photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-CBC **MANDATORY CREDIT**

TORONTO - Driving onto the set of her new Nova Scotia series "Moonshine," creator Sheri Elwood can see her mother's house and her family's campground. Sometimes her dad zips by in a golf cart.

The dramedy, which Elwood describes as "a blue collar" version of HBO's hit series "Succession," debuts Tuesday on CBC TV with a look at adult half-siblings battling for control of the family's ramshackle summer resort on the province's south shore.

Elwood says the story of "lust, legacy and lobster" features "a heavily fictionalized" version of her own Nova Scotia family who run a resort.

She even built the set on land adjacent to the Hubbards Beach Campground and Cottages belonging to her mother and stepfather.

"I come from a family of adult half-siblings and our old hippie parents run a resort campground out here," Elwood, who is also the showrunner and executive producer, said in a recent phone interview from the writers' room in Hubbards, N.S.

"I always wanted to tell this story."

Jennifer Finnigan, Anastasia Phillips, Emma Hunter, Tom Stevens and Alexander Nunez star as the dysfunctional Finley-Cullens siblings, alongside Corrine Koslo and Peter MacNeill as the heads of the family.

Finnigan plays Lidia, a celebrity architect and the eldest sibling who returns home with her two teenage children for a memorial for a late family member.

Lidia has big ambitions for the Moonshine, which is described as "two stars on a good day." But Phillips's character, the oft-overlooked younger sister Rhian, has her own vision for the property.

Hunter plays sister Nora, a local radio host; Nunez plays Sammy, a musically gifted adopted brother; and Stevens plays Rhian's hard-partying twin Ryan, who runs an illegal business out of the resort.

Elwood said they had a marine crew for water scenes and an animal wrangler to help with the lobster, which Montreal-born Finnigan had to perform with in a scene.

"It was my first time ever holding a living lobster and it was terrifying," laughed Finnigan, whose previous credits include CBS's "Salvation," FX’s "Tyrant" and the CBS soap opera "The Bold and the Beautiful," where she played Bridget Forrester from 2000 to 2004.

"And just so you know, when I dropped that lobster into a pot of boiling water, it was strictly a shallow pot of cool water with dry ice. No lobsters were harmed."

Season 1 was shot starting last summer and season 2 is in production through October. All the crews are local.

"I chose this part of the world because it's actually not a part of Nova Scotia that I've really seen on TV that often," said Elwood, who created the dark comedy "Call Me Fitz," starring Jason Priestley, for HBO Canada and the Audience Network in the United States.

"Oftentimes, the Maritime shows are jaunty and nautical and all those things. And this little corner on the south shore is a little more ragged. It's just very specific, so I wanted to show that, the place where I spent summers."

Los Angeles-based Elwood said she grew up splitting time between Toronto and Nova Scotia. Her four half-siblings and three blood siblings were all similar in age and it was "absolute chaos."

"I wanted to see a show like this that, even though it was caustic and dark, had a squishy centre, because I think that's what I was missing," said Elwood.

"Oh look, there's my mother now literally just driving by. She just waved to me," she added with a laugh as she looked out the window.

Elwood said she was also interested in exploring families bound by the land and relationships between wildly different adult sisters still figuring out their lives.

"There are a lot of women in my writers' room, too," she said. "We're using this show and the relationships with the sisters as an excuse to talk about things that are important to us, that we haven't really seen discussed in a certain way."

Finnigan said when she reads the scripts for the one-hour episodes, she hears Elwood's voice "all over" them.

"I definitely assumed at first that I was basically playing Sheri," she said. "But now knowing Lidia much better and Sheri much better, they are two very different creatures.

"There are definitely some qualities in there. But Sheri and I are similar in a lot of ways."

So, is Lidia is based on Elwood?

"She's definitely my favourite character to write. But Lidia doesn't have a lot of self-awareness, and the fact that I don't really know if she's based on me, what does that say?" she said with a laugh.

"But that's why the story is not autobiographical."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2021.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2021
The Canadian Press

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