There’s a lot of prep work that goes on long before cameras roll to shoot an episode of Murdoch Mysteries.
Not your average police procedural drama, Murdoch’s early 20th century setting means that producers of the show – Shaftsbury – need to find the right locations, complete with architecture and land features that best reflect those of the early 1900s.
And, for one day at least, Thorold fit the bill as crews from the long-running CBC show transformed the downtown, filming scenes for an episode for next season.
Finding shooting locations can be complicated, said Murdoch producer Jeremy Hood.
“The biggest challenge is that it's not 1911; you don't notice all the modern hits,” he told ThoroldToday, prior to the Thorold shoot. “You go to a small town, and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is quaint’, but without the eye to seeing that, ‘Oh, wait, there's parking signs and stuff signs and lines in the roads, traffic lights and all of those things.’ That's really the biggest challenge.”
That’s all part and parcel with the show’s quest to make sure everything, from costumes to props, is authentic to the show’s time period.
“The biggest and hardest thing is being on location and making it not look like 2024,” Hood said.
Location scouts for the show had taken note of the city previously, Hood said, but filming here could not be worked into the production schedule. Ideally, Hood said, locations shouldn’t be spread too far apart so time isn’t eaten up with travel, and Thorold was just a little too out of the way for past shoots.
But not this time.
Prior to coming to Thorold, the crew was at Westfield Heritage Village in Flamborough. Thorold is a little further away than what is normally preferred – it takes a little over an hour to get from Thorold to Flamborough, about three times the normal 20 minutes preferred for production of the show.
But for the purposes of the new episode, Thorold couldn’t be passed up, Hood said. There were little in the way of what he described as “complications” for the filming.
“It was between Thorold and Ayr, which is 20 minutes from Westfield, but Thorold just gave us more.”
In the end, the aesthetic of Front Street proved to be too good to pass up.
“It’s all about the buildings. There's not really a ton of what we would call ‘contamination,’" Hood said, meaning there’s little in the way of modern looking intrusions in the stretch being used. “When you're looking straight up and down the sidewalk, you don't really see anything modern. Even the signs that you see look like they could be from that era.”
Oddly enough, for the production, Thorold is subbing for another Niagara municipality.
“It's funny. In the script it's actually Grimsby,” Hood said. “It's like we passed Grimsby to go to Thorold to shoot Grimsby.”
And without giving away the plot of the episode being filmed; Hood said the scenes shot in Thorold are “integral” to the story.
“It's kind of a jumping off point,” Hood said.
Murdoch Mysteries airs Monday at 8 p.m. on CBC. Episodes can also be viewed on the network’s Gem streaming service. The scenes shot in Thorold will be included in the eighth episode of the’ 18th season. It is expected to air in early January.
