On the slab with Coroner Season 4

While there’s a new medical examiner in Jenny’s office in Coroner Season 4, there were changes behind the scenes, too, with Adriana Maggs stepping into her first year as executive producer and showrunner on the series. And while she worked hand-in-hand with the series’ original creator, Morwyn Brebner, and the Coroner writing room, Adriana also got to explore one of her own passions this season, too.

“Dealing with a coroner who's struggling with mental health is really fascinating. Especially because it's exploring the idea that if you're dealing with mental health issues, you still have to show up at work and solve a crime, or whatever your job is,” she says, laughing. “I was so fascinated with the inner child and primal wounds research and therapy that I had been reading and doing. So it was really fun to kind of click into that and be able to manifest it on screen and talk about it there. Every condition that we explore, we have a fantastic psychiatrist who gets on and he'll just dive right into what that means and what it looks like, and what's unrealistic, how it can be treated and the effects of treatments, and so we strive to very accurately represent that.”

Read on as Adriana tells us about other firsts for the show we can experience this season, and what was happening in the writers’ room…

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Inside the writers’ room on Coroner Season 4

What can we expect in this season?

Adriana: “We were thinking about how everybody has been away from the world for a little while (because of COVID), so we thought about the theme of emergence this year. It felt right to explore going back to your life and everything being new. It's like we're all taking the little rickety steps as we try to rejoin our lives. Jenny’s estranged mother is in her house, her mother who abandoned her – so they're going to have to navigate that relationship. Abandonment as a child is one of the most damaging things that can happen to a child. And there’s a lot of interesting research being done into that primal wound that you're always trying to fix, or your inner child that they say you’re always trying to soothe or solve. If the people who are supposed to love you the most didn’t, how do you know that you’re worth loving? How does a child know that they’re worth loving? We really want to let her explore solving that primal wound and doing that with her mother. Then there’s a new coroner who's at the office and does things very differently to Jenny, and Donovan connects with an ex-wife who's into some secretive stuff that we find out eventually!”

Tell us a bit about the new Coroner, Dr. Elijah Thompson (Thom Allison)?

“I really love this actor so much, and I was really so excited to see what he could do, but he's basically the opposite of Jenny. He keeps everything very, very separate. I wouldn't say he's an incredibly compassionate character when we first meet him, everything is kind of by the book and there's forms for everything; she [Jenny] “Coroners” with her heart and he “Coroners” with his head, so they kind of come up against each other. But we also find out that he's ambitious and he has book deals and he's a lot of fun and he really enjoys his work, maybe too much sometimes! But we’ll get to know a little more about him as the season goes on, because you know Jenny is just an empath and she will pull everything out of him, and eventually we'll find out what's going on in there.”

 

How do you reimagine the story after three seasons?

Adriana: “I got to design the arc of the 4th season with Morwyn. I was really fortunate to be able to collaborate, just me and her, on where this could go. And I did inherit the [writers’] room and they had so many ideas of where we could go, but they're also fiercely loyal to where we had been. 1 of the most important things, I think, that we got to do this season is explore some of the other characters and give them stories. That was a deviation from what had been done in the past.”

What do you think Coroner fans will enjoy in the new season?

Adriana: “We are so lucky to have such a diverse, rich, writers’ room, who have so many true-life experiences with some of the worlds that we go in. So, we're everywhere. There are crimes in Chinatown, there’s crimes in the drag queen world, there's crimes in the unhoused world – as in Canada the housing crisis is crazy here since COVID. And this is something that I will credit to Morwyn – she has worked so hard to make sure that the writing room is full of people who represent their own authentic voices and their own authentic story, so it's not just a lot of white people trying to tell diverse stories, or straight people trying to tell queer stories. You're going to get the most incredible, heartfelt, authentic, real, soul story by letting people say what they want to say. When you're living something, you have a unique perspective on the details of it, right? We are also playing around with fun stuff like cults and serial killers.”

What was it like having Serinda Swan (Jenny) onboard as a director for the first time this season?

“You never know what to expect, because we have first-time directors all the time. But she knows this show, and she knows the journey of the characters and she was incredibly well prepped. There were images all over her office. I think we spent 9 hours over 1 weekend just talking through the script, and she worked really hard with the DP [Director of Photography], with the editor, and she came out with something that's just beautiful looking. I think it’s something she wants to pursue, and she’d be really good at it.”

Watch Coroner Season 4 Thursdays at 20:00 on Universal TV (DStv Channel 117)

Universal TV (DStv Channel 117) is available on DStv Premium, Compact Plus, Compact and Family. To upgrade your existing package, click here. Or if you'd like to Get DStv, find a service that suits your needs here.