You’ve got to be pretty special to stand out in the town of EUREKA, as Abbie Bernstein finds out from some of its special inhabitants…

Hidden in an isolated small town in provincial America, dozens of brilliant inventors beaver away on secret projects sponsored – and coveted – by the US government. The town is called Eureka and is the basis for a new Sci Fi Channel TV show that stars Colin Ferguson, Salli Richardson-Whitfield and Joe Morton.

Ferguson’s character, US Marshal Jack Carter, is the audience surrogate, a newcomer who’s charged with maintaining order in the town after something happens to the local sheriff. However, Ferguson says, it’s not always easy being ‘normal’…

Mother of Invention

“Everyone else is so wildly eccentric,” he grins. “They get to do so much interesting, fun stuff and being the guy who goes, ‘Huh, this is weird’ time after time – I was concerned that it was going to be redundant. I worked with [series creators Jaime Paglia and Andrew Cosby] over the first six episodes to do a lot of varied versions, so it’s not that ‘fish out of water’ thing every week. It’s a drama but with comedy in it and it’s very self-aware – I really like that aspect.”

Salli Richardson-Whitfield’s Department of Defense agent, Allison Blake, is responsible for liaising between the government and the townsfolk while keeping Eureka’s secrets safe from the outside world. The actress says what appeals to her most are the parallels between herself and her character.

“What I like, and you can see it in the writing, is her sarcastic wit,” she explains. “I always think of myself as, maybe not a jokester, but I have a sense of humour and it’s very sarcastic and I get to use that in this and I enjoy that. Besides, she’s a working mom, and that’s what I get to explore, because that’s what I’m exploring in my own life. And she’s not just a single mom, but with an exceptional kind of child, which makes it a little different.

“I think my [real-life] child is exceptional,” Richardson-Whitfield states with a laugh, “but in the show, my son is autistic, but he’s also one of the brightest minds in the town. So I have two reasons to be there – because they’re working with my son and I’m the [Federal] agent for the town.”

Does being a mother in real life help Richardson-Whitfield in her scenes with Meshach Peters, who plays Blake’s son Kevin? “I think it does,” Richardson-Whitfield says. “You don’t know how much you will love a child until you have your own, no matter how many nieces and nephews you love, it’s a different kind of feeling. Having a child in a show, I can really express that feeling.”

Scientific Method

Morton, who has played other scientific geniuses in Terminator 2 and Smallville, has also had some real-life experiences that he draws on in playing Henry Deacon, one of Eureka’s brightest (albeit most eccentric) inventors.

“I grew up on military bases,” he states. “A military base is very much like what they’re describing here. It’s a very small, tight-knit community and all the social and political intrigue takes place without the rest of the world knowing what’s going on. My father’s job in the early 1950s was to integrate the [US] armed forces overseas. This was a tight little secret. Some people knew that the Army was certainly not integrated [at that time], but they didn’t know how it became segregated. That was a huge thing that was actually going on, but nobody knew about it. So that was the secret.

“This show,” Morton continues, “is about the scientific community wedded to the military community at the same time, and put in a microcosm of a small town. So you’ve got a small-town mentality – everybody knows everybody else, everybody knows everybody else’s business. Yet at the same time, what’s swirling around in the middle is all this tremendous science. They say geniuses perceive the world in a very different way than the rest of us. So you have these guys who are dealing with the world in these wonderful and strange ways, trying to have a life as a husband and a father and whatever. So that is what makes it really interesting.”

Top Secret!

The outside world doesn’t know about Eureka and the audience will have mysteries to unravel, but Ferguson says he has some ideas about where the series is going.

“I have a good sense of the mythology. I think [as an actor] you have to, because you need to know what not to play into. You don’t want to make a choice as an actor that gives away the mythology, so you have to have a sense of it to lead the audience in the other direction. They worked a lot on the mythology, they’ve put a lot of time and a lot of months of the history of the town, the history of the characters, what’s truly going on and what’s going to develop over the first six [episodes], the first 12, the first year – so I don’t know [all of] what they know, but I have a good sense of it.”

Richardson-Whitfield says that while all of the characters have secrets, she believes Blake’s are benign – at first, anyway. “Well, so far, I think she’s pretty much a good guy. Me and Colin are the straight people in the town - you have an idea where we’re coming from. But I think also that’ll be what’s interesting about the show, when you find out what our secret is. We don’t even know!” she laughs.

For Ferguson, it’s important to play against some of what we do know about Carter. “I like to approach things from the opposite way that you should – if he’s a law enforcement guy, I want him to have the other side of it present. My instinct wouldn’t be to interrogate someone by yelling, my instinct would be to interrogate someone by befriending them. We’re talking about a law enforcement character – I like the fact that he isn’t really a good family man. But he’s trying. And he doesn’t really like loud guns and [he knows] just pragmatic, weird stuff that guys in that field know. It’s like, ‘Don’t fire that, it’s really loud.’”

Some research went into the role, Ferguson adds. “I contacted the US Marshal Service and they were very forthcoming, which was great. I’ve [played] law enforcement guys before – I know how to fire a gun and all that stuff – but it’s really nice when you have someone you can talk to about, ‘Okay, I have to take this guy down, what’s the protocol?’ You want to make the drama work, but you also want to as best you can adhere to what they would do for realism.”

For Morton, one of the biggest selling points for him in playing Henry is, “The fact that he loves life so much and that it was going to be a real joy to play this guy. One of the earlier series I have done was Equal Justice. With Equal Justice, the character was very concerned with pushing the envelope in terms of the legal system – it was all about who falls through the legal system, very heavy, very serious, very dramatic. And it was great. I loved every minute of it. This is going to be even more fun.”

Inventory

“The set pieces are great,” notes Ferguson about how, well, inventive the production team has been when creating the show’s gadgets. “They’re really, really fun. I don’t get to use them all that much, because my jurisdiction as a US Marshal keeps me to my tools of the trade. I don’t go into [the scientist characters’] field, which makes me a little jealous as an actor, because they’ve got these really fun, wild props.”

Richardson-Whitfield so far hasn’t got to handle the inventions, either, but thinks Blake takes this in her stride. “I’ve been there for a while. We go through the town, and Colin’s character is amazed by everything, and to me it’s like I’m expecting anything every day, so it doesn’t seem to affect her at all. She’s jaded by the town by now.”

Morton, whose character puts together some of the nifty props, adds that even when objects look strange, they usually have an intuitive function. “What’s great about what the guys have done is, they’ve made it very real and very logical, so that I pretty much understood what was supposed to happen and what the mechanism is supposed to do and how it was supposed to work, and I’ve done enough reading to figure things out. If I had questions, I would go to them and say, ‘Is this what this is supposed to be?’ And they would say yes or no.”

Still, Ferguson notes, “First and foremost, it’s a character-driven show. It’s the people who make that world and how they interact with people outside of it. You’d hope that when a minority becomes the [group in power], it would be utopian, because they’ve experienced the other side and then you find that no, it doesn’t, it just repeats itself. Now that they have power, they exploit it to the best of their ability.”

“What we all have to remember about Eureka,” Morton points out, “is that it’s really about a small town of geniuses. That is a conflict of interest. You know what I’m saying? If you are a small town but you have large thoughts, those two things are going to butt up against each other, and how to live your life is going to become exponentially more difficult.”

This feature originally appeared in Dreamwatch Issue 144, September 2006.