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| Ming (Mayko Nguyen) | Earl Fowler
Movie Entertainment
January 2010
It’s a bit of a dilemma.
When an author creates vital, compelling characters that leap off the page, they actually do leap off the page.
“It’s impossible to contain their complex personalities and sketch out all plausible plot lines within the covers of a single book,” said Vincent Lam in a recent interview with Movie Entertainment.
So when the Toronto emergency physician had a chance to help adapt his 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning book of short stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, into an eight-part TV series to debut this month on HBO Canada, it was just what the doctor ordered.
“What Jason (Sherman, the Governor-General Award-winning playwright and screenwriter who did the adaptation) asked me quite early in the project was: ‘Did you imagine a future life for these characters?’”
Lam said of course he had. It was Lam’s first book and he was far from done with the territory he knows so well .
As Sherman recognized, Lam’s series of interconnected stories about a group of conflicted medical students struggling through internships, emergency-room crises, triumphs and failures was deliberately left open-ended.
“I did that to pick up the option of coming back to the characters with further plot ideas,” said Lam, 35. “We talked about some and actually put them into the series – things not in the book – which is pretty cool.”
Produced by Shaftesbury Films and shot in Toronto and Hamilton, the series “explores some off-the-margins, off-the-edges-of-the-pages elements” readers won’t find in the book, Lam said. “There’s an infertility issue and a furthering of a love triangle dynamic … What makes a project interesting is not simply a literal translation but an exploration.”
Lam served as both a medical and a creative consultant on Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, which he said departs from familiar dramas like House, ER and Grey’s Anatomy by focusing less on “the sense of bravado” endemic to the genre and more on “the humanity of these characters, and in many ways the faults of the characters.”
“These are ordinary people trying to do something extraordinary, which is to learn to be doctors and then to actually be doctors. Characters who find that sometimes they do really good things, and characters who also find that sometimes they fall short.”
The three main characters are doctors at Toronto Mercy Hospital with a shared history. Starring in his first one-hour drama series, Shawn Ashmore (X-Men, Terry) plays Fitz, an Air Ambulance doctor with passions for life, booze and lost love Ming (Mayko Nguyen of ReGenesis and Rent-a-Goalie fame). Painfully private Ming is married to Chen (Byron Mann of Dragon Boys and Dark Angel), whose calm demeanour belies an emotional turmoil.
Experienced directors Rachel Talalay (Terminal City), Kari Skogland (The Stone Angel) and Erik Canuel (Bon Cop Bad Cop) collaborated on the series.
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures will premiere on HBO Canada on January 10.
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