Making Law & Order Toronto is like 'trying to construct a Swiss watch while having a stroke'

When you scroll through veteran TV writer and showrunner Tassie Cameron's IMDB page, you can't help but notice the boat load of police procedural projects under her belt. In addition to her current gig running Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent — the second season of which started last month — she's also worked on Flashpoint, Rookie Blue, and CBC's procedural dramedy Pretty Hard Cases. 

She says that her love for crime TV comes from her mother, Stevie Cameron, who was an investigative journalist for several Canadian publications, including the Ottawa Citizen, The Globe and Mail, and the CBC, and who also wrote several true crime books.

"[She] covered a lot of different crime stories… And I think that we spent a lot of time as a family talking about crime and policing and good and bad, and the law and reading crime thrillers," she says.

Law & Order is, arguably, the ultimate police procedural. The franchise launched 35 years ago this September. There are two generations of adults who have no real memory of a Law & Order free world. So when Cameron heard that they were putting together a Canadian version of the series, she had to toss her name in the hat and try her hand at writing a pilot.

"I joined the bake-off," she says. "I thought, 'This is an incredibly fun challenge and it doesn't matter if I get it or I don't, it will be really intellectually stimulating and fun and challenging.' And so I just tried to put my nerves at adapting such a legendary franchise aside long enough to write a pilot."

Cameron says working on Law & Order is like "trying to construct a Swiss watch while having a stroke." And while that metaphor may seem both jarring and weirdly specific, it makes perfect sense when she explains it. 

"You're just like, OK, I have 400 little moving springs and coils and pieces of plots and clues and alibis and photographs and you're trying to put them all together into a thing that is elegant and that ticks along and moves and keeps time," she says. "But you get sort of boggled by the amount of detail that you're trying to incorporate into the story sometimes. And that's the stroke part, right?"

The part of writing for the Law & Order franchise that is both the most challenging and the most fun for Cameron is finding a way to somehow make the show feel both distinctively Toronto.

"We've studied [Law & Order], we've broken it down, we've read their bibles," she says. "We understand the rules. Like, you have to know your framework very, very well, and then you have to kind of fill in that very complex and very iconic framework with the details, characters, locations, headlines, issues, concerns, neighborhoods that are Canadian and specifically Toronto. And that's been so fun, I can't tell you. Like, saying what matters to people in Toronto… and then also looking at big crime stories that Canadians recognize for inspiration and saying, what's our spin on that headline?"

According to Cameron, writing Law & Order is "never easy," but that writing a second season is always a bit more straightforward than writing a first, adding that they've "hit a stride" in terms of knowing the tone of the series, and that the characters are more developed now than when she started. That development, in part, comes courtesy of the lead actors: Aden Young, Kathleen Munroe, K.C. Collins, and Karen Robinson.

"I'm always a big believer in once you've cast the roles, you start to work with the actors to figure out who [the characters] are together as a team," she says. "They know their characters as well as you do. Sometimes better. So, certainly, when you've got great actors working as your partners in this, they help you. But also the characters themselves do start to take on a life of their own, and suddenly [Detective Sergeant Henry] Graf will say something… that you're like, 'Whoa, I didn't know that his mother lived in Paris,' or 'I didn't know that he knew this kind of fact or would make this kind of joke…' you have to kind of lean into that and hope that the mysterious muses are giving you something as a bit of a gift, you know?"