“Don’t you know the crime rate is going up, up, up, up, up
To live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough!
You got rats on the west side
Bed bugs uptown
What a mess, this town’s in tatters I’ve been shattered
My brain’s been battered, splattered all over Manhattan”
— “Shattered,” The Rolling Stones
Television is full of tortured, conflicted characters. There’s House, the brilliant, drug-addicted doctor who’s impossible to work with yet saves lives every day. You’ve got Don Draper, a superstar ad man whom everyone wants to be but counts booze room and women as his vices. Patrick Jane can read a person's body language to determine whether they’re guilty of crimes, and is tormented by the murder of his wife and son.
Add Shattered's Detective Ben Sullivan to that list. Played to perfection by veteran actor Callum Keith Rennie, Ben is a brilliant homicide detective with a secret: he suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a.k.a. Multiple Personality Disorder. No one at his Vancouver precinct knows Ben has four alternates swirling around in his psyche, though they do wonder about the fugue states he enters from time to time, and the subtly different guy that emerges from them. When “normal,” Ben is quietly confident in his job and has a dry sense of humour.
It’s an interesting twist to a typical cop procedural that starts off with a bang in Episode 1, debuting tonight on Global. In “The Sins of the Fathers,” new partner Amy Lynch (Camille Sullivan, Normal and Intelligence) is paired with Ben; they are immediately called in to pursue a serial killer, and it’s when they have the guy cornered that one of Ben’s alternate personalities comes forward. This one is vengeful and aggressive – Rennie pulls his lips back to expose shark-like teeth – and always looking to solve things with violence. He barks at Amy to shoot the suspect, and she does, killing him. Amy shot sight unseen, not realizing that the baddie has no weapon. In a blink, the violent side to Ben is gone, replaced by the normal one, who quickly covers their tracks to appear as though the perp did in fact had a gun, and Amy shot in self-defence.
If the Vancouver-shot 13-episode series sounds a little far-fetched, it’s not. Remember Sybil? That was the pseudonym for Shirley Ardell Mason, an American woman who had 16 different and distinct female and male personalities. Shattered’s producers – which includes Rennie – did extensive research into the disorder, not only realizing that a cop could balance a job and life like Ben does, but that it all could go unchecked by co-workers, family or the person themselves.
“I found this documentary on YouTube of a guy who was cop who had DID,” the softspoken 49-year-old says during a press day at Toronto’s Soho Metropolitan hotel. “He was accepted by his department. His co-alters would cooperate with each other and he was at the firing range. One alter would shoot one way, and another would shoot another way. That cop would flip though a photo album and he was talking about family stories in the album. His voice would change and he would flip off of his chair and start to talk like an eight-year-old and he wouldn’t know who was in the book when he was that alter.”
Trauma – usually occurring in childhood – is often the trigger to DID manifesting itself. We don’t know if Ben suffered something harrowing when he was younger, but it is revealed that he’s got something current stressing him out – the kidnapping of his young son. It’s something that weighs on he and wife Ella (Molly Parker, Deadwood) constantly, pushing Ben’s personalities to the forefront.
Thus, though Shattered is an ensemble piece (The Line’s Clé Bennett, Defying Gravity’s Karen LeBlanc and Brian Markinson of Mayerthorpe all turn in fine roles), it’s very much a character study, one that changed very much from its original incarnation. Executive producer Hugh Beard (The Beachcombers, Human Cargo) revealed that the first pilot of Shattered had four actors playing each of Ben’s personalities (Robson Arms’ John Cassini portrayed one), but that idea was scrapped.
This re-shot pilot works wonderfully, largely due to the former 24 and Harper’s Island actor’s chameleon ability to switch from character to character (a total of four emerge in Season 1) smoothly. With just a subtle raised eyebrow or change in speech pattern, you know a different personality has taken over, making it that much more believable.
“This is a police drama that never stays on track, it’s always going off into character stuff and you can do many character things,” Rennie explains. “The hero part of the story isn’t so much the crime-solving, but him trying to hold onto his life with this disorder that he’s trying to keep secret. He’s a very tortured soul.”
And, like House, Don and Patrick, one that’s immensely watchable.
Shattered debuts Wednesday, Sept. 1 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Global.
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Video: First Shattered trailer with four actors as Ben’s alternates
Video: Re-shot Shattered trailer
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