The Lake is Schitt's Creek on steroids
An interview with Julian Doucet, the showrunner of Prime Video's first Canadian scripted show.
Who knew a comedy with Julia Stiles in its main cast would fly so far under the radar?
The Lake recently aired its second season on Prime Video and I can’t think of a better summer binge. The comedy takes place in lake cottage country and tells the unconventional story of Justin (Jordan Gavaris of Orphan Black) who is trying to rebuild his relationship with Billie (Madison Shamoun), his daughter he gave up for adoption in high school before coming out as gay. A lake war ensues between Justin and his stepsister Maisy-May (Julia Stiles) who has claimed ownership of the family cottage.
The Lake has all of the eccentricities of the small town of Schitt’s Creek, particularly with its supporting cast, but is much hornier, more nefarious, and ultimately more progressive than Schitt’s was able to be on a public broadcast network (CBC, although you probably watched it on Netflix). It’s unapologetically Canadian in its references and guest stars, and based on the way the show is making the rounds online, feels like the kind of slow-burn hit that will amass a bigger following with every summer dip. It was an absolute pleasure to Zoom with The Lake’s showrunner Julian Doucet. Turns out, The Lake is based on his personal story.
I grew up going to a small cottage every summer outside of Gatineau and The Lake feels so specific to that experience. What is your personal connection with Canadian cottage country?
My grandparents had a hobby farm that was on a lake, and my parents also shared a piece of land on a lake with friends. The actual show itself is inspired by a real community in Québec in the Laurentians. One of my oldest friends’ sister takes her kids there and they have this boathouse and do tilting. I had never heard of tilting before, it was so crazy. Only in Canada! That’s how I came to imagine The Lake.
I also had never heard of tilting. Our cottage was next door to a summer retreat for nuns so our side of the lake had more…family friendly vibes. How did you end up making TV?
I started as an actor, mostly in theatre. As you do, you start to make your own work, so I started to write plays on the festival circuit. At one point I thought, it would be fun to make money, and I had a lot of friends and colleagues at the time who had started to make the transition to television. A lot of them went to the Canadian Film Centre so I took their television screenwriting program, not knowing anything about it. I was raised, ironically, without television. We didn’t have a TV until I was 15. Now both my sister and I are completely obsessed with it. The screenwriting program was like a lightbulb going off.
The real origin story of The Lake is from doing a workshop of one of my plays I was writing at the Stratford Festival while I was there, a farce comedy. One of the actors said, I don’t want you take this the wrong way, but your play really sounds like TV. You could feel everyone going like, gasp. Clutching their pearls. No, not television at Canada’s premier Shakespeare festival! But instead of being insulted, it was like, oh, totally, this is television. Television allows you to push things pretty far in terms of subject material. Sometimes I struggled as a playwright because I always wanted to be entertaining.
You wanted to have fun!
I did! It’s hard to live. If it’s not funny then what is it teaching…television was the best thing for me.
Totally. When you started watching TV at 15, what were you watching?
Oh, I mean I watched TV. Instead of going outside to play with friends I’d be like, can watch all the shows on TV at your house? But definitely Friends was a big one, 90210, Melrose Place. I used to listen to people talk about Family Ties, Saved by the Bell, and The Cosby Show, and I would remember the plot points they talked about and then pretend I’d seen the show and recap the episodes to friends even better than they had. That was the actor’s side of me. I really got into TV around the golden age, Californication, Mad Men, Six Feet Under.
I’d lose a day to Six Feet Under. I’d walk down to Blockbuster and rent a season, then stay up until four in the morning weeping under the pillows like why are you doing this to yourself! Seminal. And then Alan Ball did True Blood, which is the other side of me: genre, fun, vampires. I’m still desperate to do a vampire something. And a dance movie. So if I have to combine them I’d do a vampire dance movie.
I’d watch! I can see some of the genre stuff seeping in even on The Lake, like the “Midsommar Madness” episode. That’s so funny you mention Six Feet Under after I posted about it today. It dawned on me recently that the show has one of the few long-term relationships between two gay adult men I’ve seen on TV recently.
You’re right! There’s been a lot of emphasis on young love because it’s sexy. But that whole generation above me got wiped out, so there weren’t as many writers to do it, you don’t see it as much. It was powerful. I think a lot of us were like, David, fuck off, Keith is amazing. What’s your problem! But secretly identified that we’re just like David in the worst ways.
Getting back to The Lake, what was the casting process like? Between Julia Stiles, Jordan Gavaris, and Lauren Holly…you got some pretty iconic people on the show.
Honestly, it was the pilot. The pilot went around LA and we got a lot of interest. Julia reached out and wanted to audition. Usually these things are offer only…there were a number of names in the hat and we did chemistry reads. Maisy actually isn’t in the pilot a lot and she’s a slow burn in the first season. But she responded to the writing, it was an exciting whirlwind.
It was also very important for me to have at least one Canadian anchoring the cast. Amazon had said they wanted to make this their first Canadian scripted show, but having a star in order to sell it is a thing too, so there’s all this weird horse trading you find yourself in.
When Julia auditioned, I was like oh, I can write to that. The Maisy in my head was more of a Gwyneth Paltrow type, but somewhat aware that she was using the persona of Gwyneth. Julia really had the machiavellian, the grace, and the restraint of the part. When she said the line “nobody tells me what to do, not even my asshole” in the audition, I was like that’s it.
With Jordan, there were other players in the mix but I knew the only thing against him was that he was a bit young. Even though the character was 35 and he was 32, he looks way younger, and Madison Shamoun is in her early 20s playing 16. But it was my dynamic with my daughter. There are pictures of us where I do look like her brother. I knew when I saw him that was Justin — his energy, and we’re so alike in so many crazy ways.
For Lauren, when we were doing the casting for Mimsy her people reached out. She read with Julia and it worked between the two of them. We’ve been very fortunate! I have to shout out Sarah Kay, our casting director who was tireless in getting us the right people.
It’s such an iconic cast. I was such a fan of Orphan Black too obviously, I was thrilled to see Jordan in another Canadian-specific show. They all have such great chemistry as an ensemble.
They are in love with each other. It’s not a lie.
I want to talk more about the Canadianness of the show. I was thinking about Schitt’s Creek in terms of how unapologetically Canadian The Lake is — Schitt’s avoids direct references to Canada.
Certainly we owe such a debt to Schitt’s Creek. It would be disingenuous if Amazon wasn’t interested in a show that had that kind of appeal, although we’re hornier and thornier because we’re a streaming show. We can make boob and dick jokes, which is good for me! If you’re not Canadian you won’t get all the jokes but we feel like there’s humour for everyone on the show. There’s dad humour, Wayne humour, athlete humour, woke humour, sibling rivalry, family stuff, and then we make a reference to Grimes’ elf ears or Tegan and Sara.
Ok, speaking of Tegan and Sara…please tell me more about that cameo.
We knew with the last talent show that we wanted a celebrity client, we had a few names that were bandied about. I knew Dragonette was going to appear in episode eight, and she’s very old friends and has toured with Tegan and Sara. Their people were amazing in terms of time and filming something. I didn’t even think we’d get Dragonette! I had been completely obsessed with “Slow Song,” and she agreed to sing it at bush prom. This is why being a showrunner is great.
And we have the extremely underrated High School on Freevee/Prime Video as well, great to see that Canadian TV connection.
It’s so crazy because Cobie Smulders was one of the names originally considered to play Maisy! You know…gorgeous, talented, funny Canadian celebrities that have an international platform? There’s not all that many.
Well, you saw my wish list of potential season three folks that I shared on my story. Rekha Sharma reposted it BTW, if you know her.
Battlestar Galactica, of course!
And Yellowjackets!
I’m not there yet…I’m so tense about the cannibalism.
So what are the actual chances of a third season? Because to me, the structure of the show could go on for many seasons to come, checking in with these characters every summer and where they’re at. It’s such a light breeze of a show to watch during the summer, too.
Like most streamers, they’re hopeful but very discreet, and you don’t know until you know. So much is tied to their algorithms and how their metrics work. There’s a great love for the show and they don’t have anything like it, it lives in its own corner. They did share with us that we had exceeded their projection for the first season. We don’t know what those projections are but we’re hopeful. We know we’re a grower not a shower!
Schitt’s Creek didn’t even gain a significant audience until its last two seasons! So I have high hopes.
We do too, and we have to give Amazon to credit for that, we had some champions in the first season. We’re very lucky! [cat interrupts Zoom] Oh hey kitty.
Oh sorry that’s my cat Bramble.
I love cats. So yeah, we hope!
When are you actually filming The Lake? Everyone looks so cold in behind the scenes photos.
No that’s just September in North Bay for you, sometimes August. In the first season we started mid-July and shot through to beginning of September, this second season we started a bit later and finished end of September. It’s either blisteringly hot or overnight it’s freezing. Bush prom was toward the end, but already the leaves are going. The temperature dropped so severely on the last night of shooting. The lake was steaming like a witch’s cauldron, we had to spend a lot of VFX money to get rid of the Mists of Avalon floating in.
I was also wondering how it feels to tell such a personal story. You mentioned making the show “scraped your guts out” on Instagram.
For years when people found out about my story they would tell me I should write about it. I never felt 100 percent comfortable doing it because my daughter was a kid, it’s not just my story. When she was older and finished university she was ok with it, but it’s autobiographical and it’s not. The dynamic is our dynamic, being best friends with the birth mom, and the feelings of not knowing how to do it. Nobody knowing how to define the relationship, having to find that out for yourself — that’s all very truthful.
I had a roadmap for the first season, and we arc it based on Justin trying too hard and being the cool dad to realizing he actually has to be a parent and put her first. Watching it back is very personal to me. The people making the show know it’s my story too, so the crew invest in that and want to tell it right, which becomes another thing you wear. It’s incredibly moving.
The first shoot was hard, too, there were a lot of problems. We shot on location and had all the weather, tornados, sets falling apart, docks collapsing on the first day, we didn’t have any weather coverage. Lots of those kinds of challenges.
OH wow tornados…
We crossed the finish line with something that felt honest and good, and you know where you bent but it’s on your terms. I got to the end of it, felt so good, and Amazon was like ok now we’re going to do a season two. I was in front of six fresh faces in the writer’s room being asked what season two was going to be like, I don’t know! There was that emotional exhaustion for about three week. What we were pitching Amazon wasn’t landing, and then when I came up with the runaway bride and knew we couldn’t shoot at the boathouse for the second season, it all came together.
I was going to ask about the choice to start off season two with a wedding!
There was a lot of talk about how to move the relationship forward, but we’ve already seen that on Schitt’s Creek. I was like let’s just fucking get it out of the way. Why should that be the endgame?
What’s a limited series, comedy, and drama you would recommend to someone reading?
Limited series: I May Destroy You. Michaela Coel blew up narrative in a way that we still haven’t unpacked.
Comedy: Fleabag. The speed of emotion and the wit, and examining just how selfish and fragile we are. I'm also loving The Other Two.
Drama: I’m watching Little Bird right now, which is beautiful and very very sad. I’ll also say the show that I got my first job on, Killjoys. It’s like Buffy with bounty hunters in space. All the people I worked with on that show have gone on to run their own shows. It’s tell a joke, throw a punch, have a feeling, if you want something light with surprising depth.