Murtz On The Scene: Exclusive Interview With Revolution‘s Tracy Spiridakos & Billy Burke At Fan Expo Canada 2012

Features, Interviews, Top Story, Video

One of Citytv’s most buzzed about new shows for the upcoming season is NBC import, Revolution. The epic adventure series is the brainchild of director Jon Favreau, J.J. Abrams and Eric Kripke. It is set in a post-apocalyptic society where one family struggles to reunite in a time where every single piece of technology including computers, planes, cars, phones and lights have blacked out forever.

For storyline purposes, Charlie Matheson is the equivalent of The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen. Played by Canadian Tracy Spiridakos, Charlie sets out to find her brother after her father is killed and her brother is kidnapped by the militia led by Captain Tom Neville (Giancarlo Esposito). This forces her to reunite with her estranged uncle Miles (Billy Burke), a former U.S. Marine who now lives as a recluse. In addition to their personal familial struggles, they must also figure out why the world went dark and if the power will ever return.

The show is a little bit of Lost, some Terra Nova, a pinch of Alcatraz, a dollop of FlashForward and mostly reminds me of one of NBC’s most underrated series, The Event. It seems that creative television execs believe that as a society, we are obsessed with the ‘end of days’ storyline on television. My initial take on Revolution, is that it will almost certainly be a serial series where you absolutely have to watch every episode from the beginning and then hold on to your seat for the rest, because jumping into it in the middle would almost be impossible.

At Fan Expo Canada, I had the opportunity to talk to Tracy Spiridakos and Billy Burke from the show and I asked them about the pressures of the post-apocalyptic premise, the fascination with the ‘end of days’ concept on TV and whether the series answers the question of humans being inherently good or evil and their characters. I also asked Burke if he plays the toughest guy named Miles on TV.

Check it out!

Revolution premieres on Monday, September 17 @ 10 p.m. on Citytv

Murtz Jaffer is the world's foremost reality television expert and was the host of Reality Obsessed which aired on the TVTropolis and Global Reality Channels in Canada. He has professional writing experience at the Toronto Sun, National Post, TV Guide Canada, TOROMagazine.com and was a former producer at Entertainment Tonight Canada. He was also the editor at Weekendtrips.com.