The 2023-24 broadcast season marks the end of some of Canada’s most acclaimed and lauded TV series in recent years. Playback is raising a glass to celebrate the shows that made us laugh — and cry — by asking the creatives and producers behind the series to reflect on the magic-making process. First up, CTV’s Transplant.
CTV medical drama Transplant made a major impact to Canadian television when it crashed on the scene in 2020, introducing audiences to Bashir “Bash” Hamed (played by Hamza Haq), a trauma surgeon from Syria whose life changed when a car collided into the restaurant he was working in, leading him to save the life of a Toronto surgeon (John Hannah).
The series — created by Joseph Kay and produced by Sphere Media in association with CTV and Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group — is ending its run after four seasons, concluding on Friday (Jan. 19). Along the way, the show has attracted millions of viewers for its Canadian and U.S. broadcasts on CTV and NBC, respectively, averaging about 2.9 million viewers south of the border in its current airing of season three.
Transplant has been sold to more than 170 territories since its debut, including the U.K., the Nordics, Germany, Spain, South Africa, and Australia. It has also garnered 15 Canadian Screen Awards, including three performance wins in a row for Haq, and one for Laurence Leboeuf.
Kay, who also serves as executive producer and showrunner, reflected on the series with Playback.
Joseph Kay: We’d turned an abandoned convenience store into a shawarma restaurant so a truck could topple it and Bashir [Haq] could spring to life. We were filming through the night. It was John Hannah’s first day on set and he had to lie in a smoke-filled room motionless for hours. Which he did without complaint, a total mensch. If we didn’t get all our shots by dawn we never would. In addition to being there all night as producer, I wrote 20 pages of episode 107 from behind the monitors which ended up being one of the strongest shows we did. Inspired mayhem!
I sensed it even at the pitch stage, but I could tell from people’s reactions to my pilot script that we had a good chance of connecting. Particularly by how readers responded to Bashir’s relationship with his younger sister [Sirena Gulamgaus] — our show was never about flashy action, it was only ever about emotional heart.
I gave this real thought but the answer is nothing. Even the bumps in the road were important parts of the journey of getting us where we needed to go.
Editors never get enough credit. Although all of Transplant‘s editors are tremendous, I’m going to name two — Annie Ilkow and Sylvain Lebel — who’ve been with the show our entire run and played such a huge role in shaping performances and helping construct a narrative.
There is a universality in Transplant‘s themes of new beginnings and starting over. Fundamentally, each of us needs to believe we can do it, and so we root for people who try. Also, we’ve been answering this question the same way all along, which is another reason it connected — the show always knew what it was.
A version of this story appeared in Playback‘s Winter 2023 issue
Image courtesy of Bell Media