New Brunswick’s local industry finds new life with Revival

The Blue Ice Pictures series stars Melanie Scrofano as a detective in a town where the dead mysteriously return.

Blue Ice Pictures’ latest series, Revival, is living up to its name in more ways than one. The supernatural series is helping to resuscitate New Brunswick’s local film industry after the province lost its tax credit in 2011.

Produced for Syfy in the U.S. and CTV Sci-Fi for Canada, the 10 x 60-minute series is based on the Image Comics IP of the same name by Tim Seeley and Mike Norton about a town in Wisconsin where the dead mysteriously come back to life. Melanie Scrofano (Wynonna Earp; pictured) stars as a local detective with a cast that includes Romy Weltman (Backstage), David James Elliott (JAG), Andy McQueen (Mrs. Davis) and Steven Ogg (Snowpiercer).

The series went into production with co-producer Hemmings House in and around Saint John in September 2024 and wrapped in December at a budget of about $2 million per episode, Samantha Levine, Blue Ice’s VP, production, tells Playback. Samir Rehem (Killjoys) and Amanda Row (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) each directed five episodes.

Greg Hemmings, founder and executive producer at Hemmings House, says Revival is the largest television series shot in New Brunswick to date.

The series was in development at Blue Ice for three years with creators and showrunners Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce, says Levine. When it came to finding a location, Blue Ice and Hemmings House approached the provincial government – led by the Progressive Conservative Party at the time – to see what could be done to bring the show to New Brunswick. Levine says the level of forestry and access to water made the location ideal as a double for the Wisconsin city Wausau, where the show is set.

The government had already shown interest in supporting the local industry, doubling the film, television and new media production incentive program to $5 million, starting in fiscal 2022-23. The incentive covers up to 30% of eligible costs for New Brunswick-owned productions or 40% of labour costs for service productions.

To make a production of this scale work, Hemmings says the government spread its support through different fiscal years.

So far, the investment is paying off. Hemmings says they hired a number of local entry-level crew members, and were able to source heads of departments from experienced provincial expats who returned home after the pandemic.

“We’re starting to see, through Revival, that we have the potential to crew up and service projects like this on an ongoing basis,” he says.

However, questions remain on the scalability of the sector. When the incentive was increased in 2022, the former government said it would reach $20 million by 2026, but no further budget increases have been announced since. Hemmings says he’s seen an interest from the new Liberal government to support the industry, but no commitments have been made at press time.

Despite the uncertainty, Revival marks an exciting new chapter for the province.

“This is one of the first times, certainly in a long time, that New Brunswick will be captured for a global audience in a show like this,” says Hemmings.

Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for IMDb

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s 2024 Winter issue