Endgame - more details from Globe&Mail

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Endgame, a new Canadian drama series that will air next spring on Showcase.
Here’s the deal: In Endgame, a Russian chess master, Arkady Balagan (Shawn Doyle), lives in a hotel in Vancouver and uses his tip-top skills of strategic thinking to solve crimes. He’s stuck there because his fiancée has been killed and, as a result, he’s overcome with a case of agoraphobia – can’t, won’t leave his penthouse suite. Must pay the bills though, so he ends up solving crimes for a fee. Meanwhile, his real goal is to get to the bottom of his fiancée’s murder.

Thus, the show revolves around the brilliant, possibly mad, certainly grieving Arkady and the hotel. The character is officially described as “witty, eccentric, arrogant and playful.” One imagines a variation on the guy in The Mentalist, except that this guy has to stay in a hotel all the time. It seems as if it will be a light but cheerful show, an alternative to all those methodically grim detective procedurals about terrifying serial killers roaming the world.

But could the limited setting of a hotel be a drawback? Not so, I am informed by director/producer David Frazee (Intelligence, Da Vinci’s Inquest), who tells me the limits create possibilities. “It’s a detective story. It’s about a guy who solves puzzles,” he says. “Yes, it’s fairly light but with a good emotional tone. But the key element is we go inside Arkady Balagan’s brain and watch him re-enact things inside his head. Actually, he’s not inside the hotel, he’s everywhere. The ‘Balagan brain moments,’ as we call them, are the highlights. He’s given a mystery, and we see him run through the situation from several angles.”

A short time later, I’m watching a scene from Endgame being filmed. From a distant corner of the set – an eye-popping recreation of the lobby area of a luxury hotel – I see the Arkady Balagan character, dressed in a very fancy bathrobe, irritate the heck out of the guy who runs the variety store in the hotel lobby. I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but I’m getting the picture. Balagan is a charismatic, all-ego dude who plays close attention to everything happening around him in order to do his crime-solving thing.


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