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Tru Calling faces true challenge: Time-bending series will be thrown in against heavy competition

By Alex Strachan

LOS ANGELES -- Eliza Dushku has a thing about names. In Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she played a character called Faith -- get it, nudge-nudge, wink-wink -- and now, in the Fox network's new metaphysical, time-bending thriller Tru Calling, based in Vancouver, she plays a character named Tru Davies.

The tru--th is not always what it seems.

Tru Calling is yet another one of those TV shows with a catchy name, an intriguing premise and an uncertain future, but Dushku was certain about one thing when she was faced with the decision whether to reprise her Buffy role in a potential spin-off series: It was time to move on.

"It was just one of those things," she says quietly. "I started the character of Faith five years ago and she kind of traveled with me as I grew up, and was me in a lot of ways. That character was good to me. The show was good to me, and I loved the people involved. There wasn't any doubt in my mind that we would have made an interesting show, but I think sometimes you just have to go down the road less traveled and take a risk."

She smiles, momentarily lost in thought. When Tru Calling premieres Oct. 30 on the Fox network, all bets are off. It will be thrown into the proverbial lion's den, on Thursdays at 8, opposite the final season of Friends and the latest incarnation of Survivor. (Global controls Tru Calling's Canadian rights, but hasn't decided where to place it on the schedule yet. Ironically, Global also owns the Canadian rights for both Friends and Survivor.) Tru Calling's prospects don't look too promising, but then stranger things have happened. This, after all, looks as if it might the year people finally tire of ER, a Thursday-night staple that looked as though it would never be topped in the ratings -- until, that is, Without a Trace came along.

Tru Calling combines the what-would-you-do-if-you-could-relive-a-day fantasy of Groundhog Day with the dark foreboding of The Sixth Sense to create a ticking time bomb of a supernatural thriller, in which Dushku's character, a medical student forced to take a job in the city morgue after she's jobbed out of a promising medical internship, doesn't know from one day to the next what is real and what is hallucination. In the opening episode, she questions her sanity once night in the morgue where she works after she thinks she hears a murder victim asking for help. The next morning, she wakes up to find she is back at the beginning of that same day, 12 hours before a murder that only she knows about is about to happen.

Tru Calling is a dark, moody piece, in the vein of Dark Angel, Haunted and Millennium -- all late-night series that came and went. They were all, ironically enough, based in Vancouver.

Tru Calling is only superficially about death. It's more about life -- about the need to challenge preconceptions, about the refusal to accept things at face value, and finding the courage to fight the inevitable. There may be more polished, more confident series on television this fall, but there will be few as interesting.

"It's like when you're driving down the freeway and you see a car accident," Dushku says. "You don't want to stare, but there's something intriguing about the fact that we're alive. There are things we don't know about death that we want to know. I think we're curious to see where life ends."

Tru Calling's creator and co-executive producer, Jon Harmon Feldman, says Dushku's character is driven by her curiosity, and also a deeply ingrained, moral desire to make the world a better place.

"I'm not sure it's a morbid fascination with death but there's an inevitability about dying that I think is something we don't fully understand, and it's always interesting as a writer to explore the unknown and find answers as you go," Feldman says. "She won't save someone every week. She has this power which is a gift, but it's a burden, too, because she loses sometimes. It's a burden for a 22-year-old girl to essentially have lives in her hands and know that she's not always necessarily going to make the right choice."

Dushku sees a clear similarity between her character in Tru Calling and Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Both are strong women.

"I'm intrigued by strong, gutsy, outspoken female characters," Dushku said. "I feel there should be more of them on television, because there aren't enough strong girls and women in film and television today for people to look up to. I feel fortunate in a way. I was thrust into the part of being a role model when I did Faith, and I didn't even think about it at first. It wasn't something that ever occurred to me, at least not at the beginning. But it became clear to me, over time, how many girls were responding, how many were starting to own their power again and assert themselves with confidence. This feels very similar.

"A lot of the characters that I've played have been given an opportunity to do something that really means something. I think there's a struggle there for many girls to see how someone else would react in that situation. Everyone wants to say they would do the right thing, and yet, at times -- nobody's perfect. What's going to be interesting to me is to see where she triumphs and where she fails, and how she copes. In a way, I think that for young girls all over the country, seeing these kinds of shows is almost like therapy."

Feldman insists basing the series in Vancouver will make the transition from page to screen that much easier: Experienced crews and Vancouver's reputation for being a city that can provide many different looks will keep Tru Calling fresh. He is not even concerned by the heat wave and uncommonly dry summer; he anticipates November and December's drizzle, shorter days and longer will only add to Tru Calling's look and feel.

"Let's not kid ourselves, this is not going to be easy to make," Feldman says. "But Vancouver is a wonderful place to film. The positives far outweigh any negatives. Yes, we expect a lot of rain, but we're going to work with that."

For her part -- surprisingly, perhaps, given the white-hot glare of attention stoked by Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- Dushku, a Boston native whose classic beauty caught the camera's gaze in the feature films Bring It On and City by the Sea, seems energized by the prospect of living the next six months away from the media spotlight of Los Angeles.

"I'm a little over L.A., to tell you the truth," she says softly, smiling and lowering her voice so others won't overhear. "Vancouver has a very cool vibe, like Boston. People there are very kind, very gentle. I love it there."

Dushku will leave the worrying about ratings to Feldman and Fox network executives; her job, she says, is to focus on doing the best job she can, and hope that people will watch.

"I grew up with Friends. I'm 22 now. I grew up in middle school and high school with Friends. There's a whole generation of 14-, 15-, 16-, 17-year-old girls who don't know that show like I did and, if anything, with that show ending, now seems as good a time as any to introduce a new show with new people and new characters that they can follow from day one. I'm not intimidated. We're just going to try and make it as real as possible, make the issues, the relationships and the struggles genuine and realistic. And I think that's what people want to see."