HOCKLEY VALLEY WRITER Tassie Cameron thoroughly researches the characters she creates for her television show Rookie Blue. Above, the cast from the series. At still under 40, writer Tassie Cameron has made her considerable mark on the world of television drama series.

Her current rave success is in its first season with the second season well in the making: Rookie Blue. This is her current success, but it’s not her first.

Ms. Cameron comes from a family of journalists; her mother is Stevie Cameron, author of, amongst others, the 1980’s rebuke of the Maloney regime, On the Take, and a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail.

So, after some years in New York studying and working, Tassie Cameron decided to write a series for television about journalists. The result was The 11th Hour, a series about behind the scene of a news magazine, a natural fit. The series won her a Gemini.

However, after awhile, Ms. Cameron began to feel that the drama of the life and death circumstances which the journalists were reporting was kept “one step removed”, as she put it.

The journalists themselves were only observers of the drama, not the true participants.

It would be more exciting to write about the authors of the drama: the cops.

As she said, “Every day that you put on that uniform could be your last. It’s pretty compelling.”

In order to write a new series about life as police, Ms. Cameron began talking to ex-police who came in as consultants.

“They gave a lot of insight,” she remarked.

She did considerable research for her first foray into the subject with a miniseries, Would be Kings, which was very dark but brilliant. It was also good experience for a more ambitious endeavour – a long-term series.

She became the head writer for Flashpoint, a cop series. Although she quit Flashpoint after a year, she told me, “I am so grateful for Flashpoint. After that people took me seriously. It gave me the chance to really study the background.”

She left Flashpoint because she had been given the opportunity to write with Eric Roth [Forest Gump], which project did not fly but it left Ms. Cameron ready to write another series – this time a cop series that is quite different from the rest, including Flashpoint.

“I wanted to write something more characterdriven,” she said, “and there were no cop shows from the point of view of the rookies. There are different ‘hooks’, different emotional angles.”

The whole issue of the rookie cop fascinated Ms. Cameron. “Twenty-five year-old kids are cops,” she ruminated. “The stories are from the point of view of the first day, the first month. They make mistakes that could get them killed – or get their partners killed.”

The more she got into it, the more there was to explore.

She commented, “There is always an interesting theme. There’s the imposter syndrome: how do you know when you’re ready? When are you really a cop?”

To write convincingly about being a rookie cop, Ms. Cameron has had to go back to her research and this time again engage the people in the business, the rookie cops themselves. Her prime concern is to make the stories real.

One of the junior writers on the Rookie Cop team has a brother who is a cop. His girl friend is a rookie and an invaluable source for catching “bogus” moments in the writing. She can say, “That would never happen.”

In all of Ms. Cameron’s police storytelling, there are profoundly dysfunctional relationships.

I asked her where this came from and she assured me: “Everybody in my family is crazy but great. These scenes are just imagining the worst, observation of others, listening to stories about people who have rotten relationships. For me, every story of dysfunctional families is freshly upsetting.”

Yet, she uses those stories to create a series that is quickly proving to be a public favourite. They are the off-duty stories of her rookies and their partners.

Back to the rookies on duty. Their stories begin before they begin to be jaded. The rookies still have that optimism they can make a difference, coming from a time before cynicism sets in.

Ms. Cameron defined it: “At 25, the world’s a scary, sexy, amazing place.”

Having created the premise for Rookie Blue, Ms. Cameron still had to sell it. And she did sell it, going to LA, for a meeting with the president of Global and ABC, whom she did not know and who had never heard of her, but who bought into the idea.

Even though the airing of the first episode was late in June, coming into the summer season, the critics and public have received Rookie Blue with considerable enthusiasm.

Filming the series in Toronto has been a tremendous plus, naturally. Ms. Cameron lives in Toronto, as do the actors.

Now into the final writing and starting production of the second series, Ms. Cameron commented, “It’s very easy to write tough, gritty stories and I’m quite proud I didn’t go that route.

“These are honest stories, filtered through 25- year-old glasses. We’ve used that perspective to access a different tone. The casting is great – the actors are happy and we’re happy. That’s a rare and joyous experience when the actors make what you wrote sound even better.”

Although she and her partner, Michael Mabbott, who is also a writer, live in Toronto, they rent a farm house in Hockley Valley, where they love to come for weekends and holidays.

As to her aspirations, Ms Cameron reflected, “I’ve had a child and written a successful series. Down the road, I’d like to write a feature film, but not about cops. Cops are perfect for television.”