Plan B is like no other time travel show you've ever seen
The show's creators say adapting the hit Quebec show for English audiences gave them their own 'second chance'
The hit Québecois TV series Plan B is not your typical time-travel story. For one thing, it almost aggressively does not care about the mechanics of time travel. There are no DeLoreans here. No Tardises. No wormholes. A set of tall, blonde twins in matching dark suits throw you in the back of a van, and you wake up in your desired destination in the past. That's it.
Instead, Plan B — the English adaptation of which debuts on CBC on Feb. 27 — is focused on the "why" of time travel, not the how. And in this case, the "why" is regret.
"That's a core thing that does transfer across all cultures," says screenwriter Lynne Kamm, who helped the show's original creators, Jean-François Asselin and Jacques Drolet, adapt the series for the Anglophone market.
The show's protagonist Philip (Suits star Patrick J. Adams) is a 30-something lawyer who uses the services of a shadowy company called Plan B to save his failing relationship and struggling practice. Plan B allows you to revisit your own past and fix your mistakes. But as is always the case in time travel, making new choices in the past can often create a new, different set of problems going forward.
People who use Plan B's services also don't come back to their original timeline — they just keep on living in the new one. The show's approach to time travel is so unusual that it initially made it tough for the series to get made.
"It took about eight years to complete the first season," says Drolet. "We hadn't seen, on television at that time, people who go back to the past and don't come back to the present."
In the pre-streaming era, he says, TV executives were worried about whether audiences would be able to follow the plot from week to week over 10 episodes. Asselin adds that the rise of streaming and the popularity of six-episode seasons in Québec helped the show get made.
When it came time to make an English-language version of the show — France and Belgium already have their own versions of Plan B, while Germany's is currently in production — Kamm was a natural choice to help adapt the script. She has developed a bit of a niche in Canadian television as "the French-English whisperer," as she puts it, helping adapt Québec shows to English Canadian markets. She previously helped create the English version of cop drama 19-2. She says that working on that show really helped her understand when to stick to the original script and when to start making changes.
"The first season and a half [of 19-2], we very strictly followed the original," she says. "But then you realize that you have different casts and you have different buyers. Your cast changes everything. Louis Morrissette and Patrick J. Adams are two very human beings. Karine Vanasse [who plays Philip's girlfriend Evelyne], she's a powerhouse. Different actors are going to take and embody the characters differently, so you really need to write to the strengths of your cast."
Asselin says that, in some ways, making the show again in English was kind of his own "Plan B" experience.
"We were shooting in the same locations, but instead of shooting [Québecois Plan B star] Louis Morissette, I was shooting Patrick J. Adams," he says. "We were having the same problems; the actors were asking me the same questions in English that the actors had asked me in French."
He and Drolet say that re-making the show gave them a chance to fix things they didn't like about the original. They wanted to make the audience more invested in Philip and Evelyne's relationship this time around.
"You start with a couple falling apart; it's tough to root for them," he says. "The actors brought a lot of depth to it … I told them, in the way you look at each other, we need to know, 'Why are they together?'"
Part of getting audiences more invested also involved re-imagining Evelyne a little bit, giving her more agency and making her less a subject of her partner's choices.
"We were able to actualize [the character]," explains Drolet, "because we [created the character] maybe 15 years ago, and the character is different because society has really progressed quickly in that time."
"It was fun to revoice her," adds Kamm. "She was a fun character and it was just about infusing her and making her a more active participant."
Plan B, the English version, will be making its series debut just a few days after the debut of Season 4 of Plan B, the Québec version. In Québec, the series is an anthology, and that's the same thing that Drolet, Asselin and Kamm have planned for the English show — meaning next season, there will be a new cast trying to fix a new set of regrets (although presumably the twins and the van will remain).
"Each year there's a new character," says Asselin. "The tone changes; the story changes."
Hopefully, though, the twins and the van will remain a constant.
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