The Spill, Scrapbooks, and Sally

“I won’t think less of you if you run…”

This is a fun episode, all kinds of things going down.

Synopses (Spoiler Alert!)

Captain Annoy-o has himself a little office picnic, enjoying his home made borscht soup. Unfortunately, this is just as Cake is wheeled out of the office by a paramedic… and the soup spills all over his office chair. As the Captain panics…

Brooke returns from Roxanne’s office, where he broke the news to her about Cake’s death. He’s surprised to find Alice joining the other office gals in collecting mementos of the dead woman for their “Remembering Cake Scrapbooks.” He probably shouldn’t be, Alice is the queen of enjoying things ironically. Alice tries grilling him on what went on in Roxanne’s office, but Brooke won’t tell her. Meanwhile, Reggie is recovering from a delayed mental breakdown to the stress of Cake’s death. It seems someone named ‘Sally’ played a major role in some traumatic event in his past.

While Brooke and Alice are over at Cake’s desk – the Captain has an ingenious solution to his borscht stained chair. He swaps it with Brooke’s. Co-worker Xavier leaps on the fact that Cake no longer gets a double desk – the ultimate privilege of a team leader, and stakes his claim.

Brooke won’t tell Alice what went down in Roxanne’s office, playing into the prevailing theory that he’s been fired. He returns to his desk only to find it has been picked clean. As the Captain puts it, “Everyone knows you’ve been fired.” Even Guy (pronouced Gee) pounces – it turns out Brooke shares his name with Guy’s niece. Guy’s swooped in for Brooke’s nameplate to give to his niece for her birthday.

When Brooke lets him keep it, Alice – convinced he’s been fired – hits the panic button. Under Brooke’s monitor, there’s two envelopes. One is Plan A (for Alice) and one if Plan B (for Brooke). Alice has been planning for the inevitable day when one of them gets fired for some time. She starts shoving company files into a bag, the plan is to get some ready cash by selling Conectrixx secrets to the competition. Reggie’s hurt that there’s no escape plan for him.

Captain Annoy-o rats Alice out to Roxanne. And Roxanne makes an announcement for everyone to assemble in the lounge…

Production Notes

A bit of a cliffhanger, there. What will Roxanne say? What happened between her and Brooke? Questions upon questions. It’s like Lost in here (early second season, before all the fanboys got so upset).

This episode opens with a funny little love song to borscht, which is an Eastern European beat soup. Delicious with sour cream – yum! All the music in Team Leader was composed and performed by Studio Cat. Studio Cat is a partnership between Jamie Shield and Adam White. Jamie is most famous for his band The New Deal, which if you haven’t heard them, run – don’t walk – to your record store.

Music can be a tricky thing for a series. The wrong music can dull the sharpest scene, and the right song can make a pedestrian scene soar. We didn’t put a lot of thought into the music for Team Leader until well into post-production, at which time we had become used to it without any music. Studio Cat took on our project, and surprised us with little musical touches that really kicked the whole thing up a notch without stealing focus from the drama. There are two great examples in this episode. One is, of course, the Borscht Song. When we first heard that song, we couldn’t stop sputtering with laughter. I’m not sure, but I think that the singer is actually our director, Chris Forrest. Is that true, Chris? The other moment is the Sergio Leone guitar flourish that underscores Xavier’s ‘coup du desk.’

There are two main themes to Team Leader. The first is our office theme, “Death to Katie,” which memorably runs at the beginning of the very first episode. And then there’s “Rain Comes Down,” that sad country ballad that can be heard at the very end, the two songs bookending Brooke’s journey from bored office worker to complete and utter failure.

Going back the start of this scene, during the Borscht song we see Cake being wheeled away on a gurney. That gurney represented one of the biggest challenges to our Art Department. On a low budget series like Team Leader, you don’t have the same resources for your set dressings and props that a bigger shoot has. Stephanie Avery and her Art Department did a fantastic job with scrounging, begging, borrowing and, yes, a little bit of stealing. (Only a little!) Take another look at the office set, and remember everything you see was set dressing, spending almost no money. A remarkable feat.

But an ambulance gurney, now that was something we could not borrow or otherwise get for free. We tried. As the shoot dates got closer and closer, we had pretty much everything except the gurney, and things were getting desperate. The dropping of the soup, and the staining of Brooke’s shirt, plays a major role in the story so we couldn’t do without that scene. We could have rented it, but at an outrageous price (or so it seemed to us at the time). Finally, it was Melanie Kastner to the rescue. Melanie is an alumni of Sheridan college, and she seemed to remember they had an old stage prop gurney – and they offered a terrific rental rate to their alum. She brokered the deal and we were off to Sheridan!

The campus itself is pretty confusing. To get to the building we needed to go, we had to go in one building and out another and through a basement… to find the props lock up was right beside where we parked. After some searching around for the key, we were led into the props lock up. A huge room piled floor to ceiling with debris from Sheridan plays of yesteryear. It took us some doing to find the gurney… and more effort to figure out how to dig it out. We where then further astonished when, with a wave of his hand, our guide offered for us to take anything else we thought we might need. Stephanie Avery enthusiastically took him up on his offer, and grabbed a few things that caught her eye.

The gurney was a little old, a little beat up, and would no longer ‘lock’ in the up position, but it had heart, damn it.

Brad Cowan gained a reputation on set for embellishing his lines, mostly looking to give our tired but focused crew a little laugh. His line about picking on the bald guy and bringing in his snake was mostly an improvised line, one that makes us howl every time we hear it.