When Morgan Waters attended the Applied Communications program at Camosun College in 2001, he never imagined that, a few short years later, he would be the director, co-creator, star, and writer of a web series that would be nominated for an International Emmy, take home a couple of Canadian Screen Awards, and get picked up by CBC. But it all happened, and the series is now gearing up for its fifth season. Waters—who also plays guitar in Juno- and Polaris-nominated indie-popsters Weaves—says that season five of The Amazing Gayl Pile, a story initially about a man who attempts to conquer the world of home shopping, was oddly therapeutic to edit back in March, given that the characters were staying in a post-apocalyptic beach resort while we in the real world were hunkering down in the first wave of COVID-19.
“That was my isolation time with co-star Andy King,” says Waters. “We shot it last fall, so it was a great project to be locked in with, especially when it seemed to kind of relate to what was happening. It was a good way to pass the time. Sometimes it felt a bit like, ‘Oh, my God. This is what we’re going through now,’ you know, just with all the characters being stuck at a beach resort, and society sort of falling apart after the apocalypse. It definitely mirrored reality, in a way… Last season it ended with the apocalypse, and so we knew this was going to be a Gayl-re-building-the-world scenario, but obviously we didn’t know about a global pandemic happening, so it’s a nice coincidence… Well, not nice for the world, but nice for us creators.”
Trying to produce and shoot a series right now, with the many precautions needed to make everyone safe on set, means Waters is taking this time to reduce the amount of shooting locations and to focus on editing.
“I love just sitting in a room and, you know, shaping it, and not having the constraints of a shoot day; acting is fun, but scary,” he says. “The initial gathering of ideas with writing, and sitting around, and kind of trying to live in each character and have everyone have their own voice and foibles and all that kind of stuff is exciting, too. Definitely, acting and directing at the same time is not always the smoothest thing.”
Waters says that one of the perks of a web series is that there isn’t as much compromise between network and writers as there sometimes is when working with traditional television networks. Waters describes CBC’s approach as very hands-off.
“Because it’s a web series and because we had made a season or two before CBC picked it up, they kind of let us do our thing since we had already established what the tone of it was,” he says.
The creative say is up to Waters, co-creator Brooks Gray, and story editor Andy King.
“Canadian TV, I guess that would be the cliché that people would say is that it’s nice,” says Waters. “We wanted to make something that definitely would not make it on TV—something that would fit more into an Adult Swim kind of alternative-comedy space.”