The show is set in small-town Northern California, but it’s shot in B.C. Do you enjoy it up here?
British Columbia is like that boyfriend that I accidentally caught feelings for. I had zero interest in being here . . . I had only ever done pilots, so I was only here in the darkest times. And then when I first came in the summer, I was like, “This is the best secret — we can never tell anyone how nice it is. Don’t let the Americans know!” [Laughs] Now, later in life, I think I should be the diplomat to Canada. I love B.C. I just bought a house. I’m never leaving.
You’ve done so much TV. Does Sharon feel like a different sort of role for you?
This is the first job where I’ve played the “matriarch.” It’s the first time I’ve moved out of . . . maybe not “ingenue,” I don’t think I was ever an ingenue; I didn’t really work as an actress until I was about 30 and then all of my love interests were 50, so I always had a certain kind of prowess to me, and I always worked on all-male shows. This is the first time I am the female figurehead. That’s the thing that speaks to me the most. Sharon represents the archetype of the birth mother, the big mama bear — and I think I’ve sort of become that more in life because of playing Sharon.
How does Fire Country stand out from other network procedurals?
I love that ours is a family show. It’s a family and it’s a town. It’s really about the relationships amongst the people who have to live together — whether they’re on the fire [squad] or not.
What’s it been like over the years to watch cable/streaming muscle its way into the TV landscape with broadcast?
As I was coming up, they were running parallel. I looked at it like the big-money job or the big-art job . . . I used to call it comedies and dramas — I want to do a deep, dark, dirty drama, then I need to wash off with a comedy. But the same works too for the big-money jobs and the art jobs — the big-money jobs, because we shoot for longer periods of time, there’s not a lot of time to do anything else; you have to pick a job that’s going to give you enough inner experience that you’re ready to go back to a 10-month shoot. And the art jobs are wonderful, but I don’t know if you can be solvent on just them; I’m an actress who’s spent my career mostly in TV, so if I was working in a series that only did 10 episodes, that’s a lot of downtime in the year for a mother of three kids! The joy is to be able to do both — and it’s always been that way for me.
It seems like broadcast is making a comeback lately, after the buzz was with cable and streaming for so long . . .
I think in some ways what was happening with streamers is sort of like Silicon Valley, when there’s a boom and a new kind of technology. It was the newest art form and it had unlimited potential. People were putting so much money into it and there’s thousands of shows — and it didn’t matter if absolutely no one ever saw them. That felt like the bandwagon we all wanted to be on. By the time the strike came along, it felt like a bust. It felt like the companies weren’t going to continue to make content for very little money, and that they couldn’t continue to stay afloat if no one was watching them.
All of a sudden, the networks were the safest place to actually make art . . . No one was considering network television in that vein for a decade. I think it will level out, but at the moment I feel like I won the lottery having the job I have.
The season finale of Fire Country airs Friday, April 25, on Global & CBS
MEMORABLE ROLES:
Among an impressive, expansive list of TV credits, this native Manhattanite is best known to audiences as Det. Jan Fendrich on The Job, NYC firefighter Laura Miles on Rescue Me and FBI profiler Megan Reeves on Numb3rs. Beyond that, Diane Farr has also distinguished herself as an author of lifestyle books like The Girl Code, and occasional guest host on The View.
CURRENT GIG:
Returning to her flame-dodging roots, Farr is now three seasons into CBS’s Fire Country. She plays Sharon Leone, a division chief from a family of California wildfire-fighters who feels the burn when her convicted-felon son Bode (Max Thieriot) joins the local brigade via an inmate work-release program.