‘Murder in a Small Town’ Stars Rossif Sutherland & Kristin Kreuk Break Down ‘Freeing’ Season 2 Premiere

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for Murder in a Small Town Season 2’s premiere, “Acts of Murder.”]

Things got off to a violent start on the Season 2 premiere of Murder in a Small Town. The episode began with a woman named Denise being verbally accosted by her shifty husband Garrett and responding to that with a cast-iron skillet to his temple. Thinking she’d just killed him, she then recruited her sister Merida to help, and they decided to dispose of the body by putting him in his own trunk and dropping the car off in the woods.

That wasn’t the only attack Garrett would face, though; as Karl Alberg (Rossif Sutherland) and his team would ultimately discover, he was also stabbed and burned to a crisp, ultimately dying of smoke inhalation. Turned out, Garrett had a side job running dirty money on his speedboat, and his increasing gambling addiction caused him to run afoul of dangerous people. Once Karl solved the case, he also retrieved the money from the two sisters, who narrowly avoided being killed by a gang of bikers Garrett was associated with.

The case of the day wasn’t the only draw of the episode, though. After a nail-biter election, Cassandra Lee (Kristin Kreuk) pulled off a victory in the race for town council, and she pledged to do her “damndest” to earn that title. She and Karl remain in a great place together, romantically, but could her election have unintended consequences for the two? After a tense discussion with Mayor Christie Holman (Marcia Gay Harden), it became clear that the town boss would try to put the two against each other. With Karl’s jurisdiction expanding to include multiple other departments, he desperately needed additional officers, but Holman wanted that money to come from the funds that were going to support Cassandra’s arts center.

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Karl dutifully reported the mayor’s strongarming tactic to Cassandra, and the two promised each other that while neither would back down, they would seek a compromise and work through it. But can the detente last?

To break down the premiere and find out what else to expect from Karl and Cassandra’s journey in Murder in a Small Town Season 2, TV Insider caught up with Rossif Sutherland and Kristin Kreuk!

Last season, Karl and Cassandra finally got back together in the finale, and we know that Season 2 won’t be as much of a will-they-or-won’t-they situation. How does it feel to come into that season knowing that there’s not going to be this question mark looming over their relationship?

Rossif Sutherland: It’s freeing. It’s also freeing to be able to do a season of television where you’re not introducing characters anymore, so we get to play within the landscape of established things and keep trying to stretch it just a little bit further. Also, there’s room because of that.  These characters have already been established for us to be able to explore more of the community, which is so much of the heart of this show.

The first episode ends with the phrase, “Bring it.” Is that their new mantra this season?

Kristin Kreuk: Yeah, I think the idea is that they start the season with a real belief that it’s going to be great. Things are going to go fine. They’re going to be able to handle all of it. They will push through, where you need to set them up in this place of positivity so you can kind of just chip away at them as the season goes by.

On that note, we can see that there are going to be complications between them still, even though they start out in this great place. What can we expect there?

Kreuk: Well, Karl’s jurisdiction has expanded. Because he’s so good at solving murders, they’re giving him more murders to solve, and it means that he has too few officers to deal with the situation. As he needs more money to support that, Cassandra has become part of town council, and she’s trying to influence the budget so that there’s funding for social supports and for arts. And this new mayor, who’s been there for ages, comes in and starts pulling the strings, and she may or may not have an ulterior motive that’s driving her to do that, but it’s causing a wedge between the two of them because she’s trying to use their relationship to get the thing she wants.

Kailey Schwerman / Fox

And with Karl’s expanding jurisdiction, obviously, he’s going to deal with the staffing shortage issues and things like that, but is he also going to deal with coming up against some personality clashes with the other police departments that he’s working with?

Sutherland: No, that’s not something we explored all that much. It’s a valuable storyline. But no, he’s been entrusted with this responsibility because he’s well recognized as being the qualified detective from the big city. When I asked the writer about what you mentioned, the writer said, “Actually, there’s a certain amount of relief that they no longer have to do this work that they are not experts at.” And also I’m sparing them some of this trauma. So there’s a version of this off-screen where their wives maybe were sending me cards and little bags of cookies to thank me for not having their husbands come back home with blood on their hands. But he’s stretched thin, and he has all these people under his care. He’s a different kind of a boss, Allberg. And so by seeing all these people stretched, he’s putting these people in danger. So he needs this money. And so there’s a budding of heads between Cassandra and I.

We see some of the interpersonal conflicts that are kind of going to arise with regard to Sid and his daughter and then the incoming of Layla. Can you talk about expanding that worldview and getting to know these other characters and how they have these relationships? 

Sutherland: Well, everybody carries the story…. The nice thing this season is that all of these stories, some of which you’ve mentioned, have that real estate in these episodes.

Kreuk: Even Phyllis has her moment this season, which is nice.

Sutherland: Our show does have the ambition of showing the heart of relationships with people. We could have done a show, which was just whodunnit, but I think what makes this show stand apart is the fact that it’s a bunch of people who work together, who care about each other. We’re just trying to get the job done.

Karl sees a painting that belongs to his mother that he hadn’t seen before, and it seems like there’s some kind of a thread to be tugged there. Can you tease what might be ahead there?

Sutherland: There’s a man in that painting… It’s my dad.

Murder in a Small Town, Tuesdays, 8/7c, Fox

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