Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany: The Best Actress on Television

Orphan Black seemed like the perfect show for me. It’s from the BBC, is science fiction, and just wrapped up its first ten episode season, so it’s easily consumable.

And in the last three days, I have consumed it, watching certainly the best BBC America show I’ve ever seen, and in reality, one of the best new shows of the 2012/2013 season, second only to perhaps NBC’s Hannibal, another program I should eventually comment on now that it’s wrapped.

Orphan Black manages to be an intriguing, thrilling, fascinating show due to its central plot of a group of clones finding each other and attempting to uncover their origins. But the single most impressive thing about the show is the clone herself, Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany.

Here’s the premise: Sarah is an orphaned Brit punk with a criminal record, now back in the States to try and reunite with her young daughter whom she hasn’t seen in a year. Upon arriving, she meets Beth Childs in a train station, a woman who stunningly, looks exactly like her.

Then Beth jumps in front of a train.

Wellllll shit.

Sarah, having no cash to her name, steals Beth’s bag and attempts a bit of identity fraud by swiping her clothes, adopting an American accent and emptying her bank accounts. Her situation is complicated when she figures out Beth is/was a police officer embroiled in a civilian shooting investigation .Her situation is further complicated when a German woman, who also looks exactly like her, gets in the back of her car, starts screaming hysterically and is promptly shot in the head.

Soon, Beth meets two other versions of herself, Allison, a suburban soccer mom, and Cosima, a dreadlocked science geek. They reveal that she and they are all clones, and someone is now systematically hunting down and murdering them. The plot, it thickens.

It’s important at this point to stop and realize that all of these characters, and more future clones I won’t mention for plot reasons, are all played by Tatiana Malsany. And this isn’t just a quick costume change and accent switch. The amount of complexity that’s involved in embodying this complete set of characters is mind-boggling.

The base model is Sarah, a tough, no-nonsense Brit who must now pretend to be a buttoned-up American police officer. Depending on who is calling her on the phone, she has to be ready to switch personalities on a moment’s notice. Allison and Cosima are also American, but have completely different personalities, one being uptight and so wound she’s bound to snap, the other being laid back and generally sexier than the others. And the additional clones that follow drive Maslany into even more difficult roles.

Don’t clone crazy.

Things only get crazier as the show goes on in terms of acting complexity. In one sequence, Allison has to pretend to be Sarah, and a short while later, Sarah has to pretend to be Allison. So to make this clear, Maslany is a Canadian acting as a Brit, but then also is an American attempting to adopt the British accent of another version of herself. It’s mindblowing, and has to be one of the most difficult acting challenges I’ve ever witnessed on TV.

Then there’s the technical side of this I haven’t even touched on. There are many, many scenes where these characters are not only in the same room, but interacting with each other in very believable ways. Sure, there are some shots where you only see the back of one of the girls’ heads and know it’s a stand-in, but there are others when Allison is literally pouring Sarah a glass of wine, the two of them standing side by side. The editing to make this happen is just incredible, and it’s so flawless, you never even notice it. You can literally forget this is all the same actress often acting out these scenes to presumably an empty room, playing two or three or four parts of a conversation by herself. It’s astonishing.

Though Tatiana Maslany is the main attraction, the show happens to be pretty damn good as well. It’s the best original sci-fi series I’ve seen in years, and there was never an episode that ended where I didn’t immediately want to watch another. I believe my record was five in one sitting.

She’s got that sexy Queen of Blades hair.

It’s not perfect, and has its share of plot holes. I did rather wonder about the incompetency of the  cloning agency, supposedly monitoring the clones but letting them get away with a lot when a simple tail or bug or hidden camera would have saved five or six episodes of secrets and plot twists and turns. I also thought Allison’s Desperate Housewives-esque sequences were far removed from the central tone of the show, and often felt like an entirely different genre.

Overall however, the central mystery always pulls you forward as a viewer, and the show evolves at a rapid pace. It has to, with only ten episodes, and to me, that’s just about the perfect length for a series like this. There’s very little wasted space.

The story is great, but you have to watch to simply marvel at the talent of Tatiana Maslany to be able to pull a role like this off on TV. The medium has never seen anything like it, and if her performance isn’t Emmy worthy, I’m not sure why we even have Emmys.

Give it a try for yourself.