The USA Network is about to air a new crime drama called “In Plain Sight,” with the premiere on June 1.
The gist of the story is that U.S. marshal Mary Shannon (played by Mary McCormack) is part of the Federal Witness protection program in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe, N.M., region.
Media Blvd. magazine interviewed “In Plain Sight” creator and executive producer David Maples, who had some interesting things to say about filming the show in the Land of Enchantment:
The other thing is what New Mexico brings to the table is an incredible sense of texture, an incredible feel, a blue sky that just stretches on for what seems like forever. And I think, visually we got something that you haven’t seen on television before.
Now on the negative side, it’s a state that has a brand new film industry and so a lot of the mechanisms that we’re use to dealing with in Los Angeles, like location permits and the number of hours we can shoot in any particular locale and things like that, are still being worked out down there. So there’re a lot of little kinks in the machinery that we would have to deal with on a daily basis.
But most of that and most of the concerns surrounding that would kind of dissolve away when we would look at the footage that we were shooting. And we’d see the desert, and we’d see the mountains, and we’d see the ravines, and we’d see this incredible sort of architecture from the 1960s and the roadside feel of Route 66 that is still there.
And I think that the fun of — and as David said, New Mexico and Albuquerque is very much a character in the show. And it’s a character because it’s vivid and it’s bright and it’s colorful and it’s something that I think gives us a color palate and a look that you haven’t seen. So anyway, there are pluses and minuses to Albuquerque, but I think the pluses outweigh the minuses.