To whom it may concern

Once you get an idea for a TV series, how long does it take to get it on the air?

Sometimes about six years. Take, for example, Cavendish.

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David Cronenberg’s oeuvre was invoked. The short-lived Fox series Eerie, Indiana (1991-92) and its Canadian-made spinoff, Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension (1998) were also cited as influences.

The show won’t give anyone nightmares, however, insists Bush. “Our tag line is, ‘Be afraid, be somewhat afraid.”

One episode, for example, “The Annes,” features Mark and Andy getting talked into joining a local production of Anne of Green Gables (Baroness von Sketch Show’s Carolyn Taylor guests). Before you can say “Gilbert Blythe,” the two are surrounded by a creepy coven of pigtailed, Anne-maids Tale players.

In the end, both Little and Bush seem happy that the series took as long as it did. “If, for some reason, they had green-lit this six years ago, that would have been a real nightmare,” says Little. “God bless development.”

At first, it looks like a typical festive summer picnic on the lawn of the Dingle Park, on the sun-kissed shore of Halifax’s Northwest Arm.

The nearby wooden gazebo is decorated with yellow and blue balloons, there are tables laden with sandwiches, potato salad and bowls of chips, and a large group of adults and kids mingles and chats amicably. But the mood changes quickly as a sextet of black-clad goths ascends the adjoining grassy knoll, and the crowd is panic stricken when the leader of this sullen ensemble brandishes a ceremonial dagger and rushes towards them.

So, not your typical picnic after all.

But perhaps it’s a more typical day on the set of the new CBC-TV comedy series Cavendish, currently filming on locations around Nova Scotia and in its Prince Edward Island namesake. The brainchild of Picnicface masterminds Andrew Bush and Mark Little, the eight-episode series is set to debut early next year on TV and online, with an askew look at small town life in the Maritimes, inspired by family vacations to P.E.I. and perhaps even by its creators’ own experiences of coming back to the East Coast after spending time working in Los Angeles and Toronto.

“It’s kind of a love letter to the region. There are a lot of odd places, and odd people, and I am one of them. So we really wanted to do justice to the spirit of the place,” says Bush, who plays the show’s sensible older brother Andy to Little’s coddled character Mark. The show portrays their characters returning to their small home town, and discovering its citizens’ eccentricities run a lot deeper than they ever realized.

“This is not actually Cavendish proper,” Bush explains further. “We want to let everybody know that we love Cavendish, and Rustico and that whole area. The springboard for the whole thing was thoughts of Lucy Maud Montgomery country, its beautiful landscapes, and honestly the whole world of small towns where each one has its own quirks and beliefs.”

In this episode of Cavendish, it turns out those beliefs include witchcraft, and the picnic is a summer solstice celebration sponsored by the local coven, which turns out to be more like a book club that meets for wine and cheese than a group of spellcasters studying mystic rituals.

“They’re just a bunch of nice, benign middle-aged people who have each other’s backs,” says Little, after several takes of threatening its members in a baritone grumble reminiscent of horror icon Christopher Lee.

In the episode, Little’s character is disappointed that the coven isn’t more extreme, and when he’s asked to leave, his first-ever taste of rejection sends him into a demonic downward spiral. Before his new coven crew runs amok, he challenges Andy with indignation.

“This is what passes for witchcraft in this town? Barbecue? Touch football? Races in the potato sack?” bellows Mark in his best Hammer horror growl, as the sweat from being clad in a dark cloak on one of the hottest days of the summer makes his black mascara run down his cheeks.

Taking things to extremes is a trademark of Picnicface sketches that carries over noticeably to Cavendish, and Mark’s gung-ho nature is a driving force behind many of its storylines.

“Oh yeah, he’s a very enthusiastic character,” says Little. “Andy’s the neurotic one who overthinks everything and Mark is the opposite. He dives into everything head first, and embraces how crappy everything gets as a result, even when it gets a bit more negative.

“But mostly, he’s a very positive character. This is a unique episode where the taste of negativity poisons my soul... it’s basically just Spider-Man 3. I become Venom.”

So essentially, Bush and Little have a kind of Kermit and Gonzo relationship, offset slightly by their ailing father Rollie (Hot Fuzz’s Kevin Eldon), who runs the local Museum of the Strange and Fantastic full of oddities and unusual folk art. Eldon helps round out the town population, which also includes Kathryn Greenwood (Whose Line Is It Anyway?) as his partner Ruth and Supernatural’s Kelli Ogmundson as Ruth’s gloomy niece Bryn.

Like Bush and Little, Eldon’s background includes sketch comedy, and the showrunners were fans of his early work on the UK series Big Train, which also included his Hot Fuzz co-star Simon Pegg.

Taking a break in the shade, the Kent-raised actor says he relished the chance to work in Canada for the first time, and play an eccentric character a bit different from the more sinister roles for which he’s often picked.

“There’s a little bit of colouring-in I can do myself with Rollie. He’s blunt, just says whatever comes into his head; what we call in England as a pisstaker,” says Eldon dryly.

“He likes to wind people up, but under the gruff exterior he’s fundamentally a decent chap. But at the same time, he’s very single-minded and just goes off in getting what he wants and isn’t always considerate of other people’s feelings, ploughing his own furrow quite unashamedly.”

With Eldon on board, Bush anticipates viewers making comparisons to British comedy series full of oddball characters, like League of Gentlemen or Little Britain, but he sees Cavendish as something unique with a sharper focus and more grounded characters.

“Mark and I, we try our best to play it as real as possible,” he explains. “In that sense, we were inspired by Dan Harmon’s Community, because it could get pretty crazy, but the main characters would always react in a very real way.

“I don’t think we go as far as Community, we don’t get very meta, but there’s some crazy stuff going on, as you’ve seen right here today.”

Case in point: the group of several women dressed in identical Anne of Green Gables costumes spotted wandering around the base of the Dingle Tower a few minutes later. The mind reels at the thought of what plot development could conjure up this pack of plucky orphans, but the chances are good that they’ll give Bush and Little a run for their money, especially considering how the latter is constantly set up to take each situation to extremes.

“I keep playing this character in different iterations, it’s just like a pure id character, and that’s what I like about it,” says Little, who’s done similar duty in the Picnicface feature Roller Town and the web series Space Riders: Division Earth. “It’s a totally free, unencumbered man, which is not me. I mean, that’s a piece of me, but writing both of these characters I get to take every piece of me that’s neurotic and an overthinker and socially uncomfortable and a bit proud and excessively emotional and push that onto Andy.

“Andy wears all the ways that we are both like that, and I just divest myself of those emotions and become the sort of person I’d like to be. Totally free, totally open and game for anything, like Tom Sawyer.”