Dolly Lewis Brings Personal Understanding to Her Vision-Challenged Lead Character in SIGHT UNSEEN

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede The new CTV series SIGHT UNSEEN is part cop show and partly a show about cutting-edge technology. “It absolutely is, and don’t leave out the comedy, and the drama, and the romance,” said star Dolly Lewis. “I think one of the most wonderful things about SIGHT UNSEEN is that I don’t have just one word to pin it down. And, for me, that speaks to how human it is. It’s really just a very human story.” So SIGHT UNSEEN sounds like “genre unseen.” “I love that,” Lewis said. Filmed and set in Vancouver, SIGHT UNSEEN premieres Sunday, Jan. 21 at 10 p.m. ET on CTV, CTV.ca, and the CTV app, immediately following the NFL playoff game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Buffalo Bills. An encore presentation of the first episode airs Monday, Jan. 22 at 10 p.m. ET, in what will become the show’s regular time slot moving forward. Lewis plays homicide detective Tess Avery, who – unbeknownst to her colleagues – is having serious problems with her vision. Following an incident in which her sight issues cause her to hesitate at a crucial moment, which puts her partner in peril, Tess promptly quits the police force, without a clear plan as to what lies ahead for her. Enter seeing eye-guide Sunny Patel, played by Agam Darshi. Through the use of up-to-the-minute technology, Sunny is literally a second set of eyes for Tess, speaking into her ear as she continues to help with police investigations in an unofficial capacity. But as viewers will discover, Sunny has her own issues as well, and her insistence on being a bigger part of Tess’ life than Tess initially wants leads to some funny moments. Lewis was asked if she has ever experienced that kind of “forced friendship” in real life, either as the one being pursued, or the one doing the pursuing. “I can say I have been the one who has been pursued, and luckily it worked out, and I ended up marrying the guy,” Lewis said with a laugh. “But I guess I did a fair amount of pursuing in that situation as well.” Created by sisters Karen and Nikolijne Troubetzkoy, SIGHT UNSEEN was partly inspired by Karen Troubetzkoy’s recurring experiences with sight loss. Lewis also has visual challenges, explaining that she has retinal detachment in both eyes. “First of all, I had to address the discrepancy between my condition with sight versus Tess’ condition with sight, and how that affects how we would move differently,” Lewis said. “My condition is very slow progressing, and it looks more like someone has scattered a little bit of dust across my whole field of vision. Tess’ condition is based on Leber’s neuropathy, which is the center, the core of your field of vision, eroding. Showing how that manifests in the body, how you try to look at something, how you might mask it in public, required a lot of physical prep, and I hope the viewers buy what I did. Karen Troubetzkoy and I share the condition of retinal detachment, and even though that shows up in your field of vision differently from Leber’s neuropathy, we bonded over that, and felt good about bringing it into Tess’ experience.” Going back to the part about Tess masking her condition, it does speak to the particular acting challenge for Lewis, in that she’s an actor playing a character who is also often acting. “Yeah, absolutely, and one thing I hope viewers identify with is context,” Lewis said. “I might behave very differently walking down Fifth Avenue than I do sitting on my sofa in my living room. What we choose to present to the world varies enormously. In my cop training with the Toronto Police Force, I was trained by a phenomenal woman who ran the undercover department for 30 years, and she taught me a lot about how you hold your body when you want to project something in particular. I used that a lot, not only for Tess as a cop, but also with her condition.” How do those skills link together when playing Tess? “The audience will see that when Tess finds herself in some really sticky situations, her cop training comes into play, which is kind of her second nature,” Lewis said. “But how does she defend herself now? How does she interact with a suspect when she may have a false sense of confidence that she can take care of herself? She might not be able to fully judge her own safety, which I think is an extra layer that makes it complicated and really compelling.” Tess’ pride also manifests itself in her first reaction to Sunny, who quickly starts to use the term “we” in a manner that Tess resists. “Tess is so hard-headed, she was so determined to be successful at her job, which was her identity, so to suddenly rely so heavily on somebody else for the most basic of tasks in her day-to-day life is a huge psychological challenge,” Lewis said. “I had a great time with Agam trying to figure out how we build intimacy right away when we’re never actually in the same room. But we are so closely tied. She’s literally in my head all the time, and vice-versa.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv