Feature Story

Seeing green‘Jade Fever’ eyes a big prize in season 2

By Cassie DreschTV Media

Canada is a big place with lots of land, lots of water and lots

of greenery. For the residents of a remote B.C. town, though, there’s only one green that mat-ters — jade. It can be tough to find it and mine it, but one fun-loving family of miners has made the pursuit of jade their life’s work.

The Bunces, led by matriarch Claudia, are in the business of unearthing the beautiful green gemstones, and have been for more than four generations. Discovery Canada is giving audi-ences an opportunity to take a peek into their lives when the Canadian Screen Award-nominated series “Jade Fever” premieres its second season with back-to-back new episodes Tuesday, Feb. 23.

Claudia, her husband Robin, and her family live in the remote mining town of Jade City, appro-priately named for its biggest in-dustry. Nestled in the Cassiar Mountains, Jade City is about an hour south of the Yukon border and a day’s drive from Vancouver, and its surrounding areas are rich with nephrite jade. (About 75 per cent of the world’s jade is in B.C., and 90 per cent of that is in the Cassiar Mountains region.)

The tiny town of about 30 people is a close-knit one, and

one person’s business is every-one’s business — both profes-sionally and personally.

“It really is a very tight com-munity, and maybe there are only 30 people, but they come together for barbecues, and ev-eryone knows each other’s business,” said executive pro-ducer and series producer David Gullason in an interview with TV Media. “It’s a commu-nity/family, and Claudia is the mother of them all and keeps them all going.”

Claudia, the unofficial town mayor, is a breath of fresh air in a growing reality TV landscape of mining shows. Where most se-ries focus on a hunt for gold, she and “Jade Fever” are proof that all that glitters isn’t gold, in more ways than one.

“Claudia is the matriarch of the place and that’s, I think, un-usual,” Gullason said. “She’s a woman in a man’s world, so her experience in there and how she changes things is really a differ-ent spin on the standard mining show and the standard ‘tough guy’ show.”

For the Bunces’ part, Gullason says he be-

lieves they saw the other min-ing shows on TV and

thought their operation was just as interesting.

“They’d seen the other shows and I think they had a taste for them,” he said. “I think they were thinking, ‘Well, we do more interesting things than some of those other people on those other shows.’ I think they felt like their world was just as interesting and legitimate as the gold mining world.”

And it would appear they’re right. “Jade Fever” has been a hit with fans and critics alike, most recently notching a Canadian Screen Award nomi-nation in January for its first sea-son alongside other big-name series such as another Gullason-produced show, “Ice Pilots NWT,” and CBC’s Jonny Harris-starring comedy “Still Standing.”

In season 2 of “Jade Fever,” the pressure is on for the min-ing crew as their Chinese backers, who have contributed a lot of money to the opera-tion, are looking to break even on their investment. Of course, things don’t always go as planned, and between a near-

fatal accident, some disap-pointing finds and a

semi-truck rollover, the new season is shaping up to be

quite exciting.

Robin Bunce, Claudia Bunce and Alan Qiao as seen in “Jade Fever”

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