TV Talk: ‘Archive 81,’ filmed in Pittsburgh, offers supernatural thrills

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

To prepare for her role as a mid-1990s documentary filmmaker in filmed-in-Pittsburgh Netflix supernatural thriller “Archive 81,” actress Dina Shihabi (“Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan”) got her hands on the kind of camera her character, Melody Pendras, uses in the series.

While living in the Cork Factory in the Strip District, Shihabi carried her Hi8 camera to film the Allegheny River. She shot while on walks through the Strip and into a book shop in Lawrenceville. And she filmed herself talking directly to the camera back home in her apartment.

“I wanted to really feel like the camera was a part of my arm, so it doesn’t feel awkward, it actually feels natural, and when I’m filming (scenes for the show), I know what I’m doing,” Shihabi said in an interview late last month. “If you think about how comfortable we are with our iPhones, you don’t need to be thinking about it when you’re taking a picture, when you’re texting, and I wanted it to feel like that.”

Once the series began production in November 2020, much of the footage Shihabi captured on set made it into the final cut of “Archive 81,” an updated take on the “found footage” film popularized by the 1999 movie “The Blair Witch Project.”

Inspired by a podcast of the same name and adapted for Netflix by writer Rebecca Sonnenshine (“The Boys,” “The Vampire Diaries”), “Archive 81,” streaming Jan. 14, is set in present-day New York where archivist Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie, “The Detour”) is hired by wealthy businessman Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan) to digitize videotapes Melody shot in 1994 at New York’s Visser Apartments.

In the process of doing his job at a remote compound, Dan becomes invested in Melody’s investigation of the Visser and its occupants as he watches more of her videos. The series jumps back and forth from Dan’s present-day archival work to Melody’s ’90s-era videos, telling the “Archive 81” story in two timelines.

Sonnenshine said she was asked to adapt the podcast for Netflix. While the eight-episode streaming series has “the general shape” of the podcast’s first season, the mythology has been built out and elements changed (in the podcast, the archivist digitizes audiotapes rather than videotapes).

“We really wanted to capture the spirit of the podcast,” Sonnenshine said. “They had incredibly deep, detailed sound work in their podcast, and we wanted to honor that by having a very rich and complicated sound design on our show.”

While Pittsburgh plays New York in the series — recognizably Pittsburgh locations include the Steelworkers Building and PPG Place, glimpsed through the eighth-floor windows of Virgil’s office, filmed at 11 Stanwix St., Downtown — “Archive 81” did film a few scenes, particularly for the first episode, in New York in summer 2021.

Sonnenshine had never been to Pittsburgh before it was selected as the primary “Archive 81” filming location, but she did get to scout locations before starting the show’s writer’s room and the writers did script a trip to Pittsburgh into an early episode.

“There’s so much interesting landscape, so much interesting architecture, so much texture to the city that you just haven’t seen a lot. It just has this feeling of having a history to it, and that’s so much what our show is about, the places that have all this history,” Sonnenshine said. “I’ve been shooting TV shows all over the place — never in Los Angeles, always other places — and I’d been doing ‘The Boys,’ which shot Toronto for New York, so I was familiar with the things you do to make your show look like New York. Because our show is set in two timelines, 1994 and the present, I really felt like when we got (to Pittsburgh) this would be a very good double for 1994 New York.”

Based at soundstages in Warrendale, “Archive 81’s” most prominent locations included the exterior of the compound where Dan does his work, filmed at a rented private residence outside Pittsburgh. The home’s two-story interior was built on the Warrendale soundstage.

The exterior of the First Avenue Lofts in Downtown Pittsburgh plays the exterior of the Visser Apartment building in “Archive 81.” Other notable locations glimpsed throughout the eight-episode series include East Liberty Presbyterian Church, Ritter’s Diner, The Rex Theater, Mr. Smalls Theatre and the Hartwood Acres Mansion. (When a character orders “an Arnold Palmer” to drink, Sonnenshine said it was not intended as a nod to the Latrobe native and golf legend — she didn’t know of his local ties — just something she was familiar with as “a California girl.”)

As Dan Turner, series star Mamoudou Athie spends a considerable portion of the series alone, reacting to the videos Dan watches while doing his digitizing and restoration work.

“I like working with other actors, so that was in itself a challenge, but there’s something that opens up with that particular door being closed,” Athie said. “I have to be watching this computer screen seeing what’s been described to me in great detail in the script, and just build this visual world when we’re looking at, effectively, a black screen. So it called upon this imagination, which was very exciting for me. However, I will say it was very lonely, which was a foreign experience for me on a film set.”

While Athie enjoyed the suspenseful elements of “Archive 81,” he was most drawn to his character’s heart.

“He’s so closed off in many ways to the world that even what he’s chosen as his job, to restore things that have been lost, I think it’s such a beautiful way of trying to do something for people he would like done for himself with the loss of his family,” Athie said. “I think there’s something sweet about that. It really gets me every time I think about it.”

For the cast and crew, their time filming in Pittsburgh was marked by the pandemic, with “Archive 81” beginning production before the availability of vaccines.

Shihabi said she “had a love affair with Pittsburgh,” grabbing to-go drinks with “Archive 81” castmates Evan Jonigkeit (“Sweetbitter”) and Julia Chan (“Katy Keene”) for walks along the river. Her favorite take-out food was jerked chicken from Kaya in the Strip.

Sonnenshine, who had an apartment in Lawrenceville, spent time walking in Allegheny Cemetery.

“I feel like I still haven’t been to Pittsburgh because we were shooting in lockdown,” Athie said. “I feel like I need to repeat that city.”

Perhaps in season two? The show’s sets are stored in Pittsburgh, and “Archive 81” ends on a significant cliffhanger.

“I hope people don’t see it coming. The series takes interesting twists and left turns in a good way, so I hope people will go along for the ride,” Sonnenshine said of the series, which has not yet been renewed for a second season. “For season two, there is a plan. It has not been pitched (to Netflix executives). I will cross that bridge when I come to it, but, yes, we have a plan.”