Crews re-create Carnival to capture iconic backdrop for series.

PROVINCETOWN — Mermaids, sea monsters, giant jellyfish and drag queens: A taste of Carnival more than two months early filled Commercial Street on Tuesday, staged for the sake of TV.

It was the biggest day of a week of filming for the new Starz crime drama “Hightown,” as a sun-filled block of Commercial Street crisscrossed by lines of rainbow flags was shut down for a fake “Sea Mythology”-themed Carnival parade. Crowds — some hired extras, some spectators caught up in the fuss — cheered wildly into large boom mikes as two sparkly floats and a big boat rolled between Ryder and Standish streets, then backed up to start over and over for a couple of hours. Hundreds of colorfully costumed background actors waving banners, wings and boas added to the pageantry. Some pantomimed crowd scenes were shot in silence, so stars could shout to each other from opposite sides of the street.

Afterward, decorations came down, balloons were popped, the floats backed off. Then star Monica Raymund (TV’s “Chicago Fire”) rehearsed scenes that included walking past drag stars passing out flyers for their shows.

These were scenes so specific to Provincetown that “Hightown” creator Rebecca Cutter knew they had to be filmed on location. That’s what crews are in town all week to do: film images and vistas for the Provincetown-set series that they can’t find elsewhere.

“We’re not shooting anything indoors when we can do that anywhere,” Cutter said in a phone interview Tuesday during her lunch break. They instead wanted to film “all the really beautiful exterior stuff that is particularly iconic of Cape Cod and Provincetown.”

She mentioned the bay at low tide. “I’ve never seen a place where the tide goes out as far as it does here, how you can just walk and walk and walk. That was something that was really special to this show, so we really had to come here."

Photo Gallery: Starz stages Provincetown Carnival parade

Commercial Street was another one-of-a-kind location, and a camera crew moved from block to block Tuesday morning filming “atmospheric" shots of people walking and biking. A sandwich board they set up warned passersby of the “Hightown” filming and told them if they walked through, they had given the rights to their images to all media “throughout the universe in perpetuity.”

And Carnival had to be on that same street. “So many people come here. They would recognize that place and know if we faked it,” Cutter said. “We really wanted to get that right.”

For further authenticity, production designer Dan Leigh (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “John Wick”) said Tuesday that he watched YouTube videos of real Carnival parades. His goal was to catch the spirit, and he and set dressers worked for days to make the floats sparkle and look “homemade, not like the Rose Parade.”

Cutter, whose past TV writing work includes “Gotham,” knows Provincetown so well because she’s been coming here most of her life, since 1974. She grew up in Cambridge, and Provincetown was her family’s vacation spot. The connection continued after she married a Brewster man she met in college. They wed at the Pilgrim Monument.

Provincetown “is my favorite place in the world ... I just think it’s the most beautiful place in the world. It’s so special to me, and is such an interesting setting for a show," she said.

Her mother-in-law visited the set Monday, and her father-in-law was a background actor Friday. The Friday scenes, according to Cape background actors Christine Mascott and Jamie MacDonald, who also worked that day, included MacMillan Pier.

Cutter’s father-in-law also helped with the story because he worked as a National Marine Fisheries Services officer — which is the job of the main character played by Raymund. She is described as “irreverent” and a partier, and becomes involved in a murder investigation after discovering a body during Carnival weekend.

“It’s the biggest weekend of the year and a body washes up — it kind of reminds me of ‘Jaws,’” Cutter said. “I like the dichotomy of that. This huge, fun event and this dark thing happening.”

Cutter has written scripts set in Provincetown before, but this is the first one that has been bought for filming, and the process for “Hightown" has taken a few years. Now Cutter is thrilled to be able to oversee scenes in her favorite place, with filming scheduled to continue largely in the Provincetown Inn area later this week.

“We are so blessed that we got to come here and the weather cooperated," she said. "And the light here is like no other place in the world, which is why so many artists come here.

"Lucky me. This is literally the place I came as a kid … and somehow I ended up being able to get my work to be here.”

The elaborate Carnival scene, with floats and hundreds of extras, had been a sticking point between Starz producers and town officials, especially Police Chief James Golden, when initial requests had been to shut down Commercial Street for a longer time. Multiple meetings and negotiations took place in April to come to a compromise over that plan and other details.

There’s no start date yet set for what is due to be an eight-episode first season on the premium cable network. The plot is set around the Cape Cod opioid crisis and, according to Starz, is “a crime drama about fiercely flawed people using whoever and whatever they can to get through the night. Through these characters, ‘Hightown’ explores themes of addiction and recovery and the possibility of redemption.”

Main filming started weeks ago in New York City, with Rachel Morrison (a cinematographer known for “Black Panther” and Oscar-nominated for “Mudbound”) directing the first episodes.

Also starring is James Badge Dale (movies “13 Hours” and “Hold the Dark”) as a state trooper assigned to the Cape Cod Drug Task Force.

— Follow Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.