Pandora's Box, page 13
Casting was a problem because Reilly didn’t have much money to spend, and worse, no one wanted to be on an FX original. “I think there was an assumption that this was going to be cheesy,” Ryan recalls. “I heard many stories about agents discouraging [actors] from pursuing it.” He adds, “We were just trying to look for diamonds in the rough.”10 Chiklis was one, and Walton Goggins, who plays Mackey’s best friend and number two, Shane Vendrell, was another.
Goggins was a young kid who grew up in Georgia, had been unable to get work, and was hanging on to The Shield by his fingertips. Liguori and Reilly both said, “‘We don’t fucking like that guy,’” recalls Goggins. “They wanted to fire me. I didn’t really have a face to launch a thousand network ships. Shawn said, ‘Why? I like him.’” Goggins adds, “I only had four fucking lines in the pilot.”11 But he did have enough screen time for the beyond-shocking finale in which he first shoots a Strike Team pal in the eye because he thinks he’s a fink, then buys a rose and a toy police car that he gives to his pregnant wife and little boy, respectively, before he kills them, laying their bodies out neatly on a bed with the boy clutching the toy. Then he blows his head off, creating a pool of blood and gore. It’s The Shield’s version of a happy ending, not quite the stuff that dreams are made of.
FX greenlit the pilot on August 30, 2001. It was originally called The Barn, the cops’ name for their headquarters, but that made it sound like a farm show, so it was changed to The Shield. “No one knew what we could do and what we couldn’t do,” says Goggins. “FX took a risk. We were waiting for the censors to say, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ But we didn’t ask their permission. We just kinda did it.”12
FX executives knew what they had in The Shield: an HBO-killer. As veteran publicist John Solberg put it, excitedly, “We’re gonna shove it up HBO’s ass!”13 The Shield premiered on March 12, 2002, the same year as The Wire, to a phenomenal 4.83 million viewers.
Basic cable ran commercials, and a show like The Shield could be counted on to make advertisers run for the hills, but it didn’t matter. “FX had shit advertising, so it’s not like we were jeopardizing any great advertising base—Mike’s Hard Lemonade was it,” Reilly explains. He recalls that at the conclusion of the screening for advertisers, “They all looked at their feet and kind of shuffled out the back really quick, muttering, ‘I gotta go, late for a meeting.’” He goes on, “Cable operators furnished its income to the tune of twenty-five cents a subscriber, so keeping the cost down, we had nothing to lose.”14
At the time, cable shows couldn’t get A-list actors for their shows. “Their business model,” recalls Alex Gansa, who was writing for the Fox show 24, “was to find actors and actresses who were regarded as past their prime looking to resurrect their careers on television.”15
FX pulled off a coup in luring Glenn Close, an A-lister for the likes of Fatal Attraction and The Big Chill, to play the Barn’s captain in Season 4. Initially, she turned it down. “Everybody was telling me, ‘Don’t do TV, it will ruin your career,’” Close recalled years later. She ignored their warnings and never looked back. “It’s such BS. It really is BS.”16
What finally hooked her was the opportunity to play a powerhouse woman in a man’s world. “I was offered Dune right after The World According to Garp,” she says. “I turned it down [because] there was this scene where they were running away from the big worm . . . and the woman fell down, and everyone had to come back to get her.” She continues, “I don’t want to be the woman who falls down. I want to be the woman who’s running just as fast as everyone else.”17
In Season 5, Ryan hired Forest Whitaker to play an Internal Affairs investigator targeting Mackey. “Somehow, the audience was very much against him and for Vic,” Ryan remembers. He continues, “What I realized as the seasons passed, it almost didn’t matter what we had Vic do, people had just decided that they liked him and wanted to see what he could get away with.”18 Chiklis reported that people on the street asked him, “How are you going to kill [Whitaker]?”
Finally turning the tables on the cartoon characterizations demanded by Standards and Practices was of course to be applauded, but what it revealed was disturbing. The “less yakking, more whacking” contingent that hounded David Chase was again unleashing its inner Charlie Manson. For them, the only trouble with TV’s good-bad guys was they weren’t bad enough. Still, in The Shield, the bad guys are ultimately punished. Policing may not pay, but neither does crime.
The show was a product of the era in which it was made. Explains Ryan, “When I look back, the vision of policing represented . . . was very much inspired by Bush’s ‘My country, right or wrong’ doctrine.”19 Waterboarding was next to godliness, and the ends justified the means, no matter how many ethical eggs were broken to achieve them.
The Shield lost money—it cost about $1.3 million an episode—but Chiklis won an Emmy for Outstanding Actor the first time out of the box, and the show broke basic cable ratings records. As Nash Bridges showrunner Carlton Cuse put it, “The Shield not only put FX on the map, it created the map. It created a model for how cable channels could create brand identities. And it started an era that you didn’t have to make a show that appealed to everyone.”20
Ryan was generous in crediting his predecessors. “I never think of The Shield as patient zero because to me, without Hill Street Blues and Oz and The Sopranos, The Shield would have never existed.” But like Fontana, he felt unfairly overshadowed by Chase’s series.21 He confesses, “We felt like our show was comparable to [The Sopranos, but] we got about a fifth of the attention and about a 20th of the awards.”22
Ryan does, however, rightly claim credit for paving the way for the flowering of FX, which followed with shows like ratings hits Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me, and Sons of Anarchy, three good-bad guy series in quick succession, all testosterone cocktails of misogyny that flaunted their political incorrectness. They were all sons of The Shield.
The same way Chris Albrecht worried that he’d never find a follow-up to The Sopranos, Reilly worried that he’d never find a follow-up to The Shield. Eventually, he ran across a short, swishy former journalist from Indiana named Ryan Murphy. “All the guys in power were straight white men,” Murphy remembers. “J. J. Abrams and I came up at the same time, but I never got those calls—because you mentor people who act like you and talk like you, and share your points of reference.”23 No one, it seems, acted, spoke, or shared points of reference with Murphy.
“Ryan pitched this thing about plastic surgery,” Reilly recalls. “These doctors are in the business of keeping everyone beautiful, but inside a lot of things are not beautiful.” Nip/Tuck features two sleazy plastic surgeons, one of whom is described as “a man wound tighter than a hummingbird’s asshole.” It opens with a graphic shot of an “ass-implant” procedure, and goes on to set women on the path of “designer vaginas.” In one Nip/Tuck episode, a yogi asked for a penis reduction because his was so long he couldn’t resist sucking it.
Reilly was impressed by Murphy: “He had visualized the whole thing. I thought, ‘If he gets half of this on the page, we got another one.’” Ryan turned in the script, and it was perfect. But he had a reputation for being difficult. “I would give him notes, and he’d be like, ‘Well, I think that compromises everything we’re going for. And I don’t even know if I could write this, and I don’t even know if I want to be on the show anymore.’ He would quit and wouldn’t talk to me. I’d have to go meet him at the Chateau Marmont. He’d show up with his scarf around his neck and sunglasses on and kind of sulk, and I’d have to apologize. By the end we were hugging goodbye. He is a true artist. I love him.”
Tasteless as Nip/Tuck was, it would get stiff competition from the next show up, Rescue Me. It begins with a veteran firefighter dressing down ranks of mostly white cadets like a drill sergeant roaring, “You want to know how big my balls are? My balls are bigger than two of your heads duct-taped together,” and later the recruits work out their issues by comparing penis size, even arguing over where to measure: from “under the ball sac out to the tip” or, as Chief “Reilly” prefers, “from the pubic bone to the tip, ’cause that’s all that enters the vagina.”
Executive Reilly shuttled between the networks and the cablers, and returned to NBC in 2003. John Landgraf, who shuttled the other way, left NBC, where he supervised the development of The West Wing, Friends, and ER, and landed at FX in 2004 by way of Danny DeVito’s Jersey Television. His title was president of entertainment, in charge of originals. The son of a pastor, his parents sang backup for evangelist Mel Dibble, who was part of the Billy Graham Crusade, which made his childhood sound like an episode out of the future HBO comedy The Righteous Gemstones.
Writer Stephen Tolkin remembers being sixty words into a pitch when Landgraf’s phone rang. He said, “‘I have to take this.’ I’m, ‘What?!’ Then John put his hand over the receiver, looked at me and said, ‘We’re buying it,’ meaning my pitch. He knew what he wanted. He didn’t need a treatment. Who fucking does that?”24
Landgraf left NBC because, he says, “I was just very frustrated at that time with the state of broadcast television. I felt like the business process was conspiring to dull down the vision of the artist.” He arrived at FX in time for the second season of Nip/Tuck, the first season of Rescue Me, and Season 3 of The Shield. “I was really blown away by the uncompromising, aggressive originality of those shows,” he remembers. “They didn’t seem to care what you thought of them. They were made to be what they are and you can love it or you can hate it, but it didn’t feel like it was a product that had been focus-grouped to death.”25
Realizing that good as they were, The Shield, Nip/Tuck, and Rescue Me all featured white male anti-heroes, Landgraf knew he had to vary his fare, but his attempt to diversify led him to what he calls “both the biggest mistake I ever made as a programmer, and maybe the best decision I ever made as a programmer.” He bought Breaking Bad, but then, stricken with a case of buyer’s remorse, let it go in favor of Damages. “Breaking Bad turned out to be maybe the greatest white, male anti-hero show ever made,” he continues. “I wished I had it, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to put a fourth white, male anti-hero show on the air. Damages . . . was trying to take the anti-hero genre in a different direction.”26 Or he may have been pressured by parent company Fox, which was hesitant to air a show about a meth dealer.
Written by Daniel Zelman and the Kessler brothers, Glenn and Todd A., of fired-by-David Chase fame, each season of Damages was based on a ripped-from-the-headlines case, like Enron and Bernie Madoff. The cable shows, however, were still having trouble getting A-list talent. Thus, once again, it was Glenn Close to the rescue, for the role of a scheming lawyer, Patty Hewes, mentoring Rose Byrne.
With Close attached, the show was able to attract a starry cast that would have been the envy of HBO: Ted Danson, William Hurt, Lily Tomlin, John Goodman, and others. “I poured a lot of David Chase into Glenn Close’s character,” Todd Kessler recalls. “It’s fundamentally about my experiences coming up in the entertainment industry, working for talented people who are also ruthless, paranoid, egomaniacal.”27 Like himself, the naif played by Byrne is warned about working for Hewes, who lies, bribes, blackmails, and fumbles murder. He continues, “Oftentimes the person who extends their hand in friendship the first day at work is the person you realize will be the first one to stab you in the back.”28
FX’s shows differed in quality, but however offensive or inoffensive they were, Landgraf built a formidable network, proving that basic cable could produce shows that were head and shoulders above the networks and, perhaps more important, HBO.
Landgraf’s lineup was so strong that “Free HBO” became a slogan FX could use without embarrassment. “We want you to feel when you’re watching our shows that you don’t know what’s going to happen and that you’re not in a safe place that is governed by guardrails that are going to keep you from going off,” he explains. “I think there’s a place in this world for safety. That’s not the experience that we provide.”29
Damages was followed by Sons of Anarchy, and then Justified, which opens with US Marshal Raylan Givens, played by Tim Olyphant, seated across the table at a swanky poolside restaurant on the rooftop of a Miami hotel overlooking the bay, staring down a thug who looks every inch like the mob hit man he is. Givens has granted him twenty-four hours to get out of town or be killed, but the man just stares back, daring him to make good on his threat. Surrounded by languid sunbathers stretched out on deck chairs, Raylan begins the countdown on the thirty seconds the man has left, trying to provoke him into pulling his gun, which is poorly hidden in his lap under the fold of a starched blue tablecloth. Short of fuse, he can’t resist, a big mistake, because of course the marshal is way faster on the draw. Before the thug can get off a shot, Raylan gets in three to the chest at point-blank range. Blood blossoms across the mobster’s pink shirt like a dark rose. It’s a bravura entrée to as fine a specimen of cracker noir as you’re likely to see anywhere, much less on basic cable.
The show was produced by Sony TV, whose heads, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, hired Graham Yost, who cut his teeth at HBO on Band of Brothers, to write the pilot. Yost is credited as creator and executive producer.
Yost is a Canadian who eventually made the pilgrimage to Hollywood. He was hired by ABC’s Full House because “They said they needed someone on the show with some edge,” he recalls, “but it was quickly apparent they didn’t want edge. It was awful.”30 He quit, joining the ever-expanding ranks of the unexclusive “never network” club. Coming off Speed, a movie he wrote on spec that became a hit in 1994, he dropped in on the Full House writers’ room. His old friends, still there, were awed like ballplayers stuck in the minors greeting one of their own who has made it to the majors. “They asked, ‘What’s it like writing features?’ That was everyone’s dream,” Yost recalls. “The flip side of that is now, over the last fifteen years, feature writers say to me, ‘God, it must be great writing for TV.’” The worm, as they say, has turned.
Despite The Shield, FX was still basic cable, in those days eliciting a “What’s that?” reaction from the average viewer, but Yost had nothing going when Sony sent him Elmore Leonard’s Fire in the Hole, which featured a character named Raylan Givens. Yost recalls, “I was a big fan of Leonard’s and when I read the novella I thought, ‘I can see this Raylan Givens, being the coolest character on television.’” But he felt, as he puts it, “If you were going to do Elmore Leonard, you had to let Elmore be Elmore. The reason he’s so wonderful is not because of his plots, it’s the character and the dialogue,” which was pithy and spare. Yost was shrewd enough to use as much of Leonard’s dialogue as he could. “I would be wondering what Raylan was going to say next,” he recalls. “Let’s see what Elmore has Raylan say next, and use a version of that. Elmore read the pilot, and he said he really liked it, and I said, ‘Of course you did, Elmore, 80 percent of it is you.’”31
Indeed, the pilot is thoroughly Elmore-ized, so filled with cutting repartee spit out and gone before the laughs have a chance to come and the blood to spill. Yost would even have blue rubber bracelets made that were emblazoned with the letters “WWED”—“What would Elmore do?”—reminding everyone to strip-mine Leonard’s work.32
Meanwhile, back in Justified, it seems that US marshals aren’t supposed to shoot people in the chest at point-blank range during dinner at swanky Miami hotel restaurants, no matter how depraved they are. As a punishment, the Marshals Service sends Raylan back from whence he came, to the hills and hollers of Harlan County, Kentucky, a crime-ridden backwater in coal country renowned for its poverty and violence. There, he comes up against his heavily checkered past that includes Ava (Joelle Carter), a former girlfriend, an estranged wife, Winona (Natalie Zea), a by-the-book boss, a larcenous father, and last but not least, Boyd Crowder, his childhood best friend with whom he once dug coal and who is now on the other side of the law. It’s an explosive mixture, and it doesn’t take long to combust.
Yost pitched it to HBO, and they bought it before he left for the elevator. But the cabler, its pipeline clogged with projects, had a daunting pilot-to-series ratio, thanks to Lombardo et al., and he knew he’d have better luck with FX. But despite the Leonard imprimatur, Justified was far from a sure thing. It was just what Landgraf said he didn’t want, yet another male-driven show, featuring yet another good-bad guy. Besides, Yost joked that the show didn’t fit the FX brand; it wasn’t dark enough. Raylan wasn’t a pederast with a nineteen-year-old boy chained to a wall in his basement. Nevertheless, Landgraf corrected the mistake he had made when he let Breaking Bad slip through his fingers, and snapped it up.
Yost doesn’t like to think of Raylan as a good-bad guy, but as a genuine hero who just does things his own way. He admits, however, that he “did kill a lot of people. We were going to do a virtual Zoom panel about Justified for the Austin Television Festival in 2020,” he recalls, “and we decided to cancel it because it was right after George Floyd was killed. The guy who was going to moderate it asked, ‘Would you do a show about a law enforcement officer who takes the law into his own hands, now? What would be different?’ We just decided it’d be better not to do the panel because there was just no answer we could give, except to say, ‘Fuck no, we wouldn’t do it the same way.’”33
If any of the characters heralded the coming of Donald Trump, it was Boyd Crowder, says Yost, in that “he was a liar who lied to himself, lied to everyone around him, but had a certain charm and could behave badly without ever losing the audience.”34 He is played by Walton Goggins, aka Shane Vendrell in The Shield.
