Pandora's Box, page 14
Boyd is Raylan’s white whale to whom, despite being on the wrong side of the law, he is still drawn by bonds that neither can entirely fathom. He is a cunning con artist with a florid manner of speaking. If Givens is a man of few words, Crowder is a man of many. As one character describes him, he uses “forty words where four will do.” He matches Raylan’s charm with his own brand of shifty villainy.
“I turned down Justified twice,” Goggins says, because having grown up in rural Georgia, he was uncomfortable with the way Crowder was written. He explains, “If you’re from New York and Italian, chances are you’re going to play a mafia guy. And if your heritage is Middle Eastern, you’re going to probably play a terrorist. And if you’re from the South, you’re going to play a racist redneck. I didn’t want to participate in perpetuating that stereotype.”35
Needless to say, Goggins preferred to think of his character as the smartest guy in the room. “I said, ‘Look, I’ll say the things you want me to say in the pilot, because this is Elmore Leonard’s world. But in order for me to do this, I need Raylan Givens to acknowledge that Boyd does not believe a word he’s saying.’ Because you add that factor, and suddenly, he becomes a much more interesting, more complex character. And God bless them, they gave me autonomy over Boyd.”36 He continues, “The hardest thing was how similar Boyd was to me in the sense that I’m a poor kid from the South. I felt there was a glass ceiling, and I could only get so far. I had a chip on my shoulder for not having the opportunity to spend four years in college, contemplating the meaning of life. My education began reading books while sitting in a valet chair, waiting to park cars outside of a restaurant.”37
Justified moves from the gangs of LA featured in The Shield to “shitkicker-on-shitkicker crime,” as Givens puts it, of Harlan County, but the elements remain the same: stabbings, torture (by chainsaw), and of course shootings, albeit accessorized with leaky tattoos, sawblade haircuts, hillbilly accents, and lots of bourbon.
Where The Shield troubles itself over social issues, however, pitting security against civil liberties, Justified is less about ethics than aesthetics. There is no shortage of themes to chew on—race, class, family, crime as a species of capitalism, and, most important, changing times and those they leave behind—but they all seem to resolve themselves into issues of grace. Style is everything. As Olyphant puts it, “In the world of Elmore Leonard, people are defined not by good and bad but by whether you’re a jerk or not.”38 Raylan is a killer, but we overlook that not only because he wears a badge but, as Yost understood, because he’s cool—smart and funny—smarter and funnier than the Harlan County bottom-feeders he dispatches to the afterlife.
Olyphant made Givens into a career-defining role, and was as cool as Yost could hope, but he was not the most popular actor on the set. Says one of his colleagues who disliked him, “He’s deeply insecure, not that talented, and a bully. An asshole.”39 By the end of the shoot, adds Goggins, “We weren’t talking. We weren’t friends. Maybe it was a case where he became Raylan Givens and I was Boyd Crowder.”40
Justified premiered on March 16, 2010, to the biggest numbers any FX show had scored since the opening night of The Shield, 4.16 million viewers. The first season won a Peabody.
Leonard died in 2013, the occasion for weeping and wailing on the Justified set. The director’s chair with his name on it was treated like a shrine. No one was allowed to sit in it, but after a frustrating take where he couldn’t get a scene to work, Goggins thought to himself, Fuck it, I’m just going to sit down in your chair, Elmore. He found it “very special, comforting,” and continued, “When it’s all said and done, we will be a small piece of thread in Elmore’s coattail.”41
By the time Justified was approaching its last season, Peak TV was in full flower, with approximately 349 original scripted series. Especially in the later seasons of the show, there were so many series on cable that it was almost impossible to be original. A writer would suggest a riff, and someone would say, “They just did that on Breaking Bad.” A plot dictated that Ava had to spend some time in jail, and they worried that Orange Is the New Black, built around an entire prison full of women, had been there, done that. “In a good Elmore scene,” says Yost, “someone’s going to get fucked or someone’s going to get fucked,” meaning, “there was always the possibility that something could be going along funny, and then just take a hard turn into some shocking violence. We were always looking for those surprises. The problem becomes, when you do a show for six seasons, is that surprises stop being surprising and that was one of the reasons why we felt that six years was enough,” avoiding the trap of series like Showtime’s Dexter, or zombie shows that kept lurching along well after their shelf dates expired. Adds Yost, “Sony TV would have loved it if we’d been able to do a seventh season, but we were afraid of running out of story.”42
Yost didn’t actually watch any of the other shows, but he was intensely competitive. “It’s only a half joke but I’d say in the writers’ room, ‘I am a small, petty man.’ Whenever everyone was raving about Mad Men I wasn’t going to watch because everyone was raving about it. What about our show?”43 In the end, they just pretended the other shows didn’t exist. Everything came back, as always, to “Does it feel like Elmore?”44
Post-Justified, Olyphant had to look forward to unemployment, Goggins to playing transgendered Venus Van Dam on Sons of Anarchy. Yost, going from hit to hit, was already working on The Americans, also on FX.
Ever since co-creator Joseph Weisberg had read John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold when he was eleven, he wanted to be a CIA agent. “That le Carré world was so appealing to me, and it was so connected to my personality—everything hidden, kept inside, while I’m secretly planning and plotting”—that he actually joined the CIA’s directorate of operations in 1990. He stayed for three and a half years, even though he was quickly disillusioned. As soon as he joined the agency, he began living a double life. In his words, “I was just lying constantly all day. The weird thing was how quickly I acclimated to it. After three weeks, it was like a switch flipped and I never thought about it again. It just became easy.”45 Part of his training involved reviewing past cases, an assignment he called “read yourself to death.”46
Like other new recruits, Weisberg was given a polygraph test. “You’re in this little box of a room, you’re strapped up to this thing, it’s intimidating. So they go through fifty questions, every one of which is pretty easy. And then, at the very end, the last question was, ‘Are you joining the CIA in order to write about it?’ My heart starts beating, my brain goes bananas. It was a very relevant question to me. I was not joining the CIA for that reason, but I’d been a writer since I was a kid, and I was serious about it. As soon as they said it, I thought, ‘That’s a good idea!’”47
Eventually, it also occurred to him that continuing to work for the CIA wasn’t such a good idea. “I saw that my job was going to entail recruiting people who didn’t provide much valuable intelligence, and yet they had to put their lives at great risk, and I don’t think I felt good about pursuing that.”48
After Weisberg left the CIA, he wrote a spy novel and one episode of Damages. CAA agent Joe Cohen called him. “I literally didn’t know what CAA was. That’s how little I had to do with Hollywood. He said, ‘Have you ever thought about writing for television?’”49
Cohen hooked him up with Yost, who hired him to write for a DreamWorks show, Falling Skies. Then, in 2010, the FBI rolled up ten members of a ring of Soviet “illegals,” moles run by its secret “Directorate S,” who were part of sleeper cells passing themselves off as ordinary Americans with ordinary jobs and ordinary children. One couple had started a successful diaper business. They were traded back for Americans held by the Soviets. One of them, Anna Chapman, was an attractive redhead, who reportedly nearly honeypotted a member of Obama’s cabinet.50 Displaying her photo, Jay Leno asked then vice president Joe Biden, “Do we have any spies that hot?” Biden quipped, “Let me be clear. It wasn’t my idea to send her back. I thought maybe they’d take Rush Limbaugh or something.”51 (See, he does have a sense of humor!)
The story caught the eye of executives at DreamWorks, who called Weisberg. “They said, ‘What about making a show about this?’ I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know if that’s really a good idea, but you don’t say no when those guys ask you to write a script.’ So I said, ‘Sure.’ I started thinking and thinking, and I had two insights that made me imagine it could be a great show. One was that the Soviet agents should be the protagonists rather than the FBI. And the other was, Nobody cares about this right now, you’ve got to put it back in the Cold War, and as soon as you pictured Ronald Reagan yelling about the Evil Empire you understood the stakes of the show in a new way. Philip and Elizabeth Jennings become characters who were driven by ideology.”52
Weisberg pitched it to six or seven places. They all turned it down. “They never tell you why,” he says. “Nobody but Landgraf was interested,”53 he continues. He “was the one guy—FX was the one network—that got that doing a show where the heroes were KGB agents was a good idea, an exciting idea, rather than something scary.”54 He continues, “Scary turned him on. Instead of rushing from it, he rushed towards it.”55 Asking audiences to embrace KGB agents rather than the FBI wasn’t going to be easy, but the root-for-them-anyway premise was on brand for FX. Even more so.
There was no Elmore Leonard to lead them by the hand, but Landgraf not only hired Yost as executive producer, he added Joel Fields as Weisberg’s co-showrunner. Fields was a veteran writer who had executive produced and written for shows like Ugly Betty, Rizzoli & Isles, and later Fosse/Verdon. Landgraf steered them away from making an action-oriented series like 24. “Maybe our desire not to do that was just the knowledge that we couldn’t, or couldn’t do it as well as they did on 24,” says Fields.56
Whatever the reason, they minimized action and maximized character, the relationship between Philip and Elizabeth. “John would have incredible ideas,” Weisberg recalls. “In one meeting he said, ‘Suppose Philip loved Elizabeth more than she loved him?’ As soon as he said it, everybody in the room was like, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting and powerful and could really add a lot of depth to it, and it’s not something we see all the time.’”57 It became a show about a marriage. Weisberg and Fields went so far as to “unwrite” scenes that struck them as over the top.
In effect, Weisberg and Fields embraced Alfred Hitchcock’s “bomb theory,” privileging suspense (the bomb that never explodes) over surprise (the bomb that does). Example: Nosey and oversharing neighbor Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent, is the bomb that the undersharing Jenningses fear, but the fact that he doesn’t go off until the series finale builds the suspense.
“Most of the stuff that seems the most ridiculous . . . is real,” continues Weisberg.58 He used the tradecraft he learned in the CIA in the show—bugs, dead drops, disguises, and how to follow someone without being detected. Stolen from the headlines was, for example, the so-called Bulgarian umbrella with a pneumatic tip that propelled ricin into the dissident Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978.
Like the Russian illegals, the Jennings family were engaged in kompromat, identifying vulnerable targets in and around policy circles while gathering information with which to blackmail them. In one of the most painful story lines in the series Philip, who is already not what he seems, pretends to be someone else and marries Marsha, an assistant in the DC office of the FBI. It “is absolutely based on reality,” says Weisberg. “The real-life stories are horrible and tragic. A woman was called into a police station and told that her husband was a Soviet spy who had married her because she worked in such-and-such department, and she jumped out the window and killed herself.” On the other hand, he confesses that it didn’t matter whether the tradecraft is real or not: “Le Carré admitted that it’s deeply unrealistic in his novels. It just feels authentic.”59
Weisberg’s script for the pilot was a how-to in terms of scene setting and establishing almost all the show’s themes in one brief hour. Says Yost, “I don’t believe he’d ever written a script before, and I read his first draft of his pilot, and I went, ‘You motherfucker. This is brilliant. Out of the box. You’re a better writer than I am. I hate you.’”60
Casting the Jenningses was tricky, because the actors had to be ruthless KGB agents yet caring parents. Landgraf suggested Keri Russell, a Mickey Mouse Club alum and star of Felicity. He thought the contrast between her image, which Weisberg describes as “little Miss America, a wide-eyed, romantic, super sweet American girl,”61 and the role she had to play on the show was provocative. Russell was convinced she was wrong for the part. She was too thin, scrawny, even. She recalls, “I was like, ‘Me? What are you talking about?’” The script called for several honeypot scenes in which she had to seduce her targets to get information. “People don’t cast me for my voluptuous body,” she said, laughing. “‘We’re looking for a woman with a 13-year-old boy’s body? Who can we get? Keri Russell?’”62
More serious, Steven Spielberg, whose company was one of the producers, thought Matthew Rhys was miscast. Spielberg was adamant, and demanded a meeting with Landgraf. According to a source, Spielberg said something like, “‘I’m Steven Spielberg, I know something about casting actors, and Matthew Rhys is wrong for the show. If you cast him, I will take my name off the show,’ assuming that that threat would terrify anyone. Landgraf apparently just kept calm, and said, ‘Okay.’ Spielberg took his name off. Most other people would have never defied Steven Spielberg. That was considered a Hollywood heresy.”63
The Americans premiered on January 30, 2013. The opening scene of the pilot is set in Washington, DC, and is devoted to a protracted, violent knife fight with a Soviet defector set to the pounding beat of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk,” followed by a flashback to Elizabeth Jennings being raped by her instructor as she’s being trained in martial arts back in the USSR. It then jumps forward to the present, where she and Philip (Matthew Rhys) stash a Soviet defector in the trunk of their car, park it snugly in the garage of their suburban home in Falls Church, Virginia, and open a door to the interior of the house to reveal a kitchen where their two young children, oblivious to the Sturm und Drang around them, spoon their cold cereal. As Russell noted, one minute she’s “making a bologna sandwich for her kids and then blowing a guy in a hotel for intelligence the next.”64 The ho-hum routines of domestic life are juxtaposed with their real jobs. It’s The Sopranos all over again, this time with spies, not gangsters.
Landgraf reminded the “J’s,” as Weisberg and Fields were called, that since they were writing a series for cable, they could indulge themselves with season-long, even series-long, story arcs. “That changed everything,” says Weisberg, “because instead of having to pack a whole spy plot into every episode, we could put as much or as little of the spy thread as we wanted, and that allowed the personal stories to breathe. Suddenly they blossomed and took over the show.”65
As a basic cable channel with some commercials, FX wasn’t as loosey-goosey as HBO. There were limits. Violence was okay, but it couldn’t be too bloody. “They had limitations on nudity, naked from behind, that was fine,” Yost recalls, speaking of Justified, but “we couldn’t show breasts. We could say ‘shit’ as much as we want, but they did not let us say ‘fuck.’ That was 2009. By 2012, on The Americans they started to use ‘fuck,’ but it was, ‘Well you get one a season, or you get two a season.’ That was the beginning of the whole streaming thing. By the end they didn’t care how much the characters on The Americans swore, or if there was nudity, because the secondary market was no longer syndication on stations in local markets, but Netflix or Amazon.”66
Endings are hard to do. You have to wrap up story lines, dole out rewards and punishments that make story sense and satisfy the audience, as well as include an unexpected jolt or two—unless you’re David Chase. The surprising, bittersweet end of The Americans, along with that of The Shield, boasts one of the best, if not the best, at least until Homeland finally made it to its last episode in 2020. Their cover blown, the Jenningses have to flee to the Motherland. “When we started breaking season six, we looked very carefully at all the choices,” says Weisberg. “If The Americans had been a network show, agent Stan would have arrested all of them. Where we were at that time in television, it seemed that people would expect them to die, but that didn’t feel good to us.” On the other hand, “Landgraf said that Philip and Elizabeth couldn’t just waltz away. They had to pay a karmic price for what they’d done,” Weisberg continues.67 The question was, how?
The solution was a harrowing ten-minute confrontation in a parking garage that draws its power from an outstanding performance by Emmerich as Stan, who discovers them making their getaway. Virtually vibrating with rage, but one second away from tears, and holding them at gunpoint, he goes from saying to Philip, “You fucking piece of shit” to “You were my best friend. I would have done anything for you,” and letting them escape through Canada. “We had some anxiety that people would feel that the ending wasn’t big enough, that it didn’t have the explosions, nobody shot anybody,” said Weisberg. But it wasn’t necessary. True to the heart of the show, the real explosion is emotional, not actual.
The Jenningses take daughter, Paige, with them to Canada, leaving their son behind. As their train stops at a station just before it reaches the border, Paige steps off onto the platform, seemingly for a breath of air, but she remains there as the train pulls away, appearing to have chosen the US over the USSR. Whatever her reasons, it seems that the family that spies together cannot stay together.
The Americans at its darkest portrays the cat-and-mouse game between the two superpowers, the two ideologies, as a lose-lose proposition, a zero-sum game with no winners and no exit. Yes, doing the wrong thing is punished, but so is doing the right thing.
