Keep On (Show) Running

If you love Cinema or Movies or Film or whatever you want to call the artform in question, chances are you follow certain creative people. Directors, most likely, since Auteurism passed over from academia in the 50s and entered the subconscious of the mainstream (helped by the fact that Studios had always used certain "name" Directors to sell films, as far back as Griffith and Keaton, through Welles and Ford and DeMille) so that everybody with any basic film literacy knows who Peter Jackson, James Cameron or Quentin Tarantino is. If you're like me - and every other film-lover I know - you keep an eye on the Directors you admire, and make an effort to see their new work. Probably you also follow certain thespians, for this is how the star system functions. You like an actor or actress in one thing, and you'll be willing to see if you like them in anything else, is the thinking. And so you look out for them in trailers, on posters, in reviews. You liked J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot? You loved that cocky young man playing Captain Kirk? Well, here he is, with Denzel (you've liked him in loads of things, hes an old, reliable favourite) in a big action movie, playing the good guy! You wanna see that, dontcha?

On the level of the Film Blog, you have to go into more detail. I obviously follow lots of directors and actors and actresses, but I'm also interested in the work of dozens of screenwriters, cinematographers and even composers. If Ennio Morricone or David Holmes has scored a new film I've never heard of, I'm instantly interested. Probably there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who feel exactly the same way. There are even producers whose involvement will make me take notice; Scott Rudin, Art Linson, a few others. This is how I keep up. By tracing careers, following the progress of the individual whose work I find rewarding and/or exciting.

But television is different. Traditionally it has been seen as more of a writer's medium. Directors generally don't own their shows, instead they work as hired guns. In the UK, the work of TV writers like Dennis Potter, Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale have long been the main attraction of their own programmes. The American concept of the "Showrunner" is as close as you can get to an Auteur Theory for television. This is generally the creator of the show who oversees the writing, steers the direction of the show and is involved with decisions on most every level, including casting and direction (Kurt Sutter, who created Sons of Anarchy, gives a great account of just what the job involves here ). Often, this Showrunner will receive none of the recognised relevant credits. He has not directed the episode, nor written it, not edited or shot it. Nevertheless, the episode is more his than anybody elses, for the wider vision - and very often all of the tiniest details too - comes from him. And what does he get? An "Executive Producer" credit.



The rise of HBO to a position where it is widely regarded as producing some of the finest television drama ever made has helped in the recognition of the Showrunner as the creative lynchpin of much TV. For while the likes of Sam Peckinpah (on The Westerner) and Michael Mann (on Miami Vice and Crime Story) basically worked as Showrunners on high-quality, critically acclaimed programmes in other eras before transferring their talents to cinema, before the rise of HBO, many notable American Showrunners worked on more populist, less acclaimed shows. I mean the likes of David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, The Practice, Doogie Howser, M.D), Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick (thirtysomething, Once & Again) and Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, Murder One, L.A. Law). The Sopranos, and to a lesser extent, The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, changed everything. David Chase is seen as the author of The Sopranos, credited as Creator, responsible for writing numerous key episodes and directing a couple, and he gets most of the plaudits for the series' ambition, artfulness and complexity.

Joss Whedon has benefitted similarly from the success of Buffy and trailed that through a string of less successful Series, from Angel through Firefly to Dollhouse. So it seems obvious; in TV, I follow the Showrunners, the Creators. If David Chase ever gets around to making another Series, I'll be there. David Simon has won me for life with The Wire, The Corner and Generation Kill, and I will watch Treme (whenever it gets a UK DVD release) entirely on the promise of his name. David Milch, Alan Ball, Matthew Weiner, Vince Gilligan, Mitchell Hurwitz, Kurt Sutter, Aaron Sorkin; all names associated with exceptional series whose future work will be scrutinised as belonging to their own ouevres.
David Milch, for example, has a new series in production for HBO. Entitled Luck, it would be eagerly anticipated on the basis of its cast (Dustin Hoffman, Joan Allen and Nick Nolte among many others) and director (Michael Mann is directing the pilot), but for legions of Deadwood fans, its a David Milch piece, pure and simple. Mitchell Hurwitz's new show, Running Wilde, has been given a mixed reception due to the high expectations of fans of Arrested Development.



There are several recent US shows waiting to jump the Atlantic I'm looking forward to, and Showrunner issues make each interesting for different reasons. Boardwalk Empire is the most obviously appealing. A HBO-produced period gangster epic with an awesome cast, a massive budget, and Scorsese direction of the pilot seems almost too good to be true. But it has been created by Terence Winter, one of Chase's key writers on The Sopranos. The last Sopranos alumni to launch his own period epic about the making of America? Matthew Weiner with Mad Men. Instant pedigree.
Rubicon is an AMC show, which these days is a recommendation. AMC has given us the aforementioned Mad Men together with Breaking Bad, and here they have backed the creation of Jason Horwitch, whose only previous notable work was a short-lived mid-00s drama, Medical Investigation. Rubicon has proven short-lived too, with AMC cancelling it after the first season, and it is reportedly quiet and slow and baffling and subtle, which sounds great to me, despite mixed reviews and my ignorance of Horwitch's work.
The Walking Dead is also from AMC, Frank Darabont is the Showrunner, its based on a comic I know well and quite like, and I can see it working brilliantly as a Series. Aside from Darabont's obvious cinematic record (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist, etc), I'm encouraged by the fact that his TV education came at the hands of Shawn Ryan on the Shield. Ryan is a one man Television Drama factory, his proteges and writers creating their own series regularly. The Unit and Sons of Anarchy both originate from within Ryan's stable, and I love both those shows (despite being lukewarm on The Shield itself).

Ryan is executive producer on the show I'm most excited about; Terriers. It is created by Ted Griffin, best known as a screenwriter on Oceans Eleven, Matchstick Men and Best Laid Plans. If those films suggest a taste for Neo-Noir, then the show looks like a vintage slice of Southern Californian dirty noir: all faded urban backdrops (actually San Diego) alcoholic ex-cops, struggling Private Investigators, black humour and one-liners. With a pilot directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow), underused character actors Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James as suitably scruffily mismatched leads, and echoes of such California-Noir classics as The Long Goodbye and Harper evident in the promotional material, it looks like a tonally perfect piece of classy pulp. Almost finished its first Season on FX in the States, its been well-reviewed (75 on metacritic) but not massively successful in the ratings, but I've read too many good things from writers I trust to be put off.

Griffin as Showrunner also encourages me. When Screenwriters create tv shows, the results can be fascinating. Take Graham Yost, who wrote Speed, Broken Arrow and Hard Rain in the 1990s. He seemed a big budget, high concept writer. But then he created Boomtown, the underseen and short-lived cop drama which was always complex and more or less the opposite of Yost's movie work in its effect. His most recent creation is the superb Justified. Or Peter Berg, whose middling work as a director of films has been blown away by the impressive way he developed his best film, Friday Night Lights, into the TV drama of the same name. Or Ben Best and Jody Hill, whose brilliant series Eastbound & Down is on a different level from their mixed work in feature films on the likes of The Foot Fist Way and Observe & Report. Based upon these precedents, I have high hopes for Ted Griffin as a creator of good TV, and for Terriers.



A question all of this prompts is: if I was offered the choice right now between writing and directing a Movie, with all the grandeur and spectacle that implies, and creating and running a TV Series, which would I choose? Which would anybody choose? Cinema has a magic and an aura denied to television, in some ways it seems more important, the statelier artform. But then I think of the reach, the detail, the incredible nuance and variety of shows like The Wire and Mad Men, and I don't know. Series like The Pacific match any film in terms of spectacle and action, anyway. Watch them in a theatre and they would be just as viscerally powerful as most movies. And then they have the time and space to stretch out and investigate characters, to truly address thematic preoccupations, to follow whimsical ideas, to create worlds and populate them with people and have those people grow and develop as they would in life without any false structure forced upon them.
I really can't decide.
Which is probably why people who can do both, do both.

Credit Where Its Due

Watching a new Cop show is always a risk for the viewer. Such well-trodden ground, so many gimmicky angles, such a weight of cliche bearing down. Are you going to get something revelatory and transcendent like The Wire, or a slight twist on a familiar formula, like the many CSI-inspired shows of the last decade (Bones, Numbers, Lie to Me, The Mentalist etc)?
When CSI premiered, nobody could have possibly predicted the impact it would have, though in retrospect its simplicity and the appeal of its formula seem obvious: a slick Bruckheimer gloss applied to an almost Holmesian procedural. The (generally imaginative) crimes and the style are the franchise's real stars.

Its success has meant that the majority of Cop shows that survive their first Season are in some way echoing it. The influence of more idiosyncratic and difficult shows like The Wire and The Shield is much harder to detect, perhaps because they are both so distinctive and accomplished. Quirkier and edgier treatments of the old genre tend to falter. The Unusuals, creator Noah Hawley's 2009 comedy-drama about the mordant wit of some New York Homicide detectives, was an interesting take, distinguished by some great writing and a fine cast including Jeremy Renner, Adam Goldberg and Amber Tamblyn. Of course ABC cancelled it after a single underwatched Season.



In this environment, a show like Southland seems resolutely old-fashioned, the kind of traditional product of the genre that the combination of CSI and The Wire seemed to have killed off sometime in the last decade. A multi character ensemble drama, following the experiences of several different police officers through different cases (which sometimes link up but often do not), Southland was created by Ann Biderman, a writer on Steven Bochco's NYPD Blue, perhaps the last such old-school Cop drama to achieve true popular success. It recalls lots of other shows from down the years - Hill Street Blues, most obviously, but also the exceptional Homicide: Life on the Street and the more recent Third Watch and BoomTown.
Southland spreads its gaze across a relatively wide range of Cops, following two patrolmen as they cruise the streets of LA, but also focusing on several detectives in the same department. We get glimpses of their personal lives as they deal with various cases. One has a troubled relationship with his young wife, another struggles with a rebellious teenage daughter, yet another cares alone for her aging mother and tries to deal with her own loneliness. Then there is the rookie beat cop - a Beverly Hills Lawyer's son who the others see as a tourist.

So far, so cliche, and Southland certainly does nothing that hasn't been seen before. Its strength lies in in the general high standard of its writing, performances and direction, and the fact that these days its old-fashioned ensemble storytelling seems almost radical. It is never really slick, trusting instead in the virtues that made Hill Street Blues so popular decades ago. If this makes it occasionally hamfistedly predictable, mawkish and derivative, it also works. These storylines feel authentic, and these cops are cynical and bowed by their job in a way that feels real but not utterly stereotypical. The criminal cases flit across the screen in a few scenes, their brevity - there are murders and abandoned children alongside petty drug use and traffic offenses - a sort of indictment of how the prolonged success of this genre has jaded generations of TV viewers. Only fiendishly complex crimes move us now.

The most impressive element of Southland, however, is its opening credit sequence, which is interesting both on its own terms and for its place in the evolution of the genre and, indeed, of the credit sequence. Realist cop dramas once featured credit sequences structured around their casts. Hill Street Blues is a classic example. It intersperses establishing shots of patrol cars in grim, wintry city streets with clips of characters and credits over headshots of the principals. It has an arresting opening - a garage door swings upwards and open and a police car appears under the first few bars of Mike Post's lovely, melancholy theme. This was perhaps the chief innovation of this particular sequence - it introduced melancholy, an ache and introspection into what had previously been a rather bombastic area. Hill Street Blues was many things as a television drama, but it always held that throb of pain, its characters troubled, its subject matter dark. That credit sequence acknowledge this and perhaps readied the viewer for it.

Miami Vice was far from a realist show. It was heightened in almost every respect - ultraviolent, decadent in its glamour, always cool, probably the single most stylish show ever seen on television to that point. In the world of 1980s TV, every episode of Miami Vice looked and played more like a movie than a television show. As such, its credits were unlike those of any other programme. It almost denied the importance of its cast, its narrative and genre. Instead these credits play out like an advert for Miami tourism. This sequence is all about place and atmosphere - a stream of shots of beautiful locations and local colour, such as girls in bikinis, flamingos flocking, pelota, sports cars, modernist architecture, speedboats. As a young boy when the show was at its peak, I loved the credits sequence as much as I loved the show itself. It seemed impossibly exciting. Jan Hammer's great theme was a big part of that. It was cool and modern, just like Miami seemed to be, is what those credits said, just like this show was.



Miami Vice changed TV and especially Cop shows. You can draw a link from it straight to CSI. Another highly influential show was NYPD Blue, which seemed stylistically radical when it premiered in 1993. All those handheld cameras, shaking and juddering around, characters falling out of frame, focus suddenly shifting - it was brand new on television, and it breathed new life into the genre. The credit sequence is influenced by Miami Vice - it wants to suggest the clamour of New York City, the mad rush and tumult of it, and so the first thirty seconds are a furious fast-cut montage of street scenes with abrupt focus pulls, cars and people flitting rapidly through the foreground, the cast interspersed through it as if they too have been caught on camera documentary-style. Then it softens - a muted keyboard replaces the thunderous drums of the first section, and we get a pretty standard selection of credits shots with the cast listed over clips. This lack of focus on the cast would allow it to turnover regularly over the next decade. The drum tattoo returns for the last ten seconds or so, to remind us that this show is different, its urban, its New York.



Homicide: Life on the Street premiered at around the same time as NYPD Blue to much less success, which is a shame, because it was much better. But it was also artier, a dry, witty, blackly funny - though sometimes caustically angry and serious - take on the genre. Its credit sequence, put together by Mark Pellington with music by Lynn F Kowal, is correspondingly arty - all tone, mood and place. The shots of Baltimore are all canted and elliptical, the camera moving in odd directions. The entire sequence is monochrome, the stark black and white of how the Homicide detectives saw their jobs - there are no grey areas with murder. The music never seems to really get started - there are ghosts of melody floating in it, odd ambient sounds. We see the cast, their faces lit in patches in a darkened room. Their names flash at us over shots of pinwheeling lights, a seeming nocturnal cityscape moving this way and that, in the last passage.



Homicide gave birth to The Wire, in a sense. The credits for The First Season of the Wire set out the shows stall instantly - Baltimore, ambiguity, surveillance. By now, credits served as a shorthand for viewers. You could tell how classy and intelligent a show was by the state of its credits. The Wire - muted, subtle and bluesy - was unmistakably something new, for all its formulaic elements.



The credits from the original CSI resembled nothing so much as a trailer. "Who Are You" by the Who plays over the top, as a bombastic series of images is thrown at the screen, colour filters prominent, everybody looking constantly annoyed. CSI is too impressively robotic to allow for anything as a soft as melancholy and so these credits are instead sleek and fast-moving, slick and brutally paced.



Southland seems to have taken its model for credits not from another TV show (though there are echoes of Law & Order here) but from a film - James Gray's 2007 We Own the Night. Gray's film opened with credits formed entirely from vintage police and crime scene photos by the likes of the legendary Weegee, and built up a strange power as its images played out, backed by a Jackie Gleason instrumental. The Southland sequence has learned this lesson brilliantly, taking an excerpt from "Cançao do Mar" by Dulce Pontes and covering it with powerful shots of LA police over the last century or so. it seems more stately and serious than the show itself, and it possesses a rare quality in TV credit sequences these days; beauty.