He had the time to spare. This was long before he created the critically acclaimed FX drama “The Shield,” and more than a decade before he helped create the successful CBS military series “The Unit” (left). Back then, the Rockford native was just another struggling writer, one who hadn’t actually landed a paid writing gig in years.
One day, an on-court acquaintance named George stopped showing up. “He was gone for three months,” Ryan recalled in a November interview. “He came back and I was like, ‘Where’ve you been?
’ And he said, ‘I made this pilot for NBC. I don’t know any more, but I actually think it might be pretty good.’.
” The fellow player was George Clooney, the show was the runaway hit “ER,” and if nothing else, Clooney’s wild success after years of bad gigs and failed pilots made Ryan realize that success in the entertainment industry was indeed possible. Ryan’s start in Los Angeles was promising enough. On his second day in L.
A., where he had moved after graduating from Middlebury College, he was in the writers’ room at the sitcom “My Two Dads.” Ryan had won a national award for the best comedy play written by a college student, and the reward was a glimpse at the inner workings of the TV industry.
Things looked good back in 1990. Then he began penning spec scripts (scripts that TV writers use to get hired) and looking for steady work. He ended up waiting five years - seven, if you count how long it took him to land a staff job on “Nash Bridges.
” “It’s one of those seven-year overnight successes,” Ryan says with a laugh. But Ryan, who turned 40 in October, says that time of struggle was invaluable. “It was the best thing in the world that could have happened to me,” he said.
I was, like, technically a good writer, I could write funny dialogue and I could be clever, but my writing wasn’t deep and human. I just needed to grow up.” In 2002, when Ryan finally debuted his own show, “The Shield,” the writing skills he’d honed during those scuffling years were blazingly apparent.
The fierce, magnetic police drama starring Michael Chiklis quickly won the actor both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of rogue cop Vic Mackey. And in its most recent seasons, the drama, which has only grown in complexity and depth, has garnered even more praise for sensational guest stints from Forest Whitaker and Glenn Close. But here’s the thing: Ryan has not only created a buzzworthy, edgy cable drama that keeps getting better, he also helped develop a major 2006 hit for CBS, the most mainstream of networks.
When filmmaker and playwright David Mamet began developing the special-forces drama “The Unit,” the first person he turned to was Ryan. “He’s vastly respected in television by people at every level, significantly in this case, by people at the highest levels. They trust him, as they should.
He’s a great producer,” says Mamet, who calls Ryan “a great credit to the Midwest.” Well before he met Ryan, Mamet was a fan of “The Shield,” so much so that he directed an episode of the FX show. “I’m sure I like what everyone else likes about it.
“One finds oneself saying time after time, `You can’t do that.’” “If there’s something I’ve done well, it’s that I think I’ve been good at hiring a lot of really fantastic people around me,” says Ryan. “I hire people who will challenge me.
” “One of the marks of someone who’s obviously great in this business is that you can’t scare them,” Mamet says. “Anyone who’s yelling on a set - they don’t know what they’re doing and they’re yelling because they’re frightened. Shawn is always calm, he’s always thinking of what the other person needs.
” Indeed, the self-deprecating, articulate Ryan remains a down-to-earth Rockford guy at heart. And 16 years in L.A.
haven’t made him complacent. “The pitfalls are constantly around you,” says Ryan, a father of two who’s married to actress Cathy Cahlin Ryan. “The pitfalls are repeating yourself.
One of the big pitfalls is that you get good enough at your job that you know there’s an easy way out to something that will allow you to get home and have dinner with your kids. But deep in your heart you know it’s not the best artistic solution.” Ryan, a die-hard Bears and Cubs fan, says his philosophy is, in sports parlance, “to leave it all on the field.
” “I always believe that you shouldn’t oversell your work, and that you should let it speak for itself,” Ryan says. “And when you know the work’s going to speak for itself, it has to be as good as it can possibly be.” Continue reading "Chicagoan of the year in television: Shawn Ryan of 'The Shield' and 'The Unit'" in An interview with.
.., The Shield, The Unit | Permalink | Comments (6) William Petersen was cagey on that topic in a recent interview; he’d only allow that his character, Grissom, and Sidle (pictured at left) feel they “have to protect” their relationship from the rest of the CSI team, lest news of it cause problems at work.
On another topic, however, Petersen was more than forthcoming. At the end of the season of CSI that kicks off at 8 p.m.
2), Petersen will still have time left on his contract with CBS, which runs out in 2008. But Petersen made it clear that he wants to spend a substantial part of next year doing a play in Chicago. The actor wants to come home.
[The text in this paragraph and the paragraph above has been changed.] Home, for the Evanston-born actor, is the Chicago stage. And he’s in talks with Victory Gardens Theater, which gave him his first starring role, about appearing in one of the company’s 2007 productions.
(Petersen also says he’d like to work at Chicago Shakespeare Theater or the Goodman Theatre.) “I’ve been talking to [artistic director] Dennis Zacek at Victory Gardens, and we’re going to do a play as soon as we can get enough time to make it worth everyone’s while,” Petersen says. “I plan to go back to Chicago and do plays starting next year.
” Zacek says he’d love to get the actor into one of his 2006-07 productions, which will be staged at the company’s new home at the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue. But if the work Zacek has in mind doesn’t pan out, he and Petersen may end up teaming up in the 2007-08 season. “I’m trying to have something custom-made for him, but it’s in the making.
It’s not finished,” says Zacek, who adds that he hopes to have the script ready for Petersen to read when the actor arrives in town for Victory Gardens’ season-opening gala Oct. “I’m not sure this means we won’t see him in any more movies or in any more TV stuff, but I do think there’s a hunger to get back to the demands and the purity and the risks of live theater,” Zacek adds. CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler says she doesn’t want to think about, let alone discuss, what “CSI” will do in its eighth season or beyond if Petersen leaves or reduces his presence on the show.
Cooking up the key elements of the show’s seventh season -which will have a recurring serial-killer theme, a new forensic psychologist who will “throw Grissom off his game,” and the slowly developing relationship between Grissom and Sidle - kept “CSI” producers busy enough, she notes. Continue reading "Bound for home: Chicago's William Petersen looks beyond 'CSI' to a return to the stage" in An interview with..
., CSI | Permalink | Comments (42) Olin’s remark is an understatement. The cast indeed is an acting dream team: Sally Field plays the matriarch of the sprawling Walker family, a complicated clan that’s is rocked early on in the season by a death.
Calista Flockhart plays one of her daughters, a right-wing pundit, and Rachel Griffiths, Ron Rifkin and Patricia Wettig also have featured roles. The members of the show’s creative team also have impressive pedigrees: Baitz is a playwright known for award-winning works such as “The Substance of Fire” and “Ten Unknowns,” and Olin, a veteran of “thirtysomething” and an executive producer of “Alias,” has become one of Hollywood’s most respected television producers and directors. The impressive talent has drawn scrutiny, but shakeups behind the scenes at “Brothers and Sisters” have been another cause of pre-season chatter.
After the pilot was filmed with Betty Buckley as the family’s matriarch, Buckley was let go and Field was tapped for the role and much of the pilot had to be re-shot. The part played by writer/actor Dan Futterman (“Capote”), who left the series after he got a role in the feature film about slain journalist Daniel Pearl, was also recast. Then in August, executive producer Marti Noxon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) exited “Brothers and Sisters” amid rumors of clashes with Baitz, and Greg Berlanti, the creator of “Everwood” and “Jack and Bobby,” was brought on board.
So is the show troubled? Not really, the show’s producers say; all the changes were just part of growing pains that were to be expected, given that creator Baitz is a television novice. Production on the show was never shut down for retooling, the producers point out, which often happens at this time of year with new network shows.
Rumors of turmoil are “absolutely just utterly false,” says Berlanti. “There’s no connection between what’s happening on the sets and behind the scenes and what’s being perceived from outside.” “There are always staff changes that happen this time of year,” he added.
“People are told, ‘Oh, you guys will work great together,’ and it doesn’t work out that way.” “If we would have shown the pilot that we shot, without Sally in it, and then said `We’re recasting the part,’ that seems to me to be an impossible situation,” Olin noted. Indeed, the producers were in a double bind: By midsummer, usually television critics have seen all of the network pilots for fall.
But thanks to the Internet, fall shows are being scrutinized like never before, and if a pilot that didn’t reflect the creators’ vision leaked out, negative buzz could have been a big problem for “Brothers.” Continue reading "An exclusive talk with the men behind fall's most anticipated drama " in An interview with..
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., Veronica Mars | Permalink | Comments (1) Greg Daniels and his writing staff. “And they’ve done an incredible job at that.
They’ve had so many opportunities, including on `Booze Cruise’ -- that could have been the big moment where I say something or put it all out there or something dramatic happens. And instead I say nothing because (a) I don’t know what to say, (b) I don’t know if I can say it.” Krasinski says he was intimidated to take on his role in the U.
S. version of “The Office,” because the romance of Tim and Dawn, two parallel characters on the original British series, was so perfectly done. “I think I was more terrified when I got the part than I was to audition,” Krasinski says.
“Filling the shoes of Martin Freeman [who played Tim] and taking on what I think was one of the greatest romances on television - the Tim and Dawn thing was amazing.” Still, the believably lovelorn characters played by Krasinski and Jenna Fischer have more than earned their place in TV’s romance pantheon (and their unresolved status has set up one heck of a cliffhanger for next year). But that romance is just one reason “The Office” has developed into the best new comedy on TV; the exceptional ensemble cast and sharp writing are others.
“It was a blessing in disguise in my opinion, the way that we didn’t have a lot of viewers” when the show began in 2005 and that NBC “didn’t really know what to do with us,” Krasinski says. “And because of that, we were able to really fall in love with the show as a cast and a crew and as writers and all that. … I think if when we came out of the gate, if there had been pressure to be the best show on NBC, it would have been a little different experience.
” The full text of my conversation with John Krasinski is below. Continue reading "'The Office' as a classic love story? Believe it" in An interview with.
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.., How I Met Your Mother | Permalink | Comments (2) in An interview with.
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Progress or coincidence?" in An interview with..
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. episode March 21, the show won’t return with 10 more fifth-season episodes until early 2007. And those 10 episodes might be the end of the line, says creator and executive producer Shawn Ryan, a Rockford native.
Ryan and his staff are in the midst of writing the rest of the fifth season episodes, and he says he’ll know in about a month whether the show will continue. I'm going to have a sense pretty quickly, about whether I can go to [FX head] John Landgraf and say, 'Hey, I want more episodes and here's why, and be able to be passionate about it and get him excited about it, says Ryan, who’s also the co-creator of the new CBS hit “The Unit. And if I can’t do that, then we’ll probably end it.
When the show does return, Ryan confirms that Forest Whitaker will be back as obsessed internal affairs investigator Jon Kavanaugh, the man determined to bring down L.A. cop Vic Mackey and his rogue Strike Team.
We’ve seen these guys do a lot of bad things and always get away with them, Ryan says of the show’s fifth season, which saw the shattering murder of Strike Team member Lem by his friend and fellow cop Shane. I felt that they hadn’t really paid any kind of serious price yet. And the thing that intrigued me about this season was writing a story and building up to the death of Lem, which is this big price that they finally had to pay for the life that they’ve been leading.
When we get to this next batch of episodes, which start filming next week, they're going to be struggling with that price, he notes. And that may be the beginning of the end for Mackey and his compulsively watchable crew, as well as The Shield's swan song. There's something very appealing to me about ending a season too soon rather than a season too late, Ryan says.
The complete text of my conversation with Shawn Ryan is below. Continue reading "Is 'The Shield' coming to an end? A chat with creator Shawn Ryan" in An interview with.
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