Dennis Franz of ABC’s “NYPD Blue” and Blair Underwood of CBS’ “City of Angels” may make their respective shows sing, but Steven Bochco provides the music.
The ensemble casts of the NBC comedies “Just Shoot Me” and “Stark Raving Mad” may be well-oiled machines, but Steve Levitan is there with the grease.
Calista Flockhart and Dylan McDermott may be the pillars of Fox’s “Ally McBeal” and ABC’s “The Practice,” but David E. Kelley is the one who keeps the pillars from toppling.
These three men are part of a select group that enjoys a central place in the television cosmos – a cadre of producers who either have two or more series currently on the air, or whose ingenuity and vision resulted in some of the best and most popular television of the last 30 years.
And if you look in the background of most of these producers, you will find an interesting commonality. The majority of them apprenticed under some of the most talented people of an earlier generation. And in doing so, they worked incestuously with each other in varying combinations, an arrangement that has evolved into a sort of “old boy’s” network in which they often call upon each other to help write and produce their projects.
For example, there is a direct link between the ’70s crime series “Columbo” and “Ally McBeal”-“Columbo’s” production team of William Link and Richard Levinson worked with Bochco, who wrote for “Columbo”; Bochco in turn hired Kelley, who created “Ally,” to write for “L.A. Law.”
“I was very fortunate,” says Levitan. “Most of what I learned, I learned during my four years on `Wings,’ which was run by Peter Casey, David Angell and David Lee. And they learned much of what they knew from working on `Cheers,’ and the `Cheers’ guys learned much of what they knew from working on `Taxi.’ And then the `Taxi’ guys learned a lot from `(The) Mary Tyler Moore (Show).”‘
That has the legacy touching such important writers, producers and directors as James L. Brooks (“Mary Tyler Moore,” “Taxi,” “The Simpsons”), James Burrows (“Cheers,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Wings”), Stan Daniels, Glen and Les Charles (“Cheers,” “Taxi,” “The Bob Newhart Show”) Ed Weinberger (“Mary Tyler Moore,” “Taxi”), and Allan Burns (“Mary Tyler Moore”).
“I think the writer-producer today is the seminal figure in modern television,” notes Edward Morris, himself a former TV producer and chairman emeritus of the Television Department at Columbia College Chicago.
It is this almost medieval system of apprenticeship with masters that has benefited one of the most prolific of producers: Kelley, who scored a rare coup last year by winning both the best drama and best comedy Emmy Awards for “The Practice” and “Ally McBeal,” shows for which he writes almost all of the episodes himself.
In fact, Kelley at one point this season had five shows on the air operating under the banner of his production company, counting “Chicago Hope,” for which he is consulting producer and occasional scriptwriter, “Snoops” and “Ally,” a half hour of edited reruns from “Ally McBeal.” “Ally” and “Snoops” have since been canceled.
Kelley, a former lawyer who wrote the 1978 movie “From the Hip,” got his introduction to television writing in 1986 from Bochco, who brought Kelley aboard as a writer on “L.A. Law.” Kelley became a “Law” producer a year later. He and Bochco went on to create “Doogie Howser, M.D.”
Bochco, meanwhile, traces his own influences to his days as a writer in 1967 with the late Rod Serling, with whom he helped turn a “Chrysler Showcase” movie feature “A Slow Fade to Black” into a two-hour movie for distribution. Bochco then became story editor for series such as “Columbo,” counting among his mentors that show’s writing-producing team Levinson and Link, as well as writer-producer William Sackheim (“Night Gallery”), a man who collaborated with David Chase (“The Sopranos”) and Dick Wolf (“Law & Order”) on previous TV productions.
Bochco also credits as an “enormous mentor” Grant Tinker, who was head of the groundbreaking MTM production company behind “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”– which starred Moore, Tinker’s wife at the time. Bochco says Tinker taught him “how to create an environment in which people felt safe to do their best work,” he says.
“All of these guys — Tom Fontana (“Homicide: Life on the Street”), John Sacret Young (“China Beach”), Steve (Bochco), David Milch (Bochco’s partner on “NYPD Blue” who wrote for Bochco’s “Hill Street Blues”), Dave Kelley, of course — all of these guys go back to the MTM stable. Grant Tinker really did something when he put together things the way he put them together, and I think these guys are still proving it,” Morris says.
Like Bochco, Chicago native Levitan says those who taught him the ropes were also people whose origins went back to earlier mentors. He says each one, after absorbing the requisite knowledge, went on to a certain glory.
Shows like “Cheers” and “Wings” — series produced under the MTM banner — always ran relatively smoothly, says Levitan, 37. “People were organized, there was a lot of attention paid to the story, so that you’re not rewriting a script completely after a bad table (script) read.”
According to Bochco, some of the things you learn on the job aren’t necessarily good traits: “Ironically, some of my most interesting role models were negative role models. The individuals who taught me how not to behave, individuals who taught me how not to work, in many ways are as important to me as the ones who taught me how to behave, how to work.”
“It’s a system,” explains Levitan. “So many people that you see in the business today come off of dysfunctional shows; shows that are not run very smoothly. The end product might be very good, but getting there is often a battle.”
Bruce Helford is one of those producers who survived a “dysfunctional show.” Helford is a former executive producer on “Roseanne,” which, thanks in part to its contentious star, was not a harmonious experience.
Helford, now executive producer of “The Drew Carey Show” and “Norm” for ABC (and who has deals to create an animated series called “The Oblongs” and a comedy starring “Norm” co-star Nikki Cox), learned from the standup-comic-turned-actress on how not to run a production.
“You don’t want the situation where actors and actresses are your enemy and you’re fighting them all the time because they don’t trust you,” says Helford, a 48-year-old native Chicagoan. “That kind of situation doesn’t need to exist. You can work in harmony; you don’t have to work in chaos.”
Helford — who has worked on projects with producer Gary David Goldberg (“Family Ties”) Gene Reynolds (“M*A*S*H”) and David Lloyd, who wrote the immortal “Chuckles the Clown” episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — knows how to treat his cast and crew, a trait producers of his shows will take with them if they ever create their own series.
“I was really fortunate in that I got to work with a lot of really, really talented people,” he says. “What I learned from them was how to create the atmosphere to bring really talented people, so you can do more.”
Not all of today’s hot TV producers learned from other TV producers. Glenn Gordon Caron, creator of one of the great romantic comedies of the 1980s in “Moonlighting,” thanks a director, one whose name might not be known but whose visionary work is still being seen today.
“Bob Butler is the history of television,” says Caron of his mentor, director Robert Butler. “He in many ways is creatively a sort of father figure for so many people.”
Butler directed episodes of “Star Trek,” “The Fugitive,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Batman.” He also directed “Remington Steele,” with which Caron was associated briefly at its beginning, as well as Caron’s “Moonlighting.”
It was Butler who agreed to direct the pilot for “Hill Street Blues” on one condition — that it be done in the then unheard-of hand-held camera style that has given every show from “Homicide” to “ER” its signature look.
“What I learned from him, really, was demeanor,” says Caron, 49, producer of the CBS sci-fi drama “Now and Again.” “And here’s how you behave if you’re a director. Here’s how you approach the job. Here’s how you talk to actors. Here’s how you break down a script. And that was invaluable for me.”
Rick Berman learned a lot more from “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry than how to tell the difference between a Vulcan and a Romulan.
Berman has been executive producer of three incarnations of the 1960s space series since 1987, when he and Roddenberry brought “The Next Generation” to syndication. Berman is currently in charge of UPN’s “Star Trek: Voyager.”
Berman’s background is mostly documentary filmmaking. He also worked on “MacGyver” and “Call to Glory.” But he was pretty raw when it came to telling stories in the space opera vein of “Star Trek.”
Enter Roddenberry.
“Gene’s optimism and his sense of humanity’s betterment in the next 300 or 400 years is at the fore of `Star Trek,’ and it was something that I was relatively unfamiliar with,” says Berman, 53. “And working with him mostly in the first year and in the second year of `Next Generation,’ and working with him on stories . . . (I gained an) understanding (of) the way he went about using science fiction to his best advantage, through this family of humans and maybe non-humans who were traveling off through the stars.
“And by taking science fiction and doing what is best to do with it, which is to take a story that deals with human situations and human emotions, and to turn that story a little bit on its side and allow people to look at it from a different perspective. And that’s something that I, to this day, owe to Gene.”
Many of today’s prolific writer-producers bypassed the old school. Chris Carter of “The X-Files” wrote for a surfing magazine before entering television through the Walt Disney Co., where he wrote movies for “The Wonderful World of Disney.”
Aaron Sorkin was a screenwriter and playwright before getting a production deal to create ABC’s “Sports Night.” He later teamed with John Wells of “ER” to produce NBC’s “The West Wing.”
Carlton Cuse also came out of the movie world, having worked with a few feature film producers before hooking up first with Michael Mann as a writer for Mann’s retro cop caper “Crime Story,” and later with screenwriter Jeffrey Boam, who wrote two “Lethal Weapon” movies and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” Together, they created “The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.” for Fox.
“The interesting thing about being a show runner (the producer in direct charge of a series’ operations) is it requires this very bizarre duality,” says Cuse, 40, executive producer of CBS’ “Nash Bridges” and “Martial Law.”
“You have to be very creative and intensely creative under extreme pressure, because you have to churn out a new show, which is like a little mini-movie, every seven or eight days. But at the same time you also have to be a good businessman. You have to manage the 200 people who work for you on a show. . . .
“One’s very left brain and one’s very right brain. And I think there are people who are really good at one or the other, but it’s hard to find someone who can do both.”
