`The West Wing” is doing well in its second season. “ER” is, as usual, the No. 1 drama on television.
And now, producer John Wells no longer has to worry about his third television show, NBC’s “Third Watch.” It may be the most improved series on the air.
The second-year drama about New York cops, paramedics and firefighters, which airs at 9 p.m. Mondays on WMAQ-Ch. 5, has gone through a few creative changes since last season, according to Wells, who created the series with former Chicago cop Edward Allen Bernero.
“We thought the show was pretty good last year, and could be a lot better,” Wells says. “We spent a lot of time over the summer trying to focus it, sort of analyze what we thought was working and not working.”
The most glaring change is how each episode now focuses on a single character, instead of spreading the entire nine-character cast throughout various storylines.
During the last several weeks, plots have revolved around long-suffering cop Faith Yokas (Molly Price), fresh-faced rookie Ty Davis (Coby Bell), reckless firefighter Jimmy Doherty (Eddie Cibrian) and paramedic Monte “Doc” Parker (Michael Beach), among others.
“One of the things that we heard was that people really liked the show and watched it, but they had trouble sort of differentiating the characters,” explains Wells, who spends between 40 and 50 percent of his time working on “Third Watch,” with the rest of his attention divided between “ER” and “West Wing.”
“That’s really how we decided to sit down and try to really clarify who the individual characters were, by telling individual stories about them in the early going, so that you got a good sense of who they were and what their lives were like, and what was and wasn’t in their life.”
As a result, the characters have become more interesting to viewers as personal lives interact with jeopardy-filled jobs.
The narrow casting also has allowed Wells and his writers to open up their storytelling in more visually fascinating ways.
“It was a very conscious effort to try and say `look, the audience is sophisticated, they watch a lot of film and television,'” Wells says. “They’re going to clearly be able to follow what we’re doing, so let’s just not try to do kitchen-sink realism.”
Wisely, Wells doesn’t let viewers lose sight of the rest of the large cast. Even though one character may be the center of a particular episode, just about everybody else on “Third Watch” is seen in some form or fashion in every show.
Some characters are still waiting for their closeups, but this Monday’s show will again visit the tumultuous personal life of Yokas, with a special guest appearance by Mia Farrow as her mother.
A powerful episode revolving around Yokas aired earlier this season, and Wells thought the segment required a follow-up.
“You will see the stories aren’t going to move through the ensemble,” Wells says. “It’s not like a batting order in baseball, where everybody comes to the plate in a specific order, but much more where the storytelling is leading us.” The changes seem to have appealed to viewers. Wells says “Third Watch” is averaging between 12 and 13 million viewers a week, up from 11.2 million last season.
With three shows on the air, Wells still seems to have the energy to work on a fourth. He and his ex-“ER” producing partner, Lydia Woodward, will bring to CBS a new drama, tentatively set for the fall, about a recently defeated senator who returns to the Pacific Northwest to be near his three daughters and their families.
Rebooting: ABC is replacing its low-rated Friday night sitcom “The Trouble with Normal” with “Dot Comedy,” an Internet-based variety comedy that will feature skits and animated features. The show, hosted by Jason and Randy Sklar and TBS’ “Dinner and a Movie” co-host Annabelle Gurwitch, premieres Dec. 8.
Little room: “Married . . . With Children” co-star Ed O’Neill heads a new CBS cop show slated for midseason and produced by “NYPD Blue’s ” David Milch and Anthony Yerkovich of “Miami Vice.”
But where will it show up? CBS has asked for additional episodes for all of its seven new series. This means “Welcome to New York” and “That’s Life,” two shows that have been on the bubble, will be around a while longer. However, both have been given orders for only four additional episodes each beyond the 13 that they’re already making. CBS previously had extended its five other freshmen series for the rest of the season.
Pumping up their volume: Both the Sci-Fi Channel and Comedy Central are planning to beef up their original programming.
The all-yucks channel has four pilots set for production in anticipation of using one or more of them for late night.
They include a bowling competition, a whacked-out magazine series, a products-buying show for viewers and a series featuring a “comedy erotica” music band.
Sci-Fi’s offerings are a comedy-drama about dinosaurs who have evolved into humans, and a series where the dead from every era are reborn healthy and young.
The network already has for January an adventure show with novelist Jules Verne as the center, and the action series “Black Scorpion.”
