 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
| USA's Newest Oddball: A Hero Who Feels the Crime |
David Creegan faced difficult odds when it came to cracking
the crowded lineup of television detectives. Then he had a stroke of good
fortune: he was shot in the head.
Creegan is the fictional lead character
in "Touching Evil," an offbeat, unsettling police drama that has its premiere on
Friday. He works for the Organized and Serial Crime Unit, investigating nasty
incidents in the San Francisco area, but these days mere grisliness is not
enough to make an impression in television. That's where the gunshot to the head
comes in.
It occurs in the opening minutes of the pilot: Creegan takes a
bullet about an inch above his right eyebrow. When he comes to after brain
surgery, he is a changed man: a strange and disquieting man, a man with a lot
less inhibition and a lot more insight than most detectives.
"There are
consequences to having a piece of your frontal lobe removed, and one of them is:
no shame," said Jeffrey Donovan, the actor who was given the job of portraying
the quirky Creegan and took it seriously enough to consult a neurologist about
brain injuries. "I have no inhibition; I will just say whatever I feel. The
other thing is sequential disorder. You put your pants on, you put your socks
on, you put your shoes on; he would put his shoes on, his socks on, then his
pants on."
Those kinds of oddities place Creegan in a class with USA's
other not-quite-right crime solver, Adrian Monk, the obsessive-compulsive played
by Tony Shalhoub. But "Touching Evil," unlike "Monk," will never be nominated
for Emmys in the comedy categories. The crimes are ugly (in the pilot, children
are kidnapped), and Creegan's tics are a vehicle for getting to the dark side of
human nature: his mental instability enables him to see the world as criminals
see it. And that, Mr. Donovan said, is what he hopes will set the show apart
from television's many other police dramas.
The acting challenge has been
invigorating, said Mr. Donovan, who until now has been best known as Jeffrey in
the film "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2": "How do you play a detective who's
supposed to keep himself removed from what's going on with the people who are
creating these horrific crimes, yet he feels their pain?"
"Touching Evil"
is based on a British series of the same name from the late 1990's, but Mr.
Donovan's interpretation of the lead character is more complex and unpredictable
than in the British version. Much of that comes from the script - the pilot is
by Bruno Heller - and from the director, Allen Hughes. But some of what viewers
will see, Mr. Donovan said, is his spontaneous contribution: for instance, a
scene on an airplane where he begins tossing peanuts and crackers about,
oblivious to what other passengers might think.
"Stuff like that was not
in the script," Mr. Donovan said. "I kind of invented that. And God bless Allen
Hughes and the network: they let me do anything I want."
Dealing with the
inventiveness falls first and foremost to Vera Farmiga, who plays Creegan's
reluctant partner, Susan Branca. Branca often finds herself apologizing for
Creegan's odd behavior at crime scenes or trying to keep him from walking into
onrushing traffic. But in this intricate series, Branca is her own kind of
puzzle, which is just as Ms. Farmiga wants it.
"It's not just playing
straight man to Creegan's loony," she said. "With Branca, what you see is not
always what you get. There is a duplicity there. She has a very strong sense of
her identity and purpose, and yet at times she verges on identity crisis. Branca
has her turn in confronting her own demons."
Arnold Rifkin, one of the
executive producers of "Touching Evil," first stumbled on the British version of
the show when he was president of the William Morris Agency. He said he was so
convinced of the show's potential for American audiences that when he resigned
from William Morris in 1999, he sought to buy the rights, putting up his own
money.
Later he and the actor Bruce Willis formed Cheyenne Enterprises
and shopped "Touching Evil" to the major networks, but, Mr. Rifkin said, the
response was always the same: "They thought it was too dark." Eventually Mr.
Rifkin paid a call to USA, where executives were more receptive.
'Dead
Zone' was already on the air," Mr. Rifkin said, referring to the USA series
about a man who emerges from a six-year coma with the power to see into the past
and the future. "That's why it was the perfect network to go to."
In
addition to the pilot, USA has ordered 11 one-hour episodes of "Touching Evil,"
which are now being filmed in British Columbia. In doing so it has acquired the
ingredients for an exceedingly odd network party: imagine, gathered around the
punch bowl, Adrian Monk, obsessively lining up the spoons; David Creegan,
wearing his socks over his shoes; and Johnny Smith (Anthony Michael Hall) from
"The Dead Zone," having a psychic vision worthy of a Stephen King novel, which
is where that character began.
"It is interesting, though not
necessarily by design, that shows that have resonated with us as programmers -
and we hope with our audience - have been with imperfect heroes," said Jeff
Wachtel, executive vice president for original programming at USA. "It seems
that in a complicated world, we all understand more and more that the person who
runs into the building to save your life may not actually be the most
well-adjusted man or woman in the world. So the idea of heroes who have flaws,
we find that works for us."
"Every good show, I think, is a metaphor for
part of our experience," he continued. "There's a little bit of Monk in
everyone." As for "Touching Evil," the exploration of how Creegan, Branca and
their colleagues can immerse themselves in horrific crimes and still try to have
home lives, love lives - perhaps that is not so different from the balancing act
everyone has to negotiate between stress at work, domestic demands and personal
needs.
Mr. Wachtel acknowledged that committing to a crime show when
there were already so many good ones on the air gave the network pause. "When we
got 'Touching Evil,' it was, 'Should we make this one?' - because it's a cop
show," he said.
He and others figured that the way to keep it from
becoming just another cop show was to proceed atypically. "And so almost every
choice we made in shooting the pilot - from the director, Allen Hughes, to the
unknown star, Jeff Donovan - was an unorthodox decision," he said.
Mr.
Hughes and his twin brother, Albert, are known as film directors ("Dead
Presidents," "Menace II Society") and had little experience in television before
signing on as part of the producing team for "Touching Evil."
"We had
looked at some cop dramas before, and they just all turned out to be cop
dramas," said Allen Hughes, who ended up directing the pilot as well as being an
executive producer. Usually, Mr. Hughes said, he is drawn to the secondary
characters in the scripts he reads, but not this time. "This guy reminded me a
lot of myself," he said of Creegan. "He marches to the beat of his own drummer,
looking at things a different way."
"There was also the excitement of
wanting to bring something different to TV as far as an energy, a pacing, a
style of music that maybe goes to the subtext of the soul," Mr. Hughes
continued. "TV traditionally doesn't use those tools, as far as telling a story
and having patience and not cutting too fast and using actors to really go
through the emotions and giving them time to really develop these
emotions."
Mr. Wachtel said the payoff in choosing a film director was
evident from the opening moments of the pilot. In these ominous, alluring few
minutes, Creegan sustains the wound that underpins the whole series, and the
tone for "Touching Evil" is set.
"If you look at the first five minutes
of the pilot, you could write that scene: 'Cop drives up to house, cop walks
through house, cop gets shot in the head,' " Mr. Wachtel said. "That's basically
the only thing that happens. But Allen has this kind of filmic way to bring you
into that scene that's just not normal; it's not the regular way to do it. And
we're encouraging that."
END
March 23, 2004 - article courtesy of The New York Times
|
|
| |
|
|
THURSDAYS
