Post by -|E|- on Dec 8, 2005 14:06:06 GMT -5
This interview was done between Seasons 2 and 3. There is lots of good background info and tidbits worth reading, though... Enjoy! ~ E
From http://www.fxnetwork.com:
INTERROGATION ROOM: SHAWN RYAN (PART 1)
When Shawn Ryan wrote the pilot episode for The Shield, he never thought anyone would actually want to film it. A few Emmy Awards later, he's now in his third season as the executive producer and head writer of television's top cop-drama and one of the most cutting-edge shows on the tube. In the first installment of this three-part interview, Ryan shares the story of how The Shield got made and how Vic Mackey's Strike Team was born.
The Shield Fan Club: How did you develop the idea for The Shield?
Shawn Ryan: It came from a few different places. I had been working on a cop show called Nash Bridges for a few years—the Don Johnson, Cheech Marin show—and we would do police ride-alongs each year in San Francisco as research. But Nash Bridges was a very light, buddy-cop show, and I found it was difficult to use the things I was gathering on the ride-alongs. I'd go and see these very harrowing things, so I got all this material that I felt I couldn't really use for that show. So it was building up over a number of years. When I went to write the pilot for The Shield, I had all the stuff built up that I wanted to throw in there. On top of that, at the time I started writing it, the Rampart Scandal broke out here, which made the national news a little bit, but in Los Angeles it was huge. There were newspaper articles every day that basically documented what they called a "Crash Unit" team of cops who apparently had really terrorized this one neighborhood, but terrorized it into much lower crime.
FC: Which mirrors Vic Mackey's Strike Team in The Shield.
SR: I found it interesting that the [Rampart police] were accused of all these abuses but, at the same time, the everyday citizens in that district probably felt like their lives were a little bit safer. It was an interesting conundrum to me in terms of how far you'd want your cops to go in order to make things safer.
FC: Had you already scripted the Strike Team before the Rampart Scandal hit?
SR: I'd already been writing my script that involved characters that turned Dutch and Claudette and Danny and Julian, but when I started reading about the Rampart Scandal, I realized there was another kind of cop that I hadn't explored, which was people like Vic and Shane and Lem. So I developed the Strike Team and that, obviously, turned out to be the lifeblood of this show. In many ways, I'm very fortunate that that scandal broke when it did. That was really the origin of it.
FC: Did you start out looking to make the show as gritty as it turned out to be?
SR: I just wanted to write a cop show that I would want to watch. The ones I had already been interested in were either off the air, like Homicide, or had been on the air but I'd gotten a little bored of, like NYPD Blue or Law & Order. At the time, I thought, "What would a cop show on HBO look like if you didn't have to worry about language? If you didn't have to worry about making the cops heroes all the time?" So it was all those different things coming together around the same time that turned it into The Shield.
FC: Did the violence and language make it a tough sell to prospective networks?
SR: We really didn't try to sell it. I was originally hired to write a sitcom script by the people at Fox TV studios, because they had read a sitcom pilot that I'd written before.
FC: It's tough to picture The Shield with a laugh track.
SR: They read it and liked it, but they kind of acknowledged that no one would probably want to make it, because it was just so different than the things that were on TV. At the time, I had moved from Nash Bridges to Angel and had just been there a few months at that point, so I wasn't looking to even make a show. I was only trying to do a decent job at Angel. And the people at Fox TV didn't really seem like they were all that interested in trying to sell this thing, because I was supposed to write a sitcom, which they had some experience in, and I ended up writing a drama, which they didn't have experience in. They didn't have a lot of contacts in the drama world, and they weren't really budgeted to produce a drama. So nobody was really trying to sell it.
FC: Then how did The Shield get produced?
SR: My understanding is that Kevin Riley at FX had some project he was interested in and was looking for a writer. The people at Fox TV had a lot of dealings with him and mentioned that they had a writer, me, who had written a pilot that they liked. They sent him the script not as a thing that they were trying to sell, but as a sample of my work to see if he would be interested in hiring me to write the other thing. My understanding is that when he read the script, he said, "Hey, wait a minute. I want to make this." So it wasn't a case where we were schlepping all over town trying to sell it to different networks and getting the door slammed in our face. It was just a case where nobody assumed we'd be able to sell it anywhere. I was also not a prestigious writer that the networks were interested in making a show with at that point. I just thought it would be a script that, hopefully, people would like and would be a good sample that I could use to get my next job. That's really all I thought it would be. I was as surprised as anyone when it turned out FX wanted to make it.
FC: What do you expect from your writing staff now that the show is going into its third season?
SR: We talk a lot about the stories before they go off and write, so I'm heavily involved with the other writers. I'm not necessarily surprised in what happens in the stories but when I get pages back from writers, I want to be surprised in the execution. I want to read a line that I didn't expect that either makes me laugh or think of something in a way that I haven't thought of before. There's a difference between when you read pages that sing and you read pages that are sort of "blah." I'm lucky in that we have a lot of very talented writers who have been on the show a little while now and are experienced with it. They get a lot closer a lot quicker to what I want than they did in the beginning. In many ways, my life has become easier over the last couple years, because I'm able to share the burden with a lot of other talented people now.
FC: Have you read any episodes that just blew you away?
SR: Yeah, sure. It's a very complicated show to write, because there are so many stories going on. People, especially Vic, need to be in different places at once and have different things going on at once, so it's very difficult for a first draft—even the pages I write, we do three, four, five drafts of them before we ever put out a shooting script for everyone to read. It's not like a script comes in and "Bam! We're gonna shoot it!" We're not that good, I guess. But there are a lot of times that a script ends up being in a place that kind of amazes me.
FC: What's in store for Season Three?
SR: I'm pretty happy with Season Three. In many ways, the first season on the show was about David chasing after Vic. The second season, they formed this uneasy alliance and it was about Claudette trying to break up this alliance and discover what was going on. The third season, after they ripped off this Armenian money train and they're sitting on all this money, is more about the price of success and what happens when you get what you want—and the dangers of getting what you want. In this case, the danger to them isn't so much from David or Claudette or another cop; it sort of resides within their own team and how this money eats away at them from the inside. It's been really interesting to see the Strike Team turn on each other a little bit and yet still try to stay together as friends and as a family. It goes in some unexpected ways. It's pretty cool, I think.
INTERROGATION ROOM : SHAWN RYAN (PART 2)
There's a lot that goes into writing an episode of The Shield, but even when a script is finally finished, it simply opens a new can of worries for executive producer Shawn Ryan. Despite the long hours, deadlines and other stress associated with making The Shield, the show has allowed Ryan the opportunity to help a few of his acting friends (and his wife) gain the recognition they deserve while making cutting-edge television in a post-Super Bowl climate where controversy has come under siege.
The Shield Fan Club: What have been some of your favorite scripts?
Shawn Ryan: When I read the first draft of the script, if I feel like we're on the right track and we're gonna get there, then that makes me really happy. There have been a lot of scripts, usually four or five each season, that I look back on when we're done with them and say, "Wow, that turned out really great." You think they great, but that doesn't mean other people think their great, so rather than rushing to the world to say, "Gee, isn't that great!" you then worry about whether the actors going to play it right, or if the director going to get it right. Sometimes your favorite scripts don't turn out to be your favorite episodes. I never stop worrying. I never feel like it's done until the show is actually locked. I never assume that it's turning out well.
FC: Then which ones turned out to be your favorite episodes?
SR: I'm always preferential toward the pilot, the first episode. It's your first baby; it's how we started. From the first season, "Blowback" is the first episode where we really hit the wheelhouse of where the show was—when Vic and the guys stole some drugs from the Armenians and then Shane lost them when his car got stolen and they had to recover the car and drugs before David did. That was a great episode for us. "Cupid and Psycho," where Vic and Shane switched partners for the day had a good car chase at the beginning of the episode where there was s burnt body in the trunk. I really love that episode. "Two Days of Blood," where Shane went undercover into a cockfighting ring and Vic helped Gilroy find the guy that saw him do the hit-and-run. I thought that was a great episode. In season two, "Dead Soldiers," where Vic was hiding from Claudette his involvement in this whole drug thing and he finally caught up with Armadillo and burned his face on the grill, that was great episode. "Scar Tissue," where Shane and Lem ended up orchestrating the death of Armadillo in the cage that closed out that storyline was really wonderful for us. I really liked the season finale that year, "Dominoes Falling," where they ripped off the money train, yet were still solving this other crime. Those are just a few off the top of my head.
FC: Is there anything that FX says is too graphic or out-of-bounds for the show?
SR: FX doesn't come to us and say, "Here's what's out of bounds." I'm sure there are things that are out of bounds or, if we do certain kinds of things, there are subtler ways of showing it if we need to. What's great about the network is that they kind of let us write what we want to write. If there's a line or a scene or something they feel uncomfortable with, we talk about A) is it necessary? And if I can defend artistically why it's necessary, then B) how are we going to do it in a way that's going to be acceptable to us? FX is far more permissive than the major networks, but it's still not HBO or Showtime where you can say or do pretty much anything. I have an internal mechanism in my head that makes me pretty good at knowing what we can get away with and what we can't. And when we break the stories, I'm sort of working within that mechanism. It's rare that the network and I have any dispute about something. It usually happens a couple times each year, but it's not whether to do something at all; it usually deals with
how much of it we're going to show.
FC: Did you experience any fallout in the aftermath of the infamous Super Bowl half-time show?
SR: There is an atmosphere that is a little bit chilling and a little bit worrying. It hasn't necessarily filtered down to my show. We'd made a number of episodes before that happened, so we're sort of locked in. We feel like we're different. We feel like our show is marketed to adults, unlike the Super Bowl thing, where people didn't know that something like that might happen and where there were a lot of children watching. We're a show that, when people tune in, they know the subject material is going to be adult and challenging, and the show is marketed for adults. So we believe that the standards are different for us. At the same time, I don't think the network wants to make The Shield the test case for all of this. We don't want to be the martyr at the feet of Washington DC , but we're going to keep making the show that we make and putting it on the air.
FC: Though it's now hard to imagine anyone else playing the part, Michael Chiklis didn't seem like a natural choice for the role of Vic Mackey. How did he get the part?
SR: When we heard that he wanted to audition, there was some talk about where we should even let him come in and audition. From what we knew of his previous work, he seemed so clearly wrong for the role. At the time, we were having a pretty open casting call, and we sort of said, "Well, if somebody of his stature wants to audition, why wouldn't we at least let him come in and audition?" On top of that, his wife and my wife had known each other for a number of years. They had grown up in the same neighborhood as kids and had remained acquaintances into adulthood, and I thought it would be sort of weird if we wouldn't even let the guy audition, so we said, "Sure, come on in and read."
FC: What did you see in him at the audition that got him hired?
SR: We were really expecting nothing, but he came in looking different than the image we had of Michael in our heads. He was more fit and had his head shaved, and after his initial read we thought, "Wow, that was really good. But is that who we really want to go with?" It took some time to know it, so we continued to audition other people, but nobody ever really came close to the performance Michael gave, so we eventually brought him to the network. There were also other names that were being discussed, people that wouldn't necessarily audition but had some name factor, and we were also discussing those people [with FX]. But we told the network that there were other people who auditioned that were good and that they should see them before we just hand the role to somebody else. It was Michael and one other person that we really liked, and they both came and auditioned [again for the network], and Michael blew the other guy away. He was wonderful, and the network was just like, "Well, why are we talking about giving the role to someone else when somebody just came in here and WAS the guy." So that's how he ended up getting the role.
FC: How do you like having your wife playing Vic's wife on the show?
SR: It's fun. I spend a lot of hours on the job, and that keeps me away from my family a lot. She's been an actress for a long time, and when I first started dating her I saw her in some plays and thought she was very good and always thought she deserved a chance at something. When I got the chance to cast her in this, it was something I'd wanted to do, and it was nice in the sense that because she had known Michelle Chiklis, Michael's wife, for so long, she had also known Michael for nearly a decade. I thought it was helpful to have that connection, two people who had known each other for a while playing a husband and wife who had been married for a long time. They're sort of a good physical match, and it's nice in the sense that on the days when I'm working 12-13 hours and we have a reading, she comes in for the reading to do her role and I get to see her for an hour during the day. There are a lot of actors out here who I think are really talented but never get the chance that they should. She's one.
FC: You've also helped a couple of friends get auditions and they wound up on the show.
SR: Jay Karnes, who plays Dutch, has been a good friend of mine for about 14 or 15 years now. He's a wonderful Shakespearean actor, and he really had trouble breaking into TV. He had some guest-star roles but never got a chance to do anything big, and I always thought he was an extremely talented guy. I brought him in to audition for The Shield and the network wanted to hire him. The guy who plays Ronnie on the show, Dave Snell, is a friend of mine who was knocking about a bit who I thought was really good. When you get a show like this, you get an opportunity to use people that you think are good but maybe have gone a little undiscovered. It's been great for our show to have all of them.
INTERROGATION ROOM : SHAWN RYAN (PART 3)
The Shield isn't exactly the sort of television show police departments would use as training videos, but that hasn't stopped actual police officers from tuning in. Then again, even Shawn Ryan (the creator, executive producer and head writer of The Shield) doesn't really approve of the tactics Vic Mackey uses in bringing order to the streets of the Farmington District.
The Shield Fan Club: How have actual police responded to the show?
Shawn Ryan: I don't really meet police. Unlike Michael [Chiklis], I'm not really recognizable on the street, so it's not like police go out of their way to find me. The response I hear back from our actors on the show is that police officers really love the show. In some ways, I think there's a wish-fulfillment factor to them—"Boy if I didn't have all this red tape to go through and all these rules, I could actually get things done." I think most cops wouldn't necessarily engage in the illegal activities Vic does, but I think they like the shortcuts he takes at times to achieve a good result. It seems like the lower on the force they are, the more they like the show. Here in Los Angeles , the people in the upper echelons of the police department aren't thrilled that we're airing a show that doesn't show Los Angeles cops in the best of light all the time. They have an image that they would like to project, and we're showing something else. But all the uniform cops and the detectives in the city seem to love the show. That's what I hear back from our actors who do get stopped on the street a lot by these cops.
FC: Do you like Vic or does the idea of a cop like him scare you?
SR: We've always tried to show aspects of Vic that you like, and there are certain times you would want Vic on your side. But we've also tried to create those situations where you wouldn't like him. What's interesting to us is when we have a series of scenes that really sort of make you like Vic and root for Vic, and then all of a sudden he does something that you can't accept—and then, can we get you back later in the show? He's sort of like the black wolf which, 90 percent of the time he's doing things that you really like and you really love the guy, but 10 percent of the time you're just really horrified about what he's doing. There are a lot of aspects of Vic that I like. I'm not sure I like "the whole person" because there are things that he does that I just deem socially unacceptable, but he's a flawed character [with] a lot to like.
FC: Who had the idea to cast Carl Weathers as Vic's former partner?
SR: He was just an actor who auditioned. Generally, we strive to use guest actors that aren't very recognizable. We've never engaged in any sort of stunt casting to bring in some famous name. We avoid doing that. But when we were looking for Vic's former partner—somebody who mentored him—Vic is such a powerful character, he's so strong, we needed to get somebody who it seemed like, 15 years ago, Vic would have really looked up to and learned from. To find an actor who could project that was very difficult. Carl came in and, from his whole Rocky experience, was a little bit more recognizable than I probably would have liked, yet his audition was really great, and we could all see Vic looking up to this guy, which was very important. Essentially, he won the role as an actor despite the fact that he was probably a little bit more recognizable than I was comfortable with.
FC: What did winning Emmy Awards do for the show?
SR: It's hard to say what it did in the long run, but it sure made us pretty happy. You work very hard on the show and, a lot of times, you work isolated from the people who watch it and from the other people in the industry. We were such longshots being on FX, we really didn't think anything would happen. So when that first year came and Michael was nominated for acting and I was nominated for writing and Clark Johnson was nominated for directing, it was kind of like, "Oh my god." It certainly gave the show some attention and gave the show some cachet. The network has always let us tell the kind stories we wanted to tell, but they've also always made it clear that they could defend challenging material if the quality of the show was high, but they wouldn't be able defend it if the quality was low, so it was acknowledgement that we had made a high-quality show and has allowed us to continue telling the stories we wanted to tell. At the end of the day, the awards mean everything and they mean nothing. It was wonderful, but all that really matters is the final product you put out. There are years and situations where I feel we're robbed of awards or robbed of nominations and, in many ways, at times, I think we've been over-praised.
FC: How far in advance do you have the series planned out?
SR: Not that far. There are places that we know we want to go. At the beginning of this year, myself and the other writers sat down and we mapped out a lot of what's in the current season, and there were things that we wanted to hit along the way that we ended up hitting. But a lot of times, I find that it takes a lot of great ideas to make one script in our show, and there's no way you can sit down for two weeks and come up with enough great ideas to fill a full season or two full seasons of work. For us, we come up with where we want to go in general, signposts we want to hit along the way, but then we just take it script by script.
FC: How long do you work on each script?
SR: We work on a script for three or four weeks and hopefully come up with enough ideas in that period to make the script good. If you're too planned out, then you're not leaving yourself room to surprise yourself along the way. It takes us a whole year to come up with enough good ideas to make this show, so we don't lock ourselves in with what the whole season will be just in the first two weeks coming up. It makes us sort of live by the edge of our seat a little bit. When you're putting out these scripts and now you've got to finish them in the next couple of days and there's still a story that's not working, I find that puts me right into the mindset of Vic. Vic's job, at times, is often exactly like that. We sort of work under pressure on the scripts in the same way that Vic works under pressure on the job, and I actually do think it translates in a very good way when the scripts are written a little bit last minute, a little bit with a deadline at stake, that oftentimes translates into the writing in a way that if we took our own sweet time and had them done six months ahead of time, I don't think they'd be as good.
FC: Do you have any plans to direct an episode?
SR: I do not, and I don't think I will. I'm already working far too hard as it is, and directing is a lot of work. I think I'd do an okay job, but there are so many great directors who want to work on our show that I know would do a great job, it's kind of unnecessary for me to do it. I spend a lot of time talking to directors, telling them what I want, and then I spend a lot of time in the editing room getting it to be the way that I want. Between those two things, I really feel like I've got a lot of control over how the final episode looks. I'm not directing, but I feel like I'm getting the vision that I want across. As long as I feel like that, there's no need to actually be the person on the set saying, "Action!" I tend to really enjoy focusing on the editing and writing.
From http://www.fxnetwork.com:
INTERROGATION ROOM: SHAWN RYAN (PART 1)
When Shawn Ryan wrote the pilot episode for The Shield, he never thought anyone would actually want to film it. A few Emmy Awards later, he's now in his third season as the executive producer and head writer of television's top cop-drama and one of the most cutting-edge shows on the tube. In the first installment of this three-part interview, Ryan shares the story of how The Shield got made and how Vic Mackey's Strike Team was born.
The Shield Fan Club: How did you develop the idea for The Shield?
Shawn Ryan: It came from a few different places. I had been working on a cop show called Nash Bridges for a few years—the Don Johnson, Cheech Marin show—and we would do police ride-alongs each year in San Francisco as research. But Nash Bridges was a very light, buddy-cop show, and I found it was difficult to use the things I was gathering on the ride-alongs. I'd go and see these very harrowing things, so I got all this material that I felt I couldn't really use for that show. So it was building up over a number of years. When I went to write the pilot for The Shield, I had all the stuff built up that I wanted to throw in there. On top of that, at the time I started writing it, the Rampart Scandal broke out here, which made the national news a little bit, but in Los Angeles it was huge. There were newspaper articles every day that basically documented what they called a "Crash Unit" team of cops who apparently had really terrorized this one neighborhood, but terrorized it into much lower crime.
FC: Which mirrors Vic Mackey's Strike Team in The Shield.
SR: I found it interesting that the [Rampart police] were accused of all these abuses but, at the same time, the everyday citizens in that district probably felt like their lives were a little bit safer. It was an interesting conundrum to me in terms of how far you'd want your cops to go in order to make things safer.
FC: Had you already scripted the Strike Team before the Rampart Scandal hit?
SR: I'd already been writing my script that involved characters that turned Dutch and Claudette and Danny and Julian, but when I started reading about the Rampart Scandal, I realized there was another kind of cop that I hadn't explored, which was people like Vic and Shane and Lem. So I developed the Strike Team and that, obviously, turned out to be the lifeblood of this show. In many ways, I'm very fortunate that that scandal broke when it did. That was really the origin of it.
FC: Did you start out looking to make the show as gritty as it turned out to be?
SR: I just wanted to write a cop show that I would want to watch. The ones I had already been interested in were either off the air, like Homicide, or had been on the air but I'd gotten a little bored of, like NYPD Blue or Law & Order. At the time, I thought, "What would a cop show on HBO look like if you didn't have to worry about language? If you didn't have to worry about making the cops heroes all the time?" So it was all those different things coming together around the same time that turned it into The Shield.
FC: Did the violence and language make it a tough sell to prospective networks?
SR: We really didn't try to sell it. I was originally hired to write a sitcom script by the people at Fox TV studios, because they had read a sitcom pilot that I'd written before.
FC: It's tough to picture The Shield with a laugh track.
SR: They read it and liked it, but they kind of acknowledged that no one would probably want to make it, because it was just so different than the things that were on TV. At the time, I had moved from Nash Bridges to Angel and had just been there a few months at that point, so I wasn't looking to even make a show. I was only trying to do a decent job at Angel. And the people at Fox TV didn't really seem like they were all that interested in trying to sell this thing, because I was supposed to write a sitcom, which they had some experience in, and I ended up writing a drama, which they didn't have experience in. They didn't have a lot of contacts in the drama world, and they weren't really budgeted to produce a drama. So nobody was really trying to sell it.
FC: Then how did The Shield get produced?
SR: My understanding is that Kevin Riley at FX had some project he was interested in and was looking for a writer. The people at Fox TV had a lot of dealings with him and mentioned that they had a writer, me, who had written a pilot that they liked. They sent him the script not as a thing that they were trying to sell, but as a sample of my work to see if he would be interested in hiring me to write the other thing. My understanding is that when he read the script, he said, "Hey, wait a minute. I want to make this." So it wasn't a case where we were schlepping all over town trying to sell it to different networks and getting the door slammed in our face. It was just a case where nobody assumed we'd be able to sell it anywhere. I was also not a prestigious writer that the networks were interested in making a show with at that point. I just thought it would be a script that, hopefully, people would like and would be a good sample that I could use to get my next job. That's really all I thought it would be. I was as surprised as anyone when it turned out FX wanted to make it.
FC: What do you expect from your writing staff now that the show is going into its third season?
SR: We talk a lot about the stories before they go off and write, so I'm heavily involved with the other writers. I'm not necessarily surprised in what happens in the stories but when I get pages back from writers, I want to be surprised in the execution. I want to read a line that I didn't expect that either makes me laugh or think of something in a way that I haven't thought of before. There's a difference between when you read pages that sing and you read pages that are sort of "blah." I'm lucky in that we have a lot of very talented writers who have been on the show a little while now and are experienced with it. They get a lot closer a lot quicker to what I want than they did in the beginning. In many ways, my life has become easier over the last couple years, because I'm able to share the burden with a lot of other talented people now.
FC: Have you read any episodes that just blew you away?
SR: Yeah, sure. It's a very complicated show to write, because there are so many stories going on. People, especially Vic, need to be in different places at once and have different things going on at once, so it's very difficult for a first draft—even the pages I write, we do three, four, five drafts of them before we ever put out a shooting script for everyone to read. It's not like a script comes in and "Bam! We're gonna shoot it!" We're not that good, I guess. But there are a lot of times that a script ends up being in a place that kind of amazes me.
FC: What's in store for Season Three?
SR: I'm pretty happy with Season Three. In many ways, the first season on the show was about David chasing after Vic. The second season, they formed this uneasy alliance and it was about Claudette trying to break up this alliance and discover what was going on. The third season, after they ripped off this Armenian money train and they're sitting on all this money, is more about the price of success and what happens when you get what you want—and the dangers of getting what you want. In this case, the danger to them isn't so much from David or Claudette or another cop; it sort of resides within their own team and how this money eats away at them from the inside. It's been really interesting to see the Strike Team turn on each other a little bit and yet still try to stay together as friends and as a family. It goes in some unexpected ways. It's pretty cool, I think.
INTERROGATION ROOM : SHAWN RYAN (PART 2)
There's a lot that goes into writing an episode of The Shield, but even when a script is finally finished, it simply opens a new can of worries for executive producer Shawn Ryan. Despite the long hours, deadlines and other stress associated with making The Shield, the show has allowed Ryan the opportunity to help a few of his acting friends (and his wife) gain the recognition they deserve while making cutting-edge television in a post-Super Bowl climate where controversy has come under siege.
The Shield Fan Club: What have been some of your favorite scripts?
Shawn Ryan: When I read the first draft of the script, if I feel like we're on the right track and we're gonna get there, then that makes me really happy. There have been a lot of scripts, usually four or five each season, that I look back on when we're done with them and say, "Wow, that turned out really great." You think they great, but that doesn't mean other people think their great, so rather than rushing to the world to say, "Gee, isn't that great!" you then worry about whether the actors going to play it right, or if the director going to get it right. Sometimes your favorite scripts don't turn out to be your favorite episodes. I never stop worrying. I never feel like it's done until the show is actually locked. I never assume that it's turning out well.
FC: Then which ones turned out to be your favorite episodes?
SR: I'm always preferential toward the pilot, the first episode. It's your first baby; it's how we started. From the first season, "Blowback" is the first episode where we really hit the wheelhouse of where the show was—when Vic and the guys stole some drugs from the Armenians and then Shane lost them when his car got stolen and they had to recover the car and drugs before David did. That was a great episode for us. "Cupid and Psycho," where Vic and Shane switched partners for the day had a good car chase at the beginning of the episode where there was s burnt body in the trunk. I really love that episode. "Two Days of Blood," where Shane went undercover into a cockfighting ring and Vic helped Gilroy find the guy that saw him do the hit-and-run. I thought that was a great episode. In season two, "Dead Soldiers," where Vic was hiding from Claudette his involvement in this whole drug thing and he finally caught up with Armadillo and burned his face on the grill, that was great episode. "Scar Tissue," where Shane and Lem ended up orchestrating the death of Armadillo in the cage that closed out that storyline was really wonderful for us. I really liked the season finale that year, "Dominoes Falling," where they ripped off the money train, yet were still solving this other crime. Those are just a few off the top of my head.
FC: Is there anything that FX says is too graphic or out-of-bounds for the show?
SR: FX doesn't come to us and say, "Here's what's out of bounds." I'm sure there are things that are out of bounds or, if we do certain kinds of things, there are subtler ways of showing it if we need to. What's great about the network is that they kind of let us write what we want to write. If there's a line or a scene or something they feel uncomfortable with, we talk about A) is it necessary? And if I can defend artistically why it's necessary, then B) how are we going to do it in a way that's going to be acceptable to us? FX is far more permissive than the major networks, but it's still not HBO or Showtime where you can say or do pretty much anything. I have an internal mechanism in my head that makes me pretty good at knowing what we can get away with and what we can't. And when we break the stories, I'm sort of working within that mechanism. It's rare that the network and I have any dispute about something. It usually happens a couple times each year, but it's not whether to do something at all; it usually deals with
how much of it we're going to show.
FC: Did you experience any fallout in the aftermath of the infamous Super Bowl half-time show?
SR: There is an atmosphere that is a little bit chilling and a little bit worrying. It hasn't necessarily filtered down to my show. We'd made a number of episodes before that happened, so we're sort of locked in. We feel like we're different. We feel like our show is marketed to adults, unlike the Super Bowl thing, where people didn't know that something like that might happen and where there were a lot of children watching. We're a show that, when people tune in, they know the subject material is going to be adult and challenging, and the show is marketed for adults. So we believe that the standards are different for us. At the same time, I don't think the network wants to make The Shield the test case for all of this. We don't want to be the martyr at the feet of Washington DC , but we're going to keep making the show that we make and putting it on the air.
FC: Though it's now hard to imagine anyone else playing the part, Michael Chiklis didn't seem like a natural choice for the role of Vic Mackey. How did he get the part?
SR: When we heard that he wanted to audition, there was some talk about where we should even let him come in and audition. From what we knew of his previous work, he seemed so clearly wrong for the role. At the time, we were having a pretty open casting call, and we sort of said, "Well, if somebody of his stature wants to audition, why wouldn't we at least let him come in and audition?" On top of that, his wife and my wife had known each other for a number of years. They had grown up in the same neighborhood as kids and had remained acquaintances into adulthood, and I thought it would be sort of weird if we wouldn't even let the guy audition, so we said, "Sure, come on in and read."
FC: What did you see in him at the audition that got him hired?
SR: We were really expecting nothing, but he came in looking different than the image we had of Michael in our heads. He was more fit and had his head shaved, and after his initial read we thought, "Wow, that was really good. But is that who we really want to go with?" It took some time to know it, so we continued to audition other people, but nobody ever really came close to the performance Michael gave, so we eventually brought him to the network. There were also other names that were being discussed, people that wouldn't necessarily audition but had some name factor, and we were also discussing those people [with FX]. But we told the network that there were other people who auditioned that were good and that they should see them before we just hand the role to somebody else. It was Michael and one other person that we really liked, and they both came and auditioned [again for the network], and Michael blew the other guy away. He was wonderful, and the network was just like, "Well, why are we talking about giving the role to someone else when somebody just came in here and WAS the guy." So that's how he ended up getting the role.
FC: How do you like having your wife playing Vic's wife on the show?
SR: It's fun. I spend a lot of hours on the job, and that keeps me away from my family a lot. She's been an actress for a long time, and when I first started dating her I saw her in some plays and thought she was very good and always thought she deserved a chance at something. When I got the chance to cast her in this, it was something I'd wanted to do, and it was nice in the sense that because she had known Michelle Chiklis, Michael's wife, for so long, she had also known Michael for nearly a decade. I thought it was helpful to have that connection, two people who had known each other for a while playing a husband and wife who had been married for a long time. They're sort of a good physical match, and it's nice in the sense that on the days when I'm working 12-13 hours and we have a reading, she comes in for the reading to do her role and I get to see her for an hour during the day. There are a lot of actors out here who I think are really talented but never get the chance that they should. She's one.
FC: You've also helped a couple of friends get auditions and they wound up on the show.
SR: Jay Karnes, who plays Dutch, has been a good friend of mine for about 14 or 15 years now. He's a wonderful Shakespearean actor, and he really had trouble breaking into TV. He had some guest-star roles but never got a chance to do anything big, and I always thought he was an extremely talented guy. I brought him in to audition for The Shield and the network wanted to hire him. The guy who plays Ronnie on the show, Dave Snell, is a friend of mine who was knocking about a bit who I thought was really good. When you get a show like this, you get an opportunity to use people that you think are good but maybe have gone a little undiscovered. It's been great for our show to have all of them.
INTERROGATION ROOM : SHAWN RYAN (PART 3)
The Shield isn't exactly the sort of television show police departments would use as training videos, but that hasn't stopped actual police officers from tuning in. Then again, even Shawn Ryan (the creator, executive producer and head writer of The Shield) doesn't really approve of the tactics Vic Mackey uses in bringing order to the streets of the Farmington District.
The Shield Fan Club: How have actual police responded to the show?
Shawn Ryan: I don't really meet police. Unlike Michael [Chiklis], I'm not really recognizable on the street, so it's not like police go out of their way to find me. The response I hear back from our actors on the show is that police officers really love the show. In some ways, I think there's a wish-fulfillment factor to them—"Boy if I didn't have all this red tape to go through and all these rules, I could actually get things done." I think most cops wouldn't necessarily engage in the illegal activities Vic does, but I think they like the shortcuts he takes at times to achieve a good result. It seems like the lower on the force they are, the more they like the show. Here in Los Angeles , the people in the upper echelons of the police department aren't thrilled that we're airing a show that doesn't show Los Angeles cops in the best of light all the time. They have an image that they would like to project, and we're showing something else. But all the uniform cops and the detectives in the city seem to love the show. That's what I hear back from our actors who do get stopped on the street a lot by these cops.
FC: Do you like Vic or does the idea of a cop like him scare you?
SR: We've always tried to show aspects of Vic that you like, and there are certain times you would want Vic on your side. But we've also tried to create those situations where you wouldn't like him. What's interesting to us is when we have a series of scenes that really sort of make you like Vic and root for Vic, and then all of a sudden he does something that you can't accept—and then, can we get you back later in the show? He's sort of like the black wolf which, 90 percent of the time he's doing things that you really like and you really love the guy, but 10 percent of the time you're just really horrified about what he's doing. There are a lot of aspects of Vic that I like. I'm not sure I like "the whole person" because there are things that he does that I just deem socially unacceptable, but he's a flawed character [with] a lot to like.
FC: Who had the idea to cast Carl Weathers as Vic's former partner?
SR: He was just an actor who auditioned. Generally, we strive to use guest actors that aren't very recognizable. We've never engaged in any sort of stunt casting to bring in some famous name. We avoid doing that. But when we were looking for Vic's former partner—somebody who mentored him—Vic is such a powerful character, he's so strong, we needed to get somebody who it seemed like, 15 years ago, Vic would have really looked up to and learned from. To find an actor who could project that was very difficult. Carl came in and, from his whole Rocky experience, was a little bit more recognizable than I probably would have liked, yet his audition was really great, and we could all see Vic looking up to this guy, which was very important. Essentially, he won the role as an actor despite the fact that he was probably a little bit more recognizable than I was comfortable with.
FC: What did winning Emmy Awards do for the show?
SR: It's hard to say what it did in the long run, but it sure made us pretty happy. You work very hard on the show and, a lot of times, you work isolated from the people who watch it and from the other people in the industry. We were such longshots being on FX, we really didn't think anything would happen. So when that first year came and Michael was nominated for acting and I was nominated for writing and Clark Johnson was nominated for directing, it was kind of like, "Oh my god." It certainly gave the show some attention and gave the show some cachet. The network has always let us tell the kind stories we wanted to tell, but they've also always made it clear that they could defend challenging material if the quality of the show was high, but they wouldn't be able defend it if the quality was low, so it was acknowledgement that we had made a high-quality show and has allowed us to continue telling the stories we wanted to tell. At the end of the day, the awards mean everything and they mean nothing. It was wonderful, but all that really matters is the final product you put out. There are years and situations where I feel we're robbed of awards or robbed of nominations and, in many ways, at times, I think we've been over-praised.
FC: How far in advance do you have the series planned out?
SR: Not that far. There are places that we know we want to go. At the beginning of this year, myself and the other writers sat down and we mapped out a lot of what's in the current season, and there were things that we wanted to hit along the way that we ended up hitting. But a lot of times, I find that it takes a lot of great ideas to make one script in our show, and there's no way you can sit down for two weeks and come up with enough great ideas to fill a full season or two full seasons of work. For us, we come up with where we want to go in general, signposts we want to hit along the way, but then we just take it script by script.
FC: How long do you work on each script?
SR: We work on a script for three or four weeks and hopefully come up with enough ideas in that period to make the script good. If you're too planned out, then you're not leaving yourself room to surprise yourself along the way. It takes us a whole year to come up with enough good ideas to make this show, so we don't lock ourselves in with what the whole season will be just in the first two weeks coming up. It makes us sort of live by the edge of our seat a little bit. When you're putting out these scripts and now you've got to finish them in the next couple of days and there's still a story that's not working, I find that puts me right into the mindset of Vic. Vic's job, at times, is often exactly like that. We sort of work under pressure on the scripts in the same way that Vic works under pressure on the job, and I actually do think it translates in a very good way when the scripts are written a little bit last minute, a little bit with a deadline at stake, that oftentimes translates into the writing in a way that if we took our own sweet time and had them done six months ahead of time, I don't think they'd be as good.
FC: Do you have any plans to direct an episode?
SR: I do not, and I don't think I will. I'm already working far too hard as it is, and directing is a lot of work. I think I'd do an okay job, but there are so many great directors who want to work on our show that I know would do a great job, it's kind of unnecessary for me to do it. I spend a lot of time talking to directors, telling them what I want, and then I spend a lot of time in the editing room getting it to be the way that I want. Between those two things, I really feel like I've got a lot of control over how the final episode looks. I'm not directing, but I feel like I'm getting the vision that I want across. As long as I feel like that, there's no need to actually be the person on the set saying, "Action!" I tend to really enjoy focusing on the editing and writing.