Author: Craig Tomashoff

September 30, 2016 10:00am PT by Craig Tomashoff

Joe Lederer/NBC

“Timeless”

With ‘Timeless,’ ‘Time After Time,’ ‘Frequency’ and ‘Making History’ due this season, THR examines why time travel has always been a hot genre on the small screen.

When you think about it, time is a pretty amazing concept. It can heal all wounds before running out. It’s also in our hands and on our side, sometimes even in a bottle. Meanwhile, it’s been known to warp just as some of us strive to get ahead of it. Perhaps most impressive of all, though, time has become one of TV’s most trusted tropes.

Time travel has been a primetime plot staple for decades, from The Time Tunnel to Doctor Who to Quantum Leap to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. These days, it’s also a central theme in several critically acclaimed shows on broadcast, basic and premium cable including The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Outlander, Once Upon a Time and 12 Monkeys. Meanwhile, it’s become one of the hottest trends in new network series, with NBC’s Timeless, ABC’s Time After Time, The CW’s Frequency and Fox’s Making History set to debut this season.

“I’ve always been interested in making a time travel show because it uniquely lends itself to the network format,” Timeless creator Eric Kripke says. “So much of coming up with a good network series is creating a really smart, clean, humming engine. And the idea of going to a different historical period each week and having an action story set against iconic moments of history, is just that.”

Adds fellow Timeless executive producer Shawn Ryan, “I haven’t done a genre show before, but I loved movies like Back to the Future and shows like Quantum Leap. So when I met with Eric and talked about this idea, I loved the adventurous and filmic quality of a time travel show.”

Both admit to being history buffs, which is why Kripke says the show is a tribute to one his history teachers — Bill Hill — who inspired his interest in exploring important events from the past. Timless’ second episode even goes back to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, a topic Hill was particularly obsessed by.

The NBC drama follows a time-honored time-travel tradition, where a team of scientists and historians discover interrupting the past will mess up the future. However, every series seems to develop its own concept of time travel In. ABC’s Time After Time, from exec producer Kevin Williamson,is based on the 1979 movie of the same name, about writer H.G. Wells’ trip to modern times to stop Jack the Ripper. The Flash and Legends make time travel seem less romantic by focusing on the personal tribulations it can cause. Meanwhile, Frequency — based on the feature film of the same name — is more like a cop show that unfolds in two different time periods simultaneously.

In real life, our odds of moving from one historical period to another are as astronomical as, say, finding Al Sharpton waiving a “Make America Great Again” sign at a Trump rally. Which is precisely why series that involve time travel have always been so popular.  They give viewers the chance to, according to Outlander executive producer Ron Moore, “go to another era and lose yourself in that world. One of the great puzzles you debate in the writers’ room is the idea of alternate histories, about what it might be like to be stuck in the past or the future.”

That’s exactly what happens to the heroine of Moore’s Starz drama, Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe). She’s a World War II nurse in England who suddenly finds herself transported to Scotland in 1743. Audiences love “the fantasy of being in the past,” says Moore, but he strives to make sure that “time travel is a conceit and a catalyst, but not so much ‘I have to save the world’.”

Think of time travel shows as the ultimate expression of the phrase “If I knew then what I know now… .” There’s a tremendous amount of comfort in nostalgia and nothing caters to that sentiment more than setting your series in a time-flexible universe. Says Flash EP Aaron Helbing, “we all have that desire for what was. We always have experiences like driving down the street and hearing a song takes you back to an earlier time. People look backwards all the time because our present is defined by our past.”

For Time After Time executive producer Williamson, his show and the others appeal to viewers’ unrequited desire to “create a new identity, to go back and fix something that went wrong in your life, to meet someone you lost.” Time travel is the combination of both wistfulness and science, which can be a tricky thing to pull off in less than 60 minutes every week. Too much of one or the other and the show becomes either too sappy or too confusing.

You could take the Terminator approach of alternate timelines colliding. Or there’s the Back to the Future notion, where things happen in the past and change the present.  According to Helbing, the science of time traveling “has to be palatable and yet emotionally satisfying to the audience. Luckily, our characters are scientists so that makes it easier to explain how time travel works.”

Still, says Moore, “there are ways to play it but you have to ground the audience in which theory you’re using right away. Lock into the rules so they can relax. You don’t want them spending a lot of time trying to figure out those rules.”

“We put in just enough science to make sense because we’re talking about H.G. Wells as our main character,” Williamson says. “And we try to do it in a fun way because we don’t want to be about the science of time travel. We’re much more of a romantic show, so we’re dealing with fate and destiny.”

In other words, make sure more time is spent exploring the lives of the travelers and less is expended on the travel itself. That’s the operative philosophy behind Frequency, inspired by the 2000 Dennis Quaid film about a ham radio operator who ends up contacting the past to try to save his dad’s life. The series uses the same device to connect a present-day New York cop with her father, a fellow officer whose life is unfolding simultaneously but 20 years earlier.

“We’re attempting something we haven’t quite seen before, people communicating across time instead of using a ghost or traveling back,” says executive producer Jeremy Carver. “We’re coming from an un-fun place – the death of a parent – but this represents an opportunity for a second chance to say something to someone that you didn’t say before. Even though we’re a genre show, the goal is to make it feel grounded and authentic because of the emotional connection between father and child.”

When there’s a good balance between emotion and fantasy, a time travel show can become, well, timeless. That’s what helped Quantum Leap, about Dr. Sam Beckett’s (Scott Bakula) never-ending journey from one time to another, become the gold standard for the genre. Bakula says that even 23 years after the show was canceled, he regularly hears from people around the world who say the show was the one series that brought all generations of their families together.

“The enduring part is the consistency of the idea, which is different from most shows and movies and time travel,” he says. “I jumped into other people’s lives, experiencing what they were from the inside. And fans could appreciate our optimism. When times are not necessarily great around the planet, it’s nice to have time travel as escapism. Which is why there’s something cyclical about these kind of shows.”

When done right, they can also be more educational than other genre series. Which is why ultimately, Kripke and Ryan both hope Timeless will promote the study of history in the same CSI did for science. That’s why NBC is having a historian blog about the facts behind every episode.

“I hope this creates a real interest about history,” explains Ryan. “I would love nothing more than for young people watch and the study of history becomes something they want to dig deeper into. We’re definitely trying to entertain people here but who says you can’t be entertained and educated at the same time?”

Adds Kripke, “CSI got people into science but nobody ever considered it a science show. So it would be great to have people interested in history even though we’re not a show about history. My secret hope? That high school and junior high teachers will show Timeless episodes to demonstrate to them that history is a very exciting world.”

Timeless debuts Monday, Oct. 3 at 10 p.m. on NBC; Frequency is set for Wednesday, Oct. 5 at 9 p.m. on The CW; while ABC’s Time After Time and Fox’s Making History are both set for dates to be determined come midseason.

Making History Time After Time Frequency

Craig Tomashoff

THRnews@thr.com

September 20, 2016 8:30am PT by Craig Tomashoff

David M. Russell/CBS

The actor reveals why it was time to say goodbye to Tony DiNozzo and ‘NCIS’ after 13 seasons.

At first glance, it’s easy to mistake Michael Weatherly for, say, the high school football team captain whose table you would never dare to sit at during lunch. He’s got the good looks. His charm is undeniable. He’s amazingly successful. As it turns out, though, Weatherly is actually more like the kid who not only lets you sit at his table, but also shares his egg salad sandwich with you and offers to introduce you to all the cute seniors.

“My first impression upon meeting was, ‘Gosh, he’s handsome!” Mark Goffman, executive producer on Weatherly’s new CBS series Bull, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I can see how that might be off-putting to some people, but he’s so likeable with this amazing intelligence and wit about him. He’s somebody who can be very brutally honest with you, but he does it all in a way that’s incredibly endearing.”

Given that, it’s no surprise that the actor’s first post-NCIS gig is playing a likable but brutally honest jury consultant named Dr. Jason Bull. “There’s a little bit of P.T. Barnum in Bull, which I love because that is always interesting,” explains the 48-year-old actor. “Bull’s a salesman trying to run his business, and sometimes when you’re selling something there has to be a certain degree of misdirection. If you show that in a non-cynical way, I think that’s very appealing.”

Leaving NCIS after 13 seasons wasn’t easy, but Weatherly admits that he’d started considering the move two years ago because of “several things.” In addition to having a young family — he has a four-year-old daughter, Olivia, and a two-year-old son, Liam, with wife Bojana Jankovic — Weatherly explains, “I was financially stable. I was in my mid-40s and looking at the world around me realizing I felt a yearning creatively. It was clearly time to do whatever comes next, and I had the support of everyone around me.” He started to develop a series based on a book he’d optioned, but nothing seemed to grab him. He was waiting for “a very specific thing I wanted to do next and unless something that fit that description popped up, I wasn’t going to make a change.”

At first, he wasn’t sure that even Bull fit that bill. Then CBS execs explained that this show based on the pre-Oprah career of Dr. Phil McGraw was also co-created by Paul Attanasio (House, Homicide: Life on the Street), directed by Rodrigo Garcia (In Treatment) and exec produced by Steven Spielberg. And the deal was done.

As much as he enjoyed playing charming rogue Anthony DiNozzo for 305 NCIS episodes, Bull felt like someone he was born to be from the first day he stepped on the show’s New York set. It didn’t hurt that, according to Weatherly, both DiNozzo and Bull have plenty in common. 

“They’re both fascinated by human behavior,” he says. “And Bull is more of a humanist but not a sucker, a realist but never cynical.”

“Bull is someone whose M.O. is to read people, to understand why they do what they do,” adds Goffman. “That means he might seem passive at times, but Michael has so much going on inside his head, he makes that interesting. He can be the alpha, the largest personality in the room but also be quiet and connect with people on an individual level. That’s a rare skill.”

Goffman praises Weatherly for “working hard to make Bull into his own character.” That’s a tough task considering that the jury consultant is modeled after someone who has had a well-established public persona ever since his consulting firm worked with Oprah Winfrey after she was sued by a group of Texas beef ranchers.

“It’s easy to dismiss the show by saying it’s just about a talk show host named Dr. Phil,” Weatherly says. “But it’s not just the cattle case that is interesting. He was also involved in a whole world of litigation that required his trial science.”

He’s so intrigued by fictional Phil that he’s been known to keep Goffman on the phone for hours on weekends, talking over his ideas for the direction of the series. He’s also fond of hanging out with the writers, letting them know “what I’m enthusiastic about in my own life.” That has led to future episodes getting more personal, like one where ex-subway busker Weatherly is given a guitar and another where he gets the chance to indulge his lifelong passion for playing baseball.

It’s not just with what Weatherly does on-camera that has impressed Goffman. It’s also what he does when the cameras stop rolling. From day one, he says Weatherly has been “the ideal number one person to have on your call sheet, someone who really knows how to lead the troops and keep everyone’s energy up.”

He learned the importance of being a leader after watching ex-NCIS co-star Mark Harmon for more than a dozen years.

“I learned great things from Mark about how to be a leader, but he and I are very different people,” explains Weatherly. “I have this need to constantly entertain and use humor in every situation. So I move toward comedy a lot. Mark is more straight — the stoic captain — and he approaches things from a different angle than I do. My big takeaway from working with him is that this can be a hard job and everyone’s going to look at you to see if you’re tired. If you are, then they will be too. That happened the other day, when I was feeling exhausted. So I ended up doing a five-minute riff on being exhausted.”

While moving on from NCIS was important creatively for him, though, Weatherly wanted to first make sure DiNozzo fans understood his decision. The actor is proud to report that his move was “embraced by everyone with open arms.” He stays in regular contact with his former co-workers, and even spent time during the summer FaceTiming with Wilmer Valderrama, who was hired to replace him on the long-running procedural. Clearly, you can take the charming rogue out of NCIS but you can’t take the NCIS out of the charming rogue.

Still, he’s ready to get bullish on Bull because, well, it’s just what he does.

“I just co-hosted with Kelly Ripa on her show, and it reminded that this is called the entertainment industry for a reason,” Weatherly says. “The world is a very difficult place, and if you can offer somebody a smile to take the edge off, why wouldn’t you? We can’t be sticking our heads into the ground and ignoring everything around us. And that’s what Bull has already become for me — a fun experience that goes at the basics of human nature but in a way that I hope people find entertaining.”

Bull premieres Tuesday at 9 p.m. on CBS.

Craig Tomashoff

THRnews@thr.com

September 20, 2016 7:00am PT by Craig Tomashoff

Courtesy of AMC

THR talks with Vince Gilligan, Jon Bokencamp, Sam Caitlin and more producers about pre-credit scenes that often seem like misdirects and why writers are increasingly featuring them.

Few shows have ever been hotter entering their sophomore season than Breaking Bad. The AMC drama about a high school chemistry teacher-turned-drug kingpin had become a critical darling from the get-go, and the anticipation for Year Two couldn’t have been more intense. And then, the season began. With an eyeball.

The first images were in black and white, showing an eyeball floating in a pool. And at the bottom of the pool was a pink teddy bear missing an eye. By the time the opening credits rolled, not one familiar character put in an appearance. It was as if this was an entirely different show. Which was precisely the point.

“We knew we were telling our story in a non-linear fashion, with the ability to cut back and forth in time, so an opening sequence like that was an extra tool in our toolbox,” explains Vince Gilligan, executive producer on Breaking Bad and its spinoff, Better Call Saul. “It’s all in service of creating a story that bears a second watching. We are going for something that’s not just watchable but rewatchable.”

Mission accomplished. By the end of season two, fans learned that the teddy bear had landed in Walter White’s pool after a plane crash caused by the bad judgment of an air traffic controller who had become overwhelmed with grief when his daughter died of a drug overdose supplied by Walter’s meth-making partner. What began as something out of left field eventually became the central theme of the whole season.

There have been a few shows over the years (often in the sci-fi genre) that kicked off an episode with some sort of misdirection, whether it was The Twilight Zone to The X-Files. Action movies like the James Bond series also often open up with a scene that’s disconnected from the story that follows yet still managed to surprise and intrigue an audience precisely because they were so unexpected. You had to keep watching, having faith that what you just saw will meet up with the main story later. Most of the time, though, television has followed a much more predictable pattern.

“When I watched Dukes of Hazard and Three’s Company, I expected the same thing every week,” explains Blacklist creator/executive producer Jon Bokencamp. “Television has often been comfort food. You tune in each week and see familiar characters in a familiar world. That is something we try to build into the show, but something different and unexpected happens when you enter the story from a unique perspective. We make that our audience’s comfort food.”

It takes a bold show to open an episode with a WTF moment that completely misdirects its faithful viewers. However, it seems that in this era of streaming and binging, more and more series seem willing to shake their fans up with unexpected pre-credit scenes.

Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul once kicked off an episode showing nothing but five minutes of a truck going through a border security check. Preacher’s first season featured one pre-credit teaser set inside a gondola in the Alps that crashes with unknown families on board. Another began in a previously unknown old Western town called Ratwater, which was dominated by lots of very bad (and unfamiliar) men.

Pre-credit teasers are also creeping into network series. NBC’s The Blacklist often opens with a mysterious vignette, introducing the bad guy of the week. Like the man who entered a motel room, removed his hair and teeth and clothes before we eventually learn he’s there to dispose of a dead body. Or when an episode opened in an African village where everyone is slaughtered except one boy who much later grows into series regular Dembe Zuma. 

“I hope people are more able to accept this device,” explains Preacher EP and former Breaking Bad writer Sam Catlin. “These sequences can’t be cliffhangers or eccentric storylines that are hooks and nothing else. The audience needs to be rewarded and not be confused. You want to intrigue them, and this is a great way to do it right from the top.”

Kicking off episodes of his show with unknown characters plunging to their death or a killer shooting his way out of a Western saloon were what Catlin considers “a way of expanding the vocabulary of our show. It used to be that TV tried to be everything to everyone. But now we have such specialized interests and so many different kinds of shows, with fans who are so passionate about them. People really get involved in the minutiae of a series and I love to do whatever we can to encourage that level of engagement.”

It’s not just viewers who are challenged by an opening scene that has no connection to the usual storyline. These pre-credit sequences are apparently a way for writers and producers to challenge themselves. “Getting to do this is one of the most fun parts of doing The Blacklist,” according to Bokenkamp. “When we talk about the episodes, one of my big questions is, ‘What’s the movie poster? What world are we going into?’ The pre-credit sequences are the best way to introduce that new world to the audience. It’s supposed to raise questions.”

Ironically, according to Bokenkamp, the sequences often begin as questions themselves. They start out “as a placeholder, a weird person doing something dangerous, while we figure out the rest of the story. Once we know who the characters are and where they’re going in the script, we can go back and build the whole story.”

Despite the increasing use of unexpected pre-credit scenes, though, they still cause anxiety for the networks producing the shows. Says Gilligan, “I’ve been at various networks and gotten notes on pilots and whatnot. There’s a constant drumbeat of notes asking if we can make things clearer. Mystery is great. Confusion is not. But for us, mystery keeps up viewers’ expectations. Clarity can sometimes be a wonderful thing but it can also be the enemy of continued interest in your show.”

A perfect example is the beginning of Breaking Bad’s fifth and final season. It began with a heavily bearded Walter White celebrating his birthday in an unfamiliar diner, exchanging money with a stranger in the men’s room and then finding an M-60 machine gun in his trunk. And as it turns out, the producers also had no idea what they were setting up.

“That was one of those times when I was inspired by my seven years with Chris Carter on The X-Files,” explains Gilligan. “We didn’t think of it so much as a pre-credit teaser as much as it was just ripping off someone else’s show completely. We were in a situation where we wanted a cool image of Walt buying a machine gun in a Denny’s parking lot. That idea tickled us.”

The more everyone worked on the episode, the more layers were thrown into the sequence. “It wasn’t just the machine gun,” says Peter Gould, a fellow executive producer on Bad and Saul. “Walt was wearing different glasses and driving a car from New Hampshire. Why was in in New Hampshire? We had to figure that out as well as figuring what we were going to do with that machine gun. There was some worry about what we were possibly going to do with this sequence we’d created.”

This sort of reverse engineering for story ideas has been a critical component of Better Call Saul. The Saul Goodman character was very well established by the end of Breaking Bad, so if Gould wanted to create a new show exploring how he came to be, there had to be some surprising twists right from the start. There had been a fleeting line of dialogue near the end of Breaking Bad, where Saul mentioned that in the best-case scenario, he’d end up running a Cinnabon in Omaha. That had been “just a joke thrown into the script,” according to Gould. “Then we realized we had to start taking it seriously.”

Cut to the first moments of the Saul premiere, black and white shots of a barely recognizable version of the title character cleaning up at a Cinnabon. There was still no clue about how he got himself there, and two seasons in, fans are still waiting for more scenes of Saul’s future. “It’s like he ascent of man graphic, only for Saul/Jimmy, it’s going the other way.”

Ultimately, these pre-credit teaser represent an unspoken bond between show writers and show fans that goes far beyond the scene itself. “We often repeat a saying from Billy Wilder around here,” says Gilligan. “’If you give the audience two and two and let them make four, they’ll love you forever. I’ve learned that audiences are incredibly smart and will put things together quickly.”

Craig Tomashoff

THRnews@thr.com