Author: Daniel Fienberg

January 26, 2016 7:59pm PT by Daniel Fienberg

‘Killing Fields’  Courtesy of Discovery

Having set the crime template with ‘Homicide,’ the Oscar-winning director is breaking it for Discovery.

Following in the recent footsteps of Serial and Making a Murderer and The Jinx, Discovery’s Killing Fields tackles the true crime docudrama from an investigative perspective, following retired Louisiana detective Rodie Sanchez and his new partner Aubrey St. Angelo as they reopen the cold case on the murder of Eugenie Boisfontaine in 1997.

Produced by Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, who helped set the template for the modern crime procedural with Homicide, Killing Fields is being produced in semi-real-time, with episodes airing as leads are still being followed and suspected vetted. 

Earlier this month, The Hollywood Reporter sat down with Levinson, also an executive producer and director on NBC’s Shades of Blue, to talk about this foray into unscripted programming, the chance that Killing Fields may not ever have an ending and the oddness of meeting his stars months into production.

The following Q&A has no real spoilers for Killing Fields, which airs on Tuesdays at 10 on Discovery.

The first question is one of sort of logistics because your name and Tom’s name have been central to this. Talk me through who has been where and doing what with the production on this. I assume you haven’t been down on the ground in Louisiana the whole time. 

No, because they’re just shooting. We got involved when they basically said, “Here’s what we want to do, this is how we want to approach it, we’re not doing a reenactment show. This is not a pure ‘Who’s the suspect, etc., you know, all the traditional things that have part of those kinds of documentaries. This is where we want to go.” You saw a couple  clips of Rodie, etc., what kind of character he is, what kind of character Aubrey is, what kind of characters are there, what is this world, and we said, “Okay, well this is interesting.” We are going past simply, “Okay, well here’s the suspect, here’s the so-and-so, and now we do it.”

We, in a sense, are riding this on the backs of these characters and this journey. We don’t know exactly where the journey’s going to go. It’s infused with more character than you normally get in these cases. If you want to just have a pure case and that’s it, just the mechanics of it, this is not that. This takes the extra step. Here’s a guy 18 years later. Flawed in his life as he talks about, married six times, etc. He’s down there in the bayou and that kind of world that he lived in. Here’s this partner that he had worked with the father, etc. 

In a sense, it almost feels as if there’s a theatrical aspect to it, as if we almost wrote the character. That’s what’s intriguing to me. You are following this in real time. There’s all these unknowns they’re going to play out. It’s not like, “What?” and then you flashback and here’s what happened and so forth and we don’t do that. That’s what makes it so intriguing and that’s why we were interesting to join it.

Who was actually down on the ground with the cameras letting you know what you were getting?

We would get the clips and stuff being shot by the crew. It needed to have a rather cinematic aspect to it. Visually it’s a little bit different, the rhythms are a little bit different. I mean it’s all part of this. 

Where does that leave you in terms of the editing room and cutting the story? 

It’s like if you took a bunch of raw footage. You can’t just have raw footage and just put it together. You got to say, “You got interesting characters, how do they behave with one another? Oh, you know what’s interesting when they were talking about this, isn’t that really fascinating? You go to here, that’s kind of interesting, but maybe…” You can’t manufacture it. You have to be able to go, “Let’s see where it’s going to go.” We have to say these people are fascinating enough, interesting enough for us to pursue this journey. We can’t have a murder mystery moment every nine minutes, not going to happen. You’re going to have to let trust that what you’re trying to attempt is interesting in and of itself because of all of these elements. 

With this series, could it be infinite?

I don’t think so. 

How long does it feel like it is to you? What do you think the audience tolerance is going to be?

I don’t know, but just like we’re not going to leave the case open forever either. There’s a point where they’ll say, “Okay, we’ve done what we’ve done, let’s call it a day.”

What is your reaction going to be if you hear that and you feel like the story isn’t where you want it to be? How are you going to respond?

We may not resolve the case, but just like in life, certain things aren’t answered. The question is how does the character deal with it and that in itself may be very interesting. Is it something that’s played for 18 years and he’s come back and he’s gotten involved, got reinvigorated and they hit a wall again? How do you deal with that? How interesting is that? I think that’s that. 

That has the chance to be simultaneously very interesting, but also very frustrating for some viewers. 

Well, you hope that it’s not frustrating because of that because I think if we empathize with the character in a sense we have to see how does Rodie deal with all of this and how does it resolve ourselves? We always think there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end to everything, but there isn’t. Even in entertainment, theatrical, whatever. Let’s use The Sopranos. Runs for x number of years, so what’s the ending? Well, they’re just sitting in a restaurant and there’s a long pause and then it will just fade to black. 

[Here, Rodie and Aubrey, in town for the Television Critics Association press tour panel, come over and they introduce themselves to Levinson.]

Okay, is that strange for you to be just be meeting your stars now? 

Yes, it is. 

What is the feeling of that? 

It’s pretty unusual, it’s something you wouldn’t normally ever do. Here, it’s like their life is their life. We’re just filming it without trying to be obtrusive to it. You can sense that they’re just these cops. That’s them. That’s what’s interesting. It’s not like I’m going to spend a lot of time and get into their world, in a way, which you might do in other situations. Here, you have a crew just follow, watch, put it together. 

Is there a different sense of responsibility you feel when you’re working with real people, and these are their lives and you’re depicting them? Either the respect for Rodie and Aubrey or how you treat the potential suspects? Because these are the people that have to go to their jobs tomorrow, whatever they happen to be? 

Look you don’t want to manufacture it. You want to depict it as they function. How they live in the world they live in, how they talk, how do they think? What are their happy moments and their down moments? It would be one thing if you were pushing into things and then say, “Oh, this is what they would do, but we got them to do this,” whatever. Here, we’re just trying to show them and not trying to slant it. There is no agenda, it’s not like we have a position in terms of an agenda that we want. You say, “This is interesting. It’s worthwhile to go down this road. We think an audience can be interested in this.” We’re not doing reenactments, we’re not doing that. This is what we have set up, this is our investment and we’re going to let it play out and not try to tweak it one way or another. 

You still have viewer expectations that exist. Frankly, Homicide helped those develop. The genre is codified.

We’re past the entertainment version. If you want to call it the entertainment version. We’re over here with it. 

How would you define as this version, is? 

Yeah, I don’t know that I can define it. I know that it’s something specific to television that theatrical can’t do. The fact that it can play out in so many hours versus what film can do. Where it can breathe, where theatrical can’t. The form, television, is in much more of a creative period than what is happening with film. There is so many new things going on and you push the boundaries of how you tell stories. 

Have you paid any attention to the rise or renaissance of the true crime genre in the past couple years? Jinx, Making a Murderer, Serial in podcast form, etc. Have you partaken in any of those? 

I’ve seen them. 

How do you think this fits in, not exactly being those things but being in conversation with them? 

Television keeps on opening these doors and going down into other ways to tell a story. I think that’s all for the good, in the sense, the diversity of it all. You’re not bound by any specific convention. I think that’s all fascinating and what happens is that technology has a lot to do with it. You couldn’t do this show 15 years ago or so, right? You couldn’t run around with the film cameras and things and you only get a 10 or 20-minute load, where now you could shoot two hours, with cameras like this, as opposed to like that. The technology changed, the digital age, in a sense contributed to this that we’re seeing. 

Do you think the scripted crime drama is in a place where it was due for this non-fiction correction, as it were? 

I don’t know if you’d call it what it was due for. It’s just things are going to continue to change. When I started Homicide, ’91 I think, it was to say, “Can we push it more? Can we do this differently? We’re not going to solve a crime every week. We’re going to deal more with character behavior. We’re going to shoot with Super-16.” Again, we weren’t digital then. Super-16, we could just jump into a squad car. “We can do this. It will be more ragged. The editing style, jump-cutting etc, all those aspects would be part of the language of Homicide.” It keeps evolving. 

Is it your assumption that with filming still going, that this will prompt people to come forward? I have to assume that it will draw attention to it and people will come out of the woodwork, actual people with information?

That’s possible, but it wasn’t something on my mind or Tom’s when we officially got involved. We say, “Is this worthwhile? Is this interesting?” Then you look at all those aspects. If you start trying to figure out, “They’ll be Tweeting…” Who the hell knows? It is what it is. It’s part of the journey, don’t you think? That’s part of the journey… It is like real time, I don’t know where it’s going to go. 

I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out from here. 

Me too. 

January 17, 2016 12:31pm PT by Daniel Fienberg

Krysten Ritter in ‘Marvel’s Jessica Jones’  Courtesy of Netflix

Jeph Loeb says they only learned of their second season renewal today.

[Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones.] 

The most important thing to know about the second season of Netflix’s Marvel’s Jessica Jones is that there’s absolutely nothing new to know about about the second season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones. 

“We learned about the pickup when you guys learned about it,” insisted Marvel Television chief Jeph Loeb at Sunday’s Television Critics Association press tour day for Netflix.

One thing the season won’t involve is David Tennant’s Kilgrave as a Big Bad, though everybody associated with the show lamented the Doctor Who veteran’s absence.

“When you have David Tennant, you want him around forever,” Jessica Jones showrunner Melissa Rosenberg said, though she noted that the show isn’t called Kilgrave. 

“The show is called ‘Jessica Jones,’ so the story is about Jessica’s arc and how it plays out in its best shape and form,” Rosenberg said, with Loeb agreeing, “Your protagonist is often defined by how strong your antagonist is.”

In lieu of any details at all about the second season, including clarifications regarding whether Loeb really and truly only learned that his wildly well-reviewed and allegedly successful — one never knows with Netflix — show would be back that morning, the panel concentrated mostly on elements from the first season including, enthusiastically, the sex scenes between Krysten Ritter’s Jessica and Mike Colter’s Luke Cage.

“You’re gonna have to do a scene like that, it’s not terrible to do it with Mike,” Ritter said. “He’s alright looking, but he’s also just a nice guy and always has your back. I always felt really safe and protected. It’s so choreographed. There’s really nothing sexy about it. We kinda pick on each other more like brother and sister, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”

Colter added, “The awkward point is the people that are in the room besides us. It’s not us. We’re OK. It’s just the 20 or 30 people that are around who are all of a sudden on set, who probably wouldn’t be on set. That’s always interesting. I really thought that it turned out as good as it could turn out.”

For Loeb, one of the caretakers of the Marvel Cinematic/Televisual Universe, the sex scenes weren’t just more graphic than most of what the studio done in the past.

“It was important that we establish that this is an adult drama and in an adult drama, there is an element of sexuality that was important and it was really important to also establish because of what was happening in Jessica’s life and in order to be able to show people that what had happened with Kilgrave was not OK, but there are other situations where that kind of activity is OK,” Loeb said.

Critics hailed Jessica Jones for its careful depiction of gender roles, sexuality, violence and consent and while the team was proud of the dialogue the show started and grateful for the commentary, there was an insistence that it was all about serving the story.

“[W]hat’s so special about how Melissa tackled some of the issues that all of you amazingly picked up on is that you’re never didactic and moralizing with it,” co-star Rachael Taylor told her showrunner. “There’s so much conversation about some of the issues that it [tackles] for women and all of those issues are really, really important, but they were threaded so intricately into your writing that it didn’t become about that in a moralizing way. It was just about making the characters truthful.”

Rosenberg agreed, “There’s been a lot of really smart think pieces and writing that y’all have been doing on the issues that we’ve been tackling in this show. What’s funny is that we never walked into the writing room going, ‘We are going to take on rape and abuse and feminism.’ We were telling a story for this character and by being true to her character it was true to the issues.”

Marvel’s Jessica Jones will return… at some point.

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November 22, 2015 10:00am PT by Daniel Fienberg

 Courtesy of Netflix

Would ‘Jessica Jones’ season two come before or after ‘The Defenders’? Melissa Rosenberg weighs in on that and more.

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Netflix’s Jessica Jones.]

Netflix premiered Marvel’s Jessica Jones on Friday, so viewers have had the chance to check out a few episodes of what some critics have called the best Marvel show to date. Oh, who are we kidding? Many viewers have had the chance to watch the whole darned thing, perhaps twice.

In the first part of The Hollywood Reporter‘s interview with Jessica Jones’ Melissa Rosenberg, the showrunner talked about how the Netflix version of the show is different from what she developed at ABC and praised Marvel for largely giving her a free rein, among other topics. In part two of the interview, Rosenberg talks about the handling of rape in Jessica Jones, a trauma that’s pervasive even if it’s unseen. She explains how Carol Danvers from her ABC script became Rachael Taylor’s Trish and why that was better for the series. And Rosenberg sounds ready to make a second season of Jessica Jones, but she notes why that will be complicated.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead from episodes one through seven.)

A lot of cable dramas have run into trouble with handling rape as a plot point. Here it’s always in the background, either as the trauma it produces or as the threat that looms and hovers. What was the care that you wanted to take with that part of the story?

We’re very conscious to treat that aspect of the story with sensitivity and responsibility. For me, if I never see an actual rape on a screen again it’ll be too soon. It’s becoming ubiquitous, it’s become lazy storytelling and it’s always about the impact it has on the men around them. It’s like, “Oh his wife was raped and murdered so he’s going to go out and destroy the world.” That’s so often what it’s about, just this kind of de rigueur storytelling to spice up often male character.

It’s damaging. It’s just hideous messaging, and so coming into this, the events have already happened and this is really about the impact of rape on a person and about healing, survival, trauma and facing demons. To me it’s much richer territory. If you turn on any television show or, for that matter, film these days, nine out of 10 of them seem to open with a naked, tied-up, dead woman with her undies around her ankles. I think I’ve been calling them the NTSDs, which stands for naked, tied-up, dead, I can’t remember. They’ve just become so ubiquitous, it’s like numbing the audience to what is a horrific violation.

You presumably didn’t want to make it into the specific topic of discussion. You just wanted to make it clear what happened without even having a scene with a therapist or a scene with a confessor figure of some sort.

Yes, she lives it out in her daily life. It’s really about how this particular character deals with it or doesn’t, as the case may be. We didn’t want to tackle it as an “issue.” Nobody wants to be preached to and I have no interest in doing any preaching, so it was really just informing her character, why she makes the choices that she makes.

Changing gears a little, my understanding is that sometimes Marvel just kind of tells creators who they have available from a roster of characters and that that was how Trish came into play here. What was that like for you?

Well back in the network ABC day I had Carol Danvers, who’s in the book, right from the source material. That relationship was important in the book and I loved that friendship. When it finally got to Netflix and by then Carol Danvers [aka Captain Marvel] was going to have her own movie, all I knew was I couldn’t have her and I threw a fit. Then one of our colleagues at Marvel brought up Patsy Walker, who I’d never heard of. I’m not the biggest comic book aficionado, but Patsy’s had her own series since the ’40s. It was very girly. She’s a model, and she has boyfriends and she wears these fabulous outfits. There was this really rich material in her backstory about being a child star, and about having a stage mother and her life exploited. 

They treated that in the comics rather gently, but we grabbed onto that and in fact it ended up being a better counterpart to Jessica than Carol Danvers would’ve been, because Trish has everything. Beauty, charm, education, grace, fame, money, taste. She has everything that Jessica doesn’t except powers. Envy becomes a part, is woven into their relationship, and I think it’s a really authentic relationship between them. We wouldn’t have had that if we had Carol Danvers, we would’ve had a very different kind of thing.

We see her in early episodes doing a bit of Krav Maga. She’s trying to bulk herself up and Trish does have, at least one of the versions of the character, a specific arc in the Marvel universe. Was that something that you wanted to play with? 

Certainly we have the choice. There were no dictates regarding her character. Only that when she was a child star, her hair was red. (Laughs.) Other than that it’s kind of been left open to, “What is the character asking of the storytelling?” There’s been no preconceived ideas about what should or shouldn’t happen there, which is very freeing. 

Also, we talked little bit about the sarcasm and how that’s where a lot of the humor comes from with Jessica. What was the challenge to get in moments of levity and honestly in this dark world?

It was incredibly important to me. One of the things that we’re constantly avoiding, the one word I never wanted to hear was “bleak.” Because as an audience member, I’m a big fan of television, and I have watched a great deal and when something is so bleak that you have to force yourself to go, you don’t want to spend an hour in that world. It’s not fun, it’s not giving me anything. I walk away depressed and I just never wanted this to be bleak. That said, we’re dealing with some pretty bleak stories. There’s some pretty bleak themes going on, so it was always extremely important to all of us to balance that out with a certain sense of humor.

How conscious are you when making a show like this of how few female comic book heroes have gotten to be the focus of their own series or movie, and does that make you think, “Here’s what I have to do because this is a first of a kind or a second of a kind”? 

It does in terms of, “Here’s what I don’t want to do.” I don’t want to see some buxom chick in a unitard with her boobs hanging out and a size 18 waist, a sort of unrealistic model for women. I didn’t feel a need to sexualize her character. Or, because her character is actually very sexual, I think objectify is the word I’m looking for. When you’re looking at comic books that’s what you’re seeing is these unrealistic manifestations of women. Men, too, frankly.

One of the things I said out from the beginning is, “I never need to see Jessica Jones in high heels and a miniskirt using her feminine wiles to get information out of a suspect.” Any time you have a woman in the role of cop, detective or something to that effect, one of the first things they do is put her in heels and nice, tight black dress and send her out to go and get the information. Again, it’s just frickin’ lazy. Jessica Jones is just not someone who would ever do that. She’d beat it out of them first, that’s actually a much more effective method.

When did you know where you wanted to be at the end of 13 episodes? When did you know what the arc of the first season had to be?

When you’re talking about what is essentially a 13-hour movie, I always start with, “Where is she starting and where do you want her to end up?” That can obviously change in terms of how she ends up where she’s going to end up, but that was early on, from right back from when we were pitching the season. Then it was about working backward and laying out all those, where does she meet, how is she going to get there, what are the stepping stones and then placing them. We really look at the full season first before we start breaking down the individual episodes.

Is there room for a second season of Jessica Jones before The Defenders in your mind?

I hope so. There certainly is storytelling wise. The question becomes is there actual time? There are logistics involved, because Defenders has to shoot by a certain time, contractually. Actually, I’m not sure; I’m not at all involved in those conversations, much to my dismay. The first question is whether or not we will even get a second season. The second question is, if so, when? Will it be before The Defenders or after? I’d certainly love it to be before but there are things that play into that — time, availability.

When they get to Defenders they’re obviously going to be using Jessica and you say that you won’t necessarily be involved with that. How much are you going to want to be involved? Are you going to want to have conversations with The Defenders people and say, “Here’s what you have to know about Jessica”?

I’m a complete control freak when it comes to this character. I will do everything in my power to protect the character in whatever forms. They’ll have to throw me kicking and screaming out of that building. But they own the property. They’ve really been inclusive thus far so I’m not really worried about it.

Jessica Jones is now on Netflix.

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