World Screen @ 35: The Basic Cable Revolution Continues

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series.

In our last article, we looked at how the basic cable innovation revolution continued with FX, which supported talent that wanted to reimagine anthology series. Today, we hear from showrunners with significantly different backgrounds and creative sensibilities about shows they created for FX: Joe Weissberg and Joel Fields with The Americans and Carlton Cuse with The Strain.

THE BASIC CABLE REVOLUTION CONTINUES—THE AMERICANS & THE STRAIN
From The Shield to Nip/Tuck to American Horror Story, FX demonstrated at the beginning of the 2000s that its door was open to diverse creative voices.

“We’re intensely supportive of original creative visions,” said John Landgraf, then president and general manager of FX Networks, in a 2013 interview. “We have built our entire organization from the ground up around creative people and around how to be excellent at identifying really talented people and then supporting their vision.”

Two FX shows illustrate how far the cabler cast its net when looking for individuals with visions for TV series that had not been done before.

First, The Americans, from a writer, Joe Weisberg, who had come to television after working for the CIA. The other, The Strain, from a seasoned TV writer-showrunner, Carlton Cuse, who had run across a trilogy of books from a feature-film director, Guillermo del Toro.

The period drama The Americans takes place in the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War. It follows Elizabeth and Philip, two KGB spies posing as American nationals in suburban Washington, D.C. The series is packed with intrigue and spy tradecraft—from breaking and entering to dead drops, surveillance to cryptography, honey traps to disguises. But at the heart of the show is the tenuous relationship between Elizabeth and Philip, thrown together into an arranged marriage by their handlers in the Soviet Union and sent to the U.S. to live as a couple, have children, raise them as Americans, and not reveal their true identities.

The show was created by Weisberg, who in a 2014 interview explained the genesis of the series. “In 2010, there was a group of Russian intelligence agents who were illegals who were arrested in the U.S. They were called illegals during KGB times because they were officers who served not in Soviet embassies but under deep cover. Everybody thought that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russians probably weren’t doing that anymore, but it turns out they were. A group of ten of those illegals were arrested by the FBI in the U.S. Everybody knew it had happened and it was a big deal. I got a call from DreamWorks Television, who I was working with at the time and had done some other projects with, and because I had worked in the CIA and had a background in intelligence, they asked if I would be interested in developing a TV show based in any way on those illegals. That was the birth of the project. I was interested in all kinds of different themes. One that really interested me was the families of spies. Back when I worked in the CIA, I was very interested in the question of officers who were married and served abroad and didn’t tell their kids what they did. The kids grew up in a family with this giant lie. That was certainly something that always grabbed me.”

Joel Fields, who worked alongside Weisberg as showrunner of The Americans, added, “Part of what is so exciting about what Joe created in this show, and what we get to explore creatively, is ultimately even for those of us who aren’t in the CIA, we all struggle as human beings with this question of how truthful are we being in our lives. Are we people who are trying to shed our shells and share ourselves? Or are we going through life wearing our disguises, unaware that we all have the lies? To me, that is part of what is great that we can explore in this show.”

While the politics and ideology of the time, as well as the covert missions, are crucially important to the series, the real focus is the relationship between Philip (played by Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and the conflicts within their family.

“My favorite aspect of the show is still the complicated marriage,” said Russell in 2014. “The fact that it is a period show, set in D.C., and we are these KGB spies is just the conceit that allows us to push and pull this relationship so much. It starts off as this estranged kind of arranged marriage, and then you slowly see them fall in love with each other and then really trust each other amidst the craziness of this world: even having sex with other people, being in life-and-death situations—the stakes are very high.”

Rhys and Russell had to wear disguises in almost every episode as Philip and Elizabeth must pretend to be different people in order to complete their spy missions. This allowed them as actors to work on a number of different levels. But in acting, as in the spy business—as Weisberg told Rhys when he talked about his training at the CIA—“you should never veer far from the truth,” explains Rhys. “You need to stay as close to the truth as possible in order to convince the person in front of you. That holds for acting as well. You need to convince the person in front of you so that the audience can believe it as well. [Philip and Elizabeth] are not transformative. They are not chameleons. They don’t become completely different people. They need to keep close contact with the truth in order for it to be believable; if not, the person in front of them clearly knows they are lying. To me, it’s always about making whatever persona you are playing as believable as possible, and usually, that doesn’t mean veering too far from the truth. Sometimes when a disguise goes on, it can lead you to a small place—it’s in the minutiae. I kind of allow that. If I look in the mirror, something new tends to come out quite naturally, and as long as it’s not too extreme, I’ll follow it.”

“The show has always been about the nature of self, the truth of identity, who we really are to ourselves, to our friends, to our family,” said Noah Emmerich in 2015, who plays FBI agent, Stan Beeman. “Is there a public self and a private self? It’s about the nature of relationships. If you think of the identity of self as a complex issue and then you put two people together, the identity of a relationship becomes exponentially more complex. So in the context of a spy’s life-and-death world, it becomes more dramatized and more illuminated and exaggerated. But the issues that these characters have are the same issues everybody has…It’s really about how we relate to each other as human beings in the world and that is quite a broad umbrella. Maybe every drama is about that to some degree, but that is the center of this show.”

I had the privilege of visiting the Brooklyn set of The Americans at the end of 2014. I was amazed at the level of authenticity in the props, furniture, and costumes. Even jail cells used in scenes depicting Russia were built and measured in meters, instead of feet, to remain faithful to reality.

As Fields explained, “Everything is a challenge on this show and everything is a blessing. There are a lot of technical challenges on this show: The period setting, every exterior has to be redressed. Every extra has to be dressed. Every phone, every car, every parking meter, everything is a special challenge to its period, to its setting in Virginia and D.C. Shooting in the winter in New York is a challenge. The first year we had Hurricane Sandy. The second year we had a polar vortex. There have been a lot of challenges, but they are all outweighed by the blessings. We have a phenomenally gifted cast who are not only as talented as you could hope for but also great people and great creative collaborators. Joe and I have forged a great friendship and creative collaboration. We have such a supportive studio and the network brings so much support and insight and collaboration to the table. We have such a great team. So there are a lot of challenges, but they are outweighed by the blessings.” 

And when asked if it was difficult to find cars from the 1980s, he quipped, “No, it’s really, really, easy to find the cars. The problem is none of them run reliably! We have given up saying we want to find the cars. What we beg on our knees for is, when the director shouts action, for them not to sputter and die!”

FROM SPIES TO STRIGOI
The Americans, as much as it was a suspenseful thriller, offered viewers a relatable relationship-based entry point to the life and work of spies. The Strain, which premiered in 2014, was a thriller of a very different ilk. It started with the investigation into a mysterious viral outbreak by a diligent former CDC director, Dr. Ephraim “Eph” Goodweather, played by Cory Stoll, and slowly unveiled the existence of a horrifying group of strigoi—vampires—who take over the bodies of humans. Over the course of four seasons, Eph and a group of everyday New Yorkers team up to save humanity from the evil Master and his growing legion of bloodsucking followers.

The TV series The Strain was based on the first of three novels by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. Showrunner Carlton Cuse, who had already shepherded the broadcast network norm-defying show, Lost, explained in a 2014 interview how he got involved with The Strain.

“I read the book, I liked it, and then a couple of years later, I was approached by my agent at William Morris Endeavor, who was also Guillermo’s agent, and he said, ‘Would you be interested in adapting The Strain for television?’ I was. There was this cool idea embedded in these books, which was, you could upend the current notion of the vampire genre. We had all these vampire stories based on romantic, brooding, glittery dudes with love-life problems! It would be much more interesting to go back to the roots of vampires as scary, dangerous, parasitic creatures. I thought that there was a way to take that idea and carve out a spot in the genre that was not occupied.

“So I sat down with Guillermo and we connected,” continued Cuse. “We shared a lot of aesthetic sensibilities, and I felt we also had really complementary skill sets. The other thing that attracted me to the project was I felt like Guillermo was one of the best visualists working in film and entertainment. I was confident that he would be able to create these creatures in a way that was interesting and compelling. I’ve had a lot of experience as a storyteller in television, and I felt I had a good take on how to take the spine of this narrative and really flesh it out and turn it into a full-fledged 13-hour first season of television. My focus was primarily on the storytelling, the scripts and the editing. We shared casting. Guillermo, meanwhile, was very focused on the monsters and the visual look of the show. It was a wonderful collaboration where we each brought the best of ourselves to the table. I very much believe that success in television is a collaborative artistic medium. There is this erroneous assumption that creativity is in its best form a singular pursuit, but there are many cases of that not being the case. Even people you think of as being solitary creative artists were not solitary creative artists. There is so much work involved in creating the world of a TV show and making a story that plays believably over 13 episodes; our collaboration really made this story special.”

The vampires in The Strain are unequivocally evil. “That’s the thing that differentiates The Strain from other movies and shows in the vampire genre, where vampires aren’t bad as much as they are misunderstood,” said Cuse. “In our world, vampires are bad. Another thing that differentiates our show is that there is also a very complicated layered mythology for the vampires. In a show like The Walking Dead, you have one force of zombie antagonism—the zombies are all homogenous. In our story, they are more like bees; there are worker bees and then Queen bees. We have elevated vampires and what’s interesting is the complex mythology about the vampires that unfolds across the course of the first season and even beyond, where we as an audience are really learning the whole story of the mythology of the Master and the other vampires, how they came to be and why they are here and what their origins are and what their goals are. That unfolds across the series and it’s interesting to see they have both empirical and spiritual roots.”

When The Strain premiered in 2014, Cuse was already working on another critically acclaimed TV series, Bates Motel, a prequel to the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho. Cuse explained the different creative processes used to break stories on the two series, one based on an existing novel and the other inspired by a feature film.

“The books provide a guideline that is wonderful, but there is a lot of invention and creation involved in making The Strain episodes,” noted Cuse. “In Bates Motel, the idea was to take two wonderful characters from the iconic movie Psycho. The thing that really intrigued me was that Norma Bates is this famous character in cinema, but we don’t actually see her alive; we just see her corpse and hear a projection of her voice. So I thought, what would it be like to bring her to life? I sold the idea of doing this as a contemporary prequel to A&E. I had come up with some other inventions, including the idea that there was a brother and very quickly presented a version of the show that was untethered from the movie. I wanted to work on it with someone because I really do like the collaborative process of television. I was introduced to Kerry Ehrin through Universal Television. We teamed up and she had a bunch of wonderful ideas and we jointly developed the concept for what the show would be. The idea fundamentally became that it wasn’t interesting to just have this shrewish character. You imagined that Norma Bates was this shrewish character that berated her son into becoming crazy. But it seemed far more interesting to us if Norma Bates and her son had this complicated, crazy, dysfunctional, but intensely loving relationship and that Norman had a flaw in his DNA and maybe her behavior ultimately catalyzed his demise. These characters loved each other more than anybody in the world and yet we know ultimately that they befall tragic fates. Tragedy is a wonderful storytelling form; it’s worked for a long time. It worked pretty well for Shakespeare! It worked for the Ancient Greeks. It worked well for Jim Cameron in Titanic! But it’s not an easy storytelling form to go out and sell. It’s hard to go to a cable network and say, Hey, I’ve got a great tragedy for you! So we Trojan-horsed an original tragedy within the framework of Psycho, and we were blessed to get the two most wonderful actors we could have possibly have gotten: Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore. If you told me you were giving me $100 million to make the movie, I would not cast anyone over Vera or Freddie; they are as good as it gets. They can do anything that we give them and make it better. It’s wonderful. The idea for that show became this notion of doing pulpy, exaggerated storytelling that was almost noir-ish but had super-nuanced characters. It’s taken the audience a little bit of time to understand what we are doing; everyone had preconceptions from the movie. But the great thing was by the end of the second season people were saying, Oh, I get what you guys are doing, I’m into your show!”

While basic cable networks were continuing to take risks with new forms of storytelling, HBO, the outlet that had first altered the drama genre with The Sopranos, was looking for shows that could live up to the high standards set by that critically acclaimed series. We will look at HBO, post-The Sopranos in our next post.