We’ve got the shocking stories to make a mother lode of cop dramas, Charl Blignaut discovered at a recent TV scriptwriting workshop
It’s his third day in town and David Simons is still trying to get a handle on the newspaper headlines. “I look at your papers and see your crime stories …” says the award-winning United States TV producer to a room of generally underemployed local TV writers and producers. “I’ve been thinking to myself, what a mother lode! You’ve got enough material here for several cop dramas …”
Simons should know. A former crime journalist who spent a year on the beat with the Baltimore homicide unit, he wrote the book that became the TV series Homicide. Along with NYPD Blue, Homicide changed the face of the US cop drama. Thanks to Homicide, Kojak died a nasty death. Magnum got lost in paradise. Simons’s partner in crime, David Mills, sits alongside him on stage nodding his head in agreement. “We’ve got the stories, we just don’t have the series,” someone mutters, and as usual, the writers roll their eyes at the producers; the producers glare at the commissioning editors and the commissioning editors do what commissioning editors do best – pretend not to notice anything’s wrong.
Where are our one-hour drama series? We are told several projects are in the pipeline and several pilots have been shot, but it looks like it’s going to be another season of just a single high-quality drama series – Yizo Yizo. Which is, of course, why Simons and Mills are in Johannesburg in the first place. They were invited to the country by a concerned collective comprising mainly the bigger of the local production companies.Cinga Productions, Endemol Entertainment (Isidingo; Backstage), Clear (Soul City, The Toasty Show), Morula Pictures (Generations, Backstage), e.tv, SABC3 and the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology pooled their resources to try and shift the South African industry up a gear. “Bottom line,” says Simons later in the session: “Cops, hospitals or the law. If you want to create a hit series on an American network you can really only try one of those: a cop show like Homicide; a hospital series like ER or a law show like The Practice. That’s because life and death are the most valuable dramatic currency. The stakes have to be high.” The question, of course, is whether we really want to take our direction from US formulas, the nation that taught us the bulk of our bad TV habits in the first place. In the past few years though, US drama has produced some rare creatures indeed. Like The Sopranos. Or Oz. Or like The Corner, Mills’s and Simons’s Emmy award-winning six-hour mini-series tracing a year in the life of a drug corner in the black working-class streets of East Baltimore. Like with Homicide, Simons spent a year on the street with real people. The Corner is a true story. Even so, how the US learned to cope with The Corner is what South Africa needs to learn. It doesn’t even have a happy ending. According to Mills and Simon it’s been a process of deliberately breaking the rules. Writers have become the producers in US TV drama and have consistently tweaked the formulae. Just look at the history of the one-hour cop series, suggest Simon and Mills. In the 1970s, shows like Kojak were all escapist action with ridiculously noble heroes. By 1980, though, Hill Street Blues “upended all formulas and conventions” by presenting heroes with flaws – degenerate cops in lead roles. “Audiences bonded with them because they could relate.” Writers like Tom Fontana became bosses. He ran Homicide in the Nineties. Homicide and NYPD Blue took the Hill Street Blues ensemble drama to the next level – “It goes from flawed people doing a heroic job to flawed people period.” You end up with a family like The Sopranos living next door. Tom Fontana went from Homicide to Oz, the prison drama that killed its lead actor in the pilot episode. Oz is the first TV show to speak about prison life with any truth at all. The Corner does it with drugs. According to Mills and Simons, what created the climate for a series like The Corner was not only the US’s obsession with real- life drama, but also the advent of cable TV. Home Box Office, which produced The Corner, relies on subscription fees, not advertising, and therefore has no one to answer to but its viewers, whose tastes have changed as the planet grew smaller and the media more powerful. In the US soap operas are losing viewers. Real life is more interesting. The death knell for soaps was sounded the moment that OJ Simpson headed on down that highway, the instant someone pressed “record” to videotape Rodney King being beaten, the moment Monica Lewinsky sank to her knees … Welcome to the real world.