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Take a trip to 'Southland'
New cop series deserves more than one visit
Ben McKenzie (left) stars as rookie Ben Sherman with Michael Cudlitz as seasoned veteran cop John Cooper in "Southland." 9 p.m. Thursday, NBC, channel 2, cable 9. RICHARD FOREMAN / NBC
By RITA SHERROW World Television Editor
Published: 4/9/2009 2:23 AM
Last Modified: 4/9/2009 6:15 AM
Just one week after 14.6 million viewers said goodbye to "ER," John Wells' newest series, "Southland" takes over the same time slot for seven weeks.
No pressure.
The series, focusing on the lives of cops in Los Angeles, opens with a doozy of a pilot film. One filled with language (some bleeped, some not), graphic violence, streaming blood, ants, raw emotion, all manner of police officers and a plethora of emotion — from revulsion to despair to arrogance to anger and beyond.
It's not a procedural. The cases investigated aren't its thing. It's about the people on that night, said John Wells, in a teleconference Monday. Each episode opens with a freeze frame of a character with a voiceover.
"It really is an attempt to say, all right, for this officer on this day or this series of days something happened that was really substantial," said Wells, whose string of hit TV shows includes "China Beach," "Third Watch" and "The West Wing."
"We're going to follow them so that you know from the beginning who it is you're going to follow because sometimes you have that initial image and then you don't actually see that character again for five or six minutes in the episode."
Executive producers Wells, director Chris Chulack and writer-creator Ann Biderman, all Emmy winners, dug through piles of crime scene photos in the course of their research for the series.
"On a lot of the old crime-scene photos, the photographer made notes which were really compelling.
"One of them that kind of led to that (story in the pilot) of a trunk seeping blood they found in Union Station. And the caption underneath was 'Officers found trunk — a bleeding trunk. Hope that it was a deer.' "
The aim of the show is to look authentic. It's shot in L.A. and off-duty LAPD officers work as extras on camera. The series' technical advisers include a former LAPD officer and SWAT member and his wife, who formerly taught at the police academy. The actors had to attend boot camp and learn how to handle the weapons they would be brandishing in the series.
The shooting style is very MTV — jerky, quick and, most of the time, distracting.
Most scenes use natural instead of artificial light to capture the circumstances.
Eight regular characters play a handful of the 9,800 police officers who patrol 500 square miles with a population of four million.
And, they play those cops as human beings, in all different sizes, shapes and attitudes.
The story lines, said Wells, will be spread across the entire ensemble of actors and may wrap up in two or three episodes or may not resurface again for weeks.
"What we're trying to do is tell large stories with individual characters or sets of characters in different weeks. So there are weeks in which one group of characters has a great deal to do and their stories are reflected with what they have to do."
But a pilot film, that hour-long, expensively made "get-to-know-us-quickly" episode airing this week, does not a series make. Stay tuned for a few weeks before you make up your mind.
SOUTHLAND
When: 9 p.m. Thursday
Where: NBC, channel 2, cable
channel 9
Rita Sherrow 581-8360
rita.sherrow@tulsaworld.com
By RITA SHERROW World Television Editor
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