| *~*~*~*~*Con't from page 1*~*~*~*~* "It's the hardest thing I've ever done," says Molly Price, who plays long-suffering officer Faith Yokas and admits she's nervous half the time she's at work, speeding down the streets in a police car or jumping from rooftops chasing after a "perp" with co-star, Jason Wiles, her brash on-the-beat partner. "To try to explain it to people, you sound like such a 'baby head,' but it's dangerous. "If we're shooting in front of a crack house, these guys aren't watching television, they have no idea what 'Third Watch' is," she continues, "and they see Jason and I running across the street with our guns drawn. There's no protection if some crazy addict opens the window and shoots you. So you're always aware of that." The process and the place at times prove sobering. "The sick part of that is, as an actor, it's like you're being breast-fed with what you're able to work with. We really bare the brunt, so it doesn't require you to have to act a lot," Price says. But in the first season, the high-octane action took center stage over the nine principal characters-two pairs of cops, two pairs in the paramedics unit, and a firefighter (Carlson is the newcomer to the squad this fall). Albeit an adrenaline rush for the eyes, the harried 46 minutes of nonstop rescues left viewers detached from the players, unable to distinguish one brave hero saving a life from another. And the disconnect was reflected in the ratings. After one preview in "ER's" time slot in September 1999, the show settled into its original 8 p.m. Sunday slot, where it languished with ratings that for most other shows would have meant certain death. But the ailing series was revived for a second season, largely due to Wells and his reputation as Emmy-winning producer of "ER" and "The West Wing." However, that second chance came with the mandate from NBC that a change needed to be made. "We spent a lot of time talking about how we should actually proceed," remembers Wells. "Having taken one direction that we thought was working OK, but not yet working as well as we wanted it, it felt like we really only had one more chance to get it into a direction we'd be more interested in." By the time fall rolled around, "Third Watch" had switched its focus from action sequences and four-or five-character story lines an episode, to storytelling that Wells says is akin to novels, with chapters that spotlight only one or two characters each week. "They're lives are all interrelated, so in one chapter, or one episode, a whole show may be about that character, and in the next episode, that same character may be a smaller part of another story line," he explains. "It's a variation on the large ensemble, but it still requires a large ensemble to do." For Beach it allows the audience and the actors to "get to know more about these people and their situations and what makes them tick. That's why an audience tunes in, to feel something for the characters." Sources close to the series say producers are hoping to land a two-year commitment for "Third Watch" as sort of a package deal with Wells' "West Wing," which has already solidified its two-year pick-up. Chulack denies that such a deal is being brokered with the network. Nevertheless, the possibilities of "Third Watch" making it to 2004 are good, as it consistently wins its time slot with 18-to 49-year-old viewers, the creme de la creme demographic for finicky advertisers. And it continues to build on its audience Monday nights-it's a second-place contender to CBS' "Family Law'-with its hard-edged subject matter. In one of this season's most powerful episodes, written by Wells, Faith battles with her alcoholic husband over an unexpected pregnancy, a third child he wants but she doesn't and is considering aborting. It initially appears that Faith will lose the baby when she falls in pursuit of a rapist. Yet, in an unexpected twist, Wells made the decision to have Faith follow through with the abortion, going so far as to see her lying on the table with a wrenchingly painful expression. "I had heard that the network was a little uncomfortable about dealing with that subject," Price recalls. "John felt as though it wasn't so much about abortion as it was about making hard decisions. And I liked going into that part of me, because it's probably the part of me that's the most vulnerable, the part you don't want to have to deal with. It taught me a big lesson. It taught me to be humble." That episode is an example of the kind of ambitious, detailed storytelling that was missing from the series last season, says Ed Bernero, the show's co-creator and supervising producer. "Last year, we tried to stick with a story that stayed within that eight-hour shift, and we realized we needed to free ourselves from that for storytelling purposes," he says. "We really took the handcuffs off, and are telling the stories we wanted to tell." "We try to find a story that's interesting about the character first," says Wells, "then work the other elements of the action back in. That's actually much easier than the other way around .... If you're just writing action, what is it really about? It's just the events, and the event itself isn't inherently interesting." A perfect balance of the two airs Monday night, in the episode featuring the inferno. Eddie Cibrian takes the lead as firefighter Jimmy Doherty, a hapless playboy forced to come to terms with his past transgressions. He's also contending with the possible death of his best friend, a fellow firefighter, who's trapped in the burning building. In about an hour, at the sugar refinery, Cibrian shifts from a fast-paced tactical alert scene (with guest star Jason Sehorn of the New York Giants) to a somber, emotional scene in which he searches for missing firefighters in a blackened, charred warehouse. The aim was to weave the action and the emotion together to create something more powerful through the combination of those separate forces. "We wanted to take Jimmy Doherty to the next step in his development as a father and growing into a man," says Bernero. "At the same time, we wanted to do an episode that portrayed firefighters as the complete heroes we see them as." Certainly it was one of the more grueling for Cibrian. "It's tougher when it's your episode, because you're working a lot harder, because you're in almost all of the shots. But it's OK, because then when it's not your episode, you have more days off and you can relax," he says. It's his day off after wrapping his eight-day shoot, which was completed during what was expected to be one of New York's worst snowstorm. "Yeah, the storm of the century didn't happen, but we were the only show scheduled to shoot on those days. Everyone else canceled," he says, laughing. "We're crazy," Cibrian jokes. "That's all we are is crazy." |