| TACKLING TRAGEDY HEAD-ON -- NBC'S `THIRD WATCH' VENTURES INTO NEW DRAMATIC TERRITORY By VIRGINIA ROHAN, Staff Writer The entire entertainment industry has been reeling since Sept. 11, but one television series has been especially shaken by the terrorist attacks: NBC's "Third Watch." Filmed in a Brooklyn studio and all over the five boroughs, the drama is about the New York City firefighters, paramedics, and policemen who work the 3 to 11 p.m. shift. In light of the tragedy, media observers wondered, how could these make-believe rescuers carry on? How could we ever accept their fictional trials and tribulations after seeing the real devastation and learning that 343 firefighters had lost their lives? John Wells, "Third Watch" co-creator and executive producer, said he struggled with how to reintroduce the two-year-old series this fall. "We were a little stumped on how we would transition back to doing fictionalized drama when everyone's lives had sadly and tragically altered," Wells said. "What we decided was, we didn't have a way to fictionalize it in a way that made any sense or that wouldn't seem disrespectful or inappropriate or seem to trivialize it. We decided to allow the people we worked with to tell their stories." After much soul-searching, Wells and his team came up with a highly unusual three-week programming strategy that directly addresses the World Trade Center disaster. It begins tonight with a two-hour docu-style tribute to the real rescuers -- some of whom work as technical advisers and actors on "Third Watch" -- then continues, on the next two Mondays, with dramatic episodes that cover the day before the disaster, and the weeks after it. Will the series portray the fictional characters as having actually been at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11? "Some will have been down there at various times. Some won't. We were very clear to not make it appear as if any of them had been there at the very beginning," Wells said. "We have tried to stay vague out of a hope of not being exploitive." This unusual "Third Watch" trilogy is the latest of several remarkable and unprecedented television events, including the star-studded "America: A Tribute to Heroes" telethon, and the special episode of "The West Wing," another of Wells' dramas, that dealt with a terrorist threat. "It's a different problem on 'West Wing,' where it is a fictional White House that is not involved in current events," Wells said. "In the case of 'Third Watch,' it's really a workplace drama about a specific place. It's not Gotham, so we felt we had to go back and incorporate something like this into the series." The "Third Watch" episodes were so hastily produced they were not available for preview. But on Thursday Wells, who had been reluctant to do publicity about this story arc, agreed to talk with television writers by telephone about the thinking behind it. "We, like most of the nation, spent the first 10 days or two weeks staring at the television set, and worrying about the people who are there," said Wells, noting that Molly Price, who plays Police Officer Faith Yokas on the series, was engaged to a New York City firefighter. (He survived the disaster, and the pair were scheduled to be married this past weekend.) "We were ...just kind of numb, unsure of how to proceed." "Third Watch" has four primary advisers, four other emergency personnel who are actors on the series, and about 15 more who have worked as extras. "And as we started to make phone calls to the people we work with, once they had gotten home, gotten a little sleep, once they were off the pile, they all wanted to start talking," Wells said. Initially, he said, the police and fire departments were "discouraging people from individually talking." But those restrictions eased, and two weeks ago "Third Watch" got permission to interview rescuers. For tonight's program, Wells used as a model the Peabody Award-winning "Vets" episode of "China Beach" that featured interviews with Vietnam veterans who had contributed story ideas to that series. Wells and Julia Hebert, "Third Watch" executive story editor, interviewed 44 people from a number of different New York City firehouses and precincts. Many of the actors from the series -- who had been visiting precincts and firehouses in "sort of our own very minor version of the USO" -- were also present during these sessions. "It was an extraordinary experience. We shot about 62 hours. ... What we didn't anticipate was, when we got to the fire stations, people kind of lined up. They wanted to talk," Wells said. "I would ask three questions, and then people would talk for 45 minutes." A self-described "news junkie," Wells said that he was nonetheless surprised by some of the stories -- especially from those rescuers who got to the scene before the second plane hit. "They arrived when plane parts were falling, and huge sheets of glass, and large pieces of aluminum, and they were trying to organize command centers," Wells said. "It's the details and the individual stories that are so extraordinary and really get across the sense of what it was like to be there." Three teams of editors tackled the footage. When the "Third Watch" producers saw it, Wells said, "we realized we would not be able to, in the 44 minutes allotted to us, do it justice." NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker readily agreed to give Wells a full two hours tonight. While there was little debate about doing that special, Wells said, there were "lots of talks" about doing the next two episodes. He especially struggled after taking a police-escorted tour of the site. "It's shocking," Wells said. "The scale of it, and just the devastation. More than that, there's something sacred about it now. "We knew we couldn't do anything that implied that our fictional characters were there. We were very concerned about how we would portray their involvement. We knew that we needed them to have experienced some of it so that it could affect their lives as fictionalized characters going forward, but we were very concerned about doing it in any way that seemed disrespectful to the people who were there, and to the tragedies that have happened for so many families." (They also stressed that the NBC promotional department had to be "very careful about using the word 'heroes' to describe our fictional characters," he said.) Next week's episode, "September 10th," chronicles the normal day that preceded the tragedy. The following week's episode, "After Time," opens 10 days later, and then jumps to another 10 days after that. "We show something of the things that we were going through ... and that they are still very involved with," Wells said. He said that many of the firemen and policemen whom the show works with encouraged them to do these episodes, in the hope that "some of the issues that are coming up for us can be brought to the larger nation." For example, Wells said, "everyone who was down there when the buildings collapsed has inhaled a very large quantity of unknown [particles]. They're all very frightened about that. And they've asked us to stay in touch with that." On a purely technical level, "Third Watch" was severely disrupted by the disaster. "We use the city's resources -- firetrucks, police cars, and they stopped traffic for us [during filming]," Wells said. "We're just getting back to being able to use some of those things from the various departments again." Before the tragedy, "Third Watch" had filmed five new episodes, the first two of which will have to be "substantially" retooled because they contain "inappropriate" story lines, Wells said. One, for example, involves an Arabic storekeeper who killed a black shoplifter, which touches off a riot. The other episodes will be somewhat retooled, to include new scenes that make reference to the World Trade Center disaster. "We want to make sure there's a continuity so it doesn't feel as if we've simply forgotten about it," Wells said. "We'll keep coming back to Sept. 11 as the season goes along. The characters' lives will be changed by it, but we'll be trying to focus on how do you get back to something that's normal?" That is, in fact, one of the questions that Wells asked the real rescuers in tonight's program. Said Wells, "What several people said is, 'Well, we will return to a normal that is different from the normal that we have known.'" |