from Media week; April 97
"Not while I'm drawing a breath," he says, as he grabs the remote from her and shuts off the TV. For those who know the history of the show, the line is a perfectly thrown curveball, delivered with just the right touch of irony. They can afford to script inside jokes these days.
That Chicago Hope is still drawing breath after a disastrous first season—in which it went head-to-head with ER--is something of a miracle. That the show has quietly become one of the cornerstones with which CBS Entertainment chief Leslie Moonves hopes to build the network's future is equally surprising. Three years ago, in another life, Moonves was head of Warner Bros. Television, which produces ER, and "Keep Hope Alive" could hardly have been his professional battle cry.
Yet, as Chicago Hope heads toward the finish of its third season, it has consistently delivered for CBS, so much so that around Christmas Moonves asked for two additional episodes, upping this season's order to 26. Even more crucial than consistently winning its time slot each Monday at 10 p.m., the show is doing precisely what Moonves wants the network as a whole to do—attract younger viewers without losing older ones.
Up to this point in the season, Hope is CBS' highest-rated series in all the key demographic groups. Among women 18-34, Hope pulled in 11 percent more than No. 2-ranked CBS sibling Cybill and drew in 8 percent more 18-34 men. Move up the age scale and you follow a bell curve, with the high point among those 18-49, then a slight dip among those 25-54.
Beyond that, Hope is enticing a significant number of those viewers to reach for the remote. Consider March 17: Chicago Hope won its hour with a 19 share, and households tuned to CBS jumped 22 percent for Hope over its lead-in, Ink, starring Ted Danson. That a significant part of Hope's viewing audience made the effort to switch channels is not something to be underestimated in a world where a lot of people would rather be bored than switch--witness the hammock-spot between Friends and Seinfeld on NBC's Thursday night. A video of fish could do a 26 share there.
When Moonves took over CBS Entertainment a year ago and began to stop the ratings slide the network had been on for more than two years, one of the first things he did was call the show's executive producer, John Tinker. Moonves had some casting suggestions, among them his close friend Mark Harmon, who had been on St. Elsewhere when Tinker was one of its Emmy-winning writer/producers.
Tinker, whose other writing/producing credits include L.A. Law, Knots Landing, Tattinger's and the comedy Home Fires, is an unlikely savior for Chicago Hope, which was created by, and carried the singular voice of, David E. Kelley. If Tinker had been given the choice, he says he would have opted for ER.
"This show is about the best people in the best institution and I tend toward the first-rate people in second-rate institutions, so if you'd given me a choice between ER and Chicago Hope in their first outings, I would have naturally gravitated toward ER," says Tinker, an intense and serious type who's capable of being funny when you least expect it.
"I was brought in by David [late in the show's first season] because the writing staff he had in place didn't seem to be working out," says Tinker. "I had worked on L.A. Law and David was in the same building doing Picket Fences and our paths would occasionally cross. The only sage advice I gave him was that you can't do this alone, which he quickly proved me wrong—he does do it alone. And therein lay part of the problem: not only does David do it alone, no one does it like David. That's in large part why I think the first writing staff wasn't working out."
In its second season, Kelley completely stopped writing for the show—a decision that many thought would be the death of Chicago Hope, especially when that news was followed by the departure of two key stars, Mandy Patinkin and Peter MacNichol. Instead, it became a time to wean its writers from trying to imitate Kelley's style without turning off Hope's solid and growing core viewers.
"I'm a little more character-oriented," says Tinker. Where Kelley would anchor shows with a moral or ethical dilemma, Tinker would anchor episodes with character turns. By the end of the second season, the show had become so character-involved that some critics attacked Tinker for turning it into a soap opera.
Then David Kelley brought in director Bill D'Elia, whose tenure in television has taken him through some of the medium's best, including Northern Exposure, Picket Fences and Law and Order. "In the second season finale, you had people getting shot, rushing off to New Zealand, quitting, flying to Africa, and some would say got the show had gotten out of control," says Tinker. "But Bill and I knew we wanted to dismantle it completely ... sort of finish that first part of the renovation."
Says D'Elia: "I felt the show had gone too far away from the moral and ethical dilemmas. We wanted it to be character-driven but still tell the typical Chicago Hope stories where you take an issue and examine it." The show had always been shot in a classic style--master shots and close-ups, but "I wanted to loosen it up a lot," D'Elia adds, in calm, Zen-like tones. "We all know we're in the hospital and we know what it looks like. Don't worry about it: move the camera. We went with a longer lens, more dramatic lighting style."
With a new direction, a new network chief and the newly minted team of Tinker and D'Elia at the top, the hospital drama's third season looked like an adventure with the potential for disaster.
But something about the combination of Tinker and D'Elia worked. They quickly found they had a very similar creative aesthetic, they both loved the process of storytelling and they soon began to trust each other's instincts.
"Many episodic dramas are structured this way, having two people at the top," says Tinker. "Up to this point I thought it was a terrible system. What's been fun is that this year feels very first season-ish. We really feel like we made up a new show this year."
"We sit every day and say things like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if this happened, or, 'Hey, I just read about that; what do you think?" says D'Elia. "We know where we want the characters to go, but we don't know specifically how we're going to get there."
When Moonves asked them to consider adding two additional episodes to the season, they were faced with another plot twist. The two were desperately trying to shoot two other shows simultaneously, in part to meet Moonves' original 24-show order, already one more than the typical 23.
"We sat down and looked at it from every angle and there was no way we could do more than 24 episodes this year," says D'Elia. Almost as soon as they said no, they began trying to find a way to say yes.
"Obviously it was good for us," says Tinker. "They could keep airing shows and not put on a repeat or pull us off. But the network really wanted the shows and a large part of me wanted to give the people who were being very supportive of us what they needed."
There are four more episodes to shoot and about twice that left to air before the house that Kelley built--and that Tinker and D'Elia remodeled--can settle. Next year is already beginning to take shape in their minds, though the show has hit a stride and will not require the sort of radical surgery that took place at the end of last season.
"It's about how we tell this story in a way that makes you want to keep coming back to the campfire Monday night," says D'Elia. Moonves clearly thinks that Tinker and D'Elia can be depended on to keep those home fires burning. CBS is counting on the continued heat.