Director Lesli Linka Glatter is behind the first two episodes of History’s Navy SEALs drama Six, which launches next month. She tells DQ more about the series, produced and distributed by A+E Studios, and how she pieced together one of her favourite scenes.
I’m pulled to certain kinds of themes. On Six, I was drawn to the fact that people are being put in extraordinary circumstances and are forced to deal with who they really are.
I’m very interested in the idea of what price you pay for serving your country. How do you balance a life of service with a personal life? That’s intriguing to me and it’s complicated, complex and multi-layered. It also takes some digging. Things are not what they appear. You have to dig deep to find out what’s going on.
Lesli Linka Glatter
We’re in the golden age of TV now. The amount of extraordinary storytelling going on in TV is really exciting and there’s been a real shift in television for directors. Now we have to make TV look like a feature film, but you only have a few days. On Homeland, for which I’m an executive producer/director, we shoot an episode in nine days. That’s a very challenging thing to do. With Six, we’re doing a military show and that’s also very challenging! You have to be very clear on what story you’re telling. You want to spend all your time on the dollar scenes, not the 25 cent scenes.
Whether you’re doing 12 episodes or eight episodes, like with Six, you want every one to be fantastic. We tried to set something up in the pilot showing that these men feel more in control when they’re in battle than they do at home. There’s a set of rules you follow in battle and you know your teammates have your back – whereas at home, you don’t have that same control.
Hopefully the material dictates what the director’s style will be. The material has to tell you what it is, rather than the director imposing something on top of it. I hope everything I do feels different. I wouldn’t compare Six with any other shows I’ve worked on like Twin Peaks, Homeland or Mad Men. They’ve all been completely different. That’s what excites me as a director. What interests me are stories about people and the choices they make.
Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight) is among the cast of Six
On Six, we were exploring this idea that we’re used to seeing war footage from hand-held cameras. So we decided to do the opposite. Because the SEALs have a sense of control on a mission, we ended up shooting those scenes with a steadicam and dolly – and we used hand-held cameras for their home life, which is filled with unknowns and things there’s no way to control. We flipped it on its ear. That was something exciting to me and Bill Broyles, the writer.
It was amazing to work with our technical advisor Mitch Hall, a former SEAL who has worked on films such as Zero Dark Thirty. He’s an extraordinary guy. We had two other SEAL advisors who were there to ensure we were being true to what they do. It’s a story, not a documentary, but having them was really essential.
The first sequence we did with them was when the SEAL team was on a mission to take out a high-value target in a small village in Afghanistan. We went to the set and I asked Mitch what he would do if he had to enter the target’s building. He and the advisors walked me through it and it was extraordinary. I then shot the scene based on what they told me. The way the SEALs work is they get in and get out. They don’t want to be seen or heard; they don’t want to engage in a firefight. It’s very strategic and tactical. The movement is very balletic but, of course, they have guns. It was amazing for me to watch.
I just love being a storyteller. Even on the hard days, I’m grateful I do what I do.
Marti Noxon’s UnREAL is a hit with the critics but its debut attracted disappointing ratings
A+E Studios’ reality TV satire UnREAL launched on Lifetime in the US this week, and has attracted positive plaudits from critics. Time Magazine called it “dark, deft and empathetic,” while the Hollywood Reporter said the show “moves along at an engaging, entertaining pace.”
The LA Times, meanwhile, suggested UnREAL might help Lifetime shift perceptions about the kind of shows it airs: “Built on a pair of strong, nuanced, cliché-free performances by Shiri Appleby and Constance Zimmer this is a Lifetime series that transcends the words ‘Lifetime series.’”
Created by Marti Noxon (Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce) and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro – whose short film Sequin Raze inspired the series – UnREAL is about the seedy goings on at a hit dating show that is loosely based on The Bachelorette. It follows a young producer called Rachel (Appleby) who is willing to do anything to please her executive producer boss (Zimmer). Her main job is to manipulate contestants in order to get outrageous footage for the show, which she constantly feels guilty about.
Noxon, the senior partner in the creative team behind UnREAL, is a TV industry veteran who first came to prominence on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for which she wrote or co-wrote 22 episodes. Since then she has written and produced for a number of projects. Looking specifically at writing credits, Noxon has penned episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men and Glee, as well as serving as head writer on the first season of Private Practice.
The last couple of years have been particularly fruitful for Noxon. In 2013, it was announced she would write a reboot of Tomb Raider for MGM and GK Films. Then, just ahead of the debut of UnREAL on Lifetime, she launched Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce for cable channel Bravo. Centred on a self-help author whose private life doesn’t measure up to her public persona, the show was the channel’s first foray into original scripted production. Noxon wrote five of the 13 episodes, including the first and last. With a decent ratings performance and positive reviews, Girlfriends’ Guide has been renewed for a second season.
Grace and Frankie, from Marta Kauffman, will return for a second season
Noxon’s skill, it seems, is her ability to create storylines based around authentic female characters who attempt to juggle career progression, family, romance and friendship. In particular, she is able to run through the full emotional range, from humour to heartache. Commenting on Noxon’s early episodes of the Bravo show, the Chicago Sun-Times said they reveal a “nuanced, poignant tale, punctuated by some genuinely funny scenes.”
Having said all this, the initial audience figures for episode one of UnREAL were not good, with the show failing to pick up the ratings baton from Devious Maids, which led the programme in on its launch night.
Given the positive reaction from critics, this suggests two possibilities – first that audiences are not comfortable having the fantasy of ‘reality TV’ shattered (like meat-eaters who would rather not visit the abattoir); or, second, that the show is not a good fit for Lifetime (think back to that comment from the LA Times in the opening paragraph).
We’ll need to wait a few more episodes to develop an accurate picture of the show’s performance. But if it carries on in the same way, Lifetime will have to make a decision about whether it cut its losses or if renewing UnREAL will send out a message to audiences about where the channel actually wants to be in terms of brand profile. Internationally, the show might work well for channels that have a tougher, more satirical edge than we associate with Lifetime. Either way, UnREAL is likely to enhance Noxon’s status.
Sticking with talented female writers/producers, Marta Kauffman has been in the news this week. Kauffman will forever be known as the co-creator of Friends, arguably the most successful sitcom ever. But she has been consistently busy since that show ended way back in 2004. Her most recent project is Grace and Frankie, a sitcom for Netflix that was renewed late last month.
Electus and Marta Kauffman are working on a US version of Doc Martin
This week it was announced that Kauffman is teaming up with Ben Silverman’s producer/distributor Electus to make a US version of Doc Martin, a British comedy drama about a successful London surgeon who moves to a sleepy village in Cornwall. Doc Martin is something of a phenomenon, having been remade in territories such as France, Germany and Spain and sold as a completed series worldwide. With Kauffman and Silverman on board, it now stands a real chance of cracking the US too – though the sedate UK version will probably need to be injected with amphetamines to appeal to US cable channels.
Commenting, Silverman said: “Doc Martin has charmed viewers worldwide with its excellent concept and unique style of comedy, and we’re proud to be working with Marta Kauffman. She and her team are brilliant partners.”
In one of this week’s high-profile scripted stories, Showtime’s hit series Homeland has just started production on series five. The new set of 12 episodes will be filmed in and around Berlin – making Homeland “the first American TV series to shoot entirely in Germany,” according to Showtime and Fox21 Television Studios.
Echoing our comments about Mad Men in an earlier Writers Room, it’s fascinating to see just how many people are involved in making big US dramas work. Typically, Homeland is credited to Howard Gordon and Gideon Raff, the US and Israeli executives who successfully transformed Israeli series Prisoners of War into the long-running US show. But if you look at the executive producer line-up for season five, it also includes Alex Gansa, Alexander Cary, Chip Johannessen, Meredith Stiehm, Patrick Harbinson, Lesli Linka Glatter, Avi Nir and Ran Telem.
Gansa, who previously worked on The X-Files and Dawson’s Creek, is actually a co-creator of the show alongside Gordon and Raff, and has handled a number of key episodes throughout its life. Cary, Johannessen and Stiehm have also been writing on the show since the beginning, which presumably gives the production the kind of stable creative spine that ensures longevity.
Meredith Stiehm is part of the big team behind Showtime hit Homeland
Continuing this week’s bias towards successful female writers, it’s interesting to note how Stiehm has built her career in a broadly similar way to Noxon and Kauffman, mixing writing jobs with series creator/showrunner roles. After breaking into the business on classic series like Northern Exposure and Beverly Hills 90210, she went on to create Cold Case, which ran for seven seasons on CBS. After Cold Case, she came on board Homeland but still found time to adapt Nordic drama The Bridge for FX.
Stiehm was also linked to Cocaine Cowboys, a project originally developed by Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay for HBO. In the endlessly shifting world of US TV, however, that project ended up being piloted for TNT and written by Michelle Ashford, the creator/executive producer of Showtime’s Masters of Sex and a writer on HBO’s 2010 miniseries The Pacific. The latest word on Cocaine Cowboys is that it is undergoing creative surgery.
