USA's Newest Oddball: A Hero Who Feels the Crime
David Creegan faced difficult odds when it came to cracking the crowded
line-up of television detectives. Then he had a stroke of good fortune: he
was shot in the head.
Creegan is the fictional lead character in Touching Evil, an offbeat,
unsettling police drama that has its premiere on Friday 12 March, 2004. He
works for the Organized and Serial Crime Unit, investigating nasty
incidents in the San Francisco area, but these days mere grisliness is not
enough to make an impression in television. That's where the gunshot to
the head comes in.
It occurs in the opening minutes of the pilot: Creegan takes a bullet
about an inch above his right eyebrow. When he comes to after brain
surgery, he is a changed man: a strange and disquieting man, a man with a
lot less inhibition and a lot more insight than most detectives. "There
are consequences to having a piece of your frontal lobe removed, and one
of them is: no shame," said Jeffrey Donovan, the actor who was given the
job of portraying the quirky Creegan and took it seriously enough to
consult a neurologist about brain injuries. "I have no inhibition; I will
just say whatever I feel. The other thing is sequential disorder. You put
your pants on, you put your socks on, you put your shoes on; he would put
his shoes on, his socks on, then his pants on."
Those kinds of oddities place Creegan in a class with USA's other
not-quite-right crime solver, Adrian Monk, the obsessive-compulsive played
by Tony Shalhoub. But "Touching Evil," unlike "Monk," will never be
nominated for Emmys in the comedy categories. The crimes are ugly (in the
pilot, children are kidnapped), and Creegan's tics are a vehicle for
getting to the dark side of human nature: his mental instability enables
him to see the world as criminals see it. And that, Mr. Donovan said, is
what he hopes will set the show apart from television's many other police
dramas.
The acting challenge has been invigorating, said Mr. Donovan, who until
now has been best known as Jeffrey in the film "Book of Shadows: Blair
Witch 2": "How do you play a detective who's supposed to keep himself
removed from what's going on with the people who are creating these
horrific crimes, yet he feels their pain?"
Touching Evil is based on a British series of the same name from the late
1990's, but Mr. Donovan's interpretation of the lead character is more
complex and unpredictable than in the British version. Much of that comes
from the script - the pilot is by Bruno Heller - and from the director,
Allen Hughes. But some of what viewers will see, Mr. Donovan said, is his
spontaneous contribution: for instance, a scene on an airplane where he
begins tossing peanuts and crackers about, oblivious to what other
passengers might think. "Stuff like that was not in the script," Mr.
Donovan said. "I kind of invented that. And God bless Allen Hughes and the
network: they let me do anything I want."
Dealing with the inventiveness falls first and foremost to Vera Farmiga,
who plays Creegan's reluctant partner, Susan Branca. Branca often finds
herself apologizing for Creegan's odd behaviour at crime scenes or trying
to keep him from walking into onrushing traffic. But in this intricate
series, Branca is her own kind of puzzle, which is just as Ms. Farmiga
wants it. "It's not just playing straight man to Creegan's loony," she
said. "With Branca, what you see is not always what you get. There is a
duplicity there. She has a very strong sense of her identity and purpose,
and yet at times she verges on identity crisis. Branca has her turn in
confronting her own demons."
Arnold Rifkin, one of the executive producers of Touching Evil, first
stumbled on the British version of the show when he was president of the
William Morris Agency. He said he was so convinced of the show's potential
for American audiences that when he resigned from William Morris in 1999,
he sought to buy the rights, putting up his own money. Later he and the
actor Bruce Willis formed Cheyenne Enterprises and shopped Touching Evil
to the major networks, but, Mr. Rifkin said, the response was always the
same: "They thought it was too dark." Eventually Mr. Rifkin paid a call to
USA, where executives were more receptive. "Dead Zone was already on the
air," Mr. Rifkin said, referring to the USA series about a man who emerges
from a six-year coma with the power to see into the past and the future.
"That's why it was the perfect network to go to."
In addition to the pilot, USA has ordered 11 one-hour episodes of Touching
Evil, which are now being filmed in British Columbia. In doing so it has
acquired the ingredients for an exceedingly odd network party: imagine,
gathered around the punch bowl, Adrian Monk, obsessively lining up the
spoons; David Creegan, wearing his socks over his shoes; and Johnny Smith
(Anthony Michael Hall) from "The Dead Zone," having a psychic vision
worthy of a Stephen King novel, which is where that character began. "It
is interesting, though not necessarily by design, that shows that have
resonated with us as programmers - and we hope with our audience - have
been with imperfect heroes," said Jeff Wachtel, executive vice president
for original programming at USA. "It seems that in a complicated world, we
all understand more and more that the person who runs into the building to
save your life may not actually be the most well-adjusted man or woman in
the world. So the idea of heroes who have flaws, we find that works for
us. Every good show, I think, is a metaphor for part of our experience,"
he continued. "There's a little bit of Monk in everyone." As for Touching
Evil, the exploration of how Creegan, Branca and their colleagues can
immerse themselves in horrific crimes and still try to have home lives,
love lives - perhaps that is not so different from the balancing act
everyone has to negotiate between stress at work, domestic demands and
personal needs.
Mr. Wachtel acknowledged that committing to a crime show when there were
already so many good ones on the air gave the network pause. "When we got
'Touching Evil,' it was, 'Should we make this one?' - because it's a cop
show," he said. He and others figured that the way to keep it from
becoming just another cop show was to proceed atypically. "And so almost
every choice we made in shooting the pilot - from the director, Allen
Hughes, to the unknown star, Jeff Donovan - was an unorthodox decision,"
he said.
Mr. Hughes and his twin brother, Albert, are known as film directors
("Dead Presidents," "Menace II Society") and had little experience in
television before signing on as part of the producing team for Touching
Evil. "We had looked at some cop dramas before, and they just all turned
out to be cop dramas," said Allen Hughes, who ended up directing the pilot
as well as being an executive producer. Usually, Mr. Hughes said, he is
drawn to the secondary characters in the scripts he reads, but not this
time. "This guy reminded me a lot of myself," he said of Creegan. "He
marches to the beat of his own drummer, looking at things a different way.
There was also the excitement of wanting to bring something different to
TV as far as an energy, a pacing, a style of music that maybe goes to the
subtext of the soul," Mr. Hughes continued. "TV traditionally doesn't use
those tools, as far as telling a story and having patience and not cutting
too fast and using actors to really go through the emotions and giving
them time to really develop these emotions."
Mr. Wachtel said the payoff in choosing a film director was evident from
the opening moments of the pilot. In these ominous, alluring few minutes,
Creegan sustains the wound that underpins the whole series, and the tone
for Touching Evil is set. "If you look at the first five minutes of the
pilot, you could write that scene: 'Cop drives up to house, cop walks
through house, cop gets shot in the head,'" Mr. Wachtel said. "That's
basically the only thing that happens. But Allen has this kind of filmic
way to bring you into that scene that's just not normal; it's not the
regular way to do it. And we're encouraging that."
© Neil Genzlinger/ NY
Times
USA Takes to Touching Evil
Sometimes it takes a while for a cable network to find its particular
niche. With its latest series entry, USA Network just may have found that
elusive groove. In the summer of 2002, USA premiered two series with two
things in common: both began life at other networks, and both feature
damaged individuals overcoming their difficulties to help others.
In "The Dead Zone," adapted from the novel by Stephen King (and originally
developed for UPN), coma victim Johnny Smith (Anthony Michael Hall)
awakens with psychic powers that he tries to use for good intentions. In
"Monk," originally developed for ABC, detective Adrian Monk (Tony
Shalhoub) battles his grief over his slain wife and his
obsessive-compulsive disorder to solve crimes that baffle the police.
On Friday, March 12, USA hopes lightning will strike three times with the
premiere of "Touching Evil," adapted from writer Paul Abbott's British
series of the same name, which aired on PBS' "Mystery!" The show's
migration to the United States began when both Arnold Rifkin and his
producing partner in Cheyenne Enterprises, actor Bruce Willis, fell in
love with the British original. First aired in the UK in 1997, it starred
Robson Green ("Wire in the Blood") as Dave Creegan, a police detective who
returns to the job after having a near-death experience as a result of a
bullet to the brain. His brush with mortality makes him moody and
reckless, which both helps and hinders his pursuit of serial killers.
In the U.S. version, Jeffrey Donovan ("Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2")
takes on the role of Creegan, who returns after a 12-month leave of
absence -- caused by the same gunshot to the head -- to the FBI's new
Organized and Serial Crime Unit, a rapid-response, elite crime squad.
There, he's partnered with smart and skeptical Susan Branca (Vera Farmiga,
"Iron Jawed Angels"), who's not sure what to expect from her unpredictable
partner.
Instead of Green's dark, death-wish Creegan, Donovan's Creegan suffers
from the more practical side effects of frontal-lobe trauma. "Green kept
it all inside," Donovan says. "What I've been trying to bring to my
Creegan is that his emotional chaos is palpable. You see him hurting
through every scene. You see him going through the pain of these
injuries."
Donovan did a lot of research on the after-effects of head trauma. "You
lose the filter that protects you from emotion," he says. "If I see
someone dead, if I'm hurt by it, I'll cry. If I think it's funny, I'll
laugh, even if it's inappropriate. Part of the frontal-lobe injury is a
loss of shame. That's a big factor. He can say anything and do anything he
wants, which is different than what Green did. That's what is going to
make our show distinct from the British version. We are really going into
the psychological defect of a frontal-lobe injury from a gunshot, and it
plays out in each case."
Along with Rifkin and Willis as executive producers -- and show runner
Robert Palm -- Touching Evil marks the TV debut of the Hughes Brothers
("Menace II Society," "From Hell"). Albert Hughes is an executive
producer, while brother Allen is also an executive producer and director
(including the pilot). Allen Hughes isn't particularly worried about fans
of the original complaining about changes -- much as he wasn't worried
about concerns from the fans of the graphic novel that inspired "From
Hell." "Why would we do the graphic novel?" he asks. "The graphic novel
has been done. And why would we do exactly what they did [in the UK]? In
this day and age, you can just jump on Amazon and order the Touching Evil
video. Why do that? It would be boring. Let's take the best things about
the show, which are the crimes and touching evil, basically, how it
affects these people, namely Creegan, and how his handicap has affected
his job to some degree. Green played Creegan very straight and cold. I
respect that, but I made a pact with myself before we did 'From Hell,' I
can't do things, movies or TV or whatever, where the bad guy is more
interesting than our lead."
Lest anyone think that Willis is just a name on the letterhead for this
show, Rifkin points out, "Bruce offered to Robson Green to do an episode
of the British version. That's how much in love with the show he was."
