EXHILARATING’’

CONTENDERS THE WRITER
Frisky
Business
“The Girlfriend
Experience”
pushed the
envelope on
Starz.
LIMITED SERIES
Scribes Take Bigger
Risks in Short Runs
Writers revel in the chance to tell complete stories and break the
rules — even as they wonder if their networks will back them up
By BOB VERINI
THE LIMITED SERIES is
staking a claim to 24K status
in television’s current
Golden Age.
While so-called “minis”
once ladled out meat
and potatoes narrative
in appointment TV epics,
today’s short form is a
binge-worthy oasis of offbeat,
buzzy entertainment.
This year alone, David
Farr inserted radical time,
place, and plot changes
in adapting international
bestseller “The Night Manager”
for AMC. In a unique
partnership, indie auteurs
Lodge Kerrigan and Amy
Seimetz were tapped by Steven
Soderbergh for equal
shares in Starz’s sexually
groundbreaking “The Girlfriend
Experience.” For season
two of FX’s “Fargo,”
Noah Hawley crafted a cold
open consisting of footage
from a (fake) 1950s Ronald
Reagan Western, and had a
UFO drop into the midst of
a climactic shootout.
Whether dazzling or puzzling
viewers, these scribes
see freedom and opportunity
traditional episodic
doesn’t necessarily afford.
“If you’re coming in to
write specific episodes in a
big series,” says Farr (who
did just that on the U.K.’s
“MI-5”), “there’s a tendency
for a writer to push it, hard,
because you want to show
what you can do.” Solo control
of a single narrative
affords what Hawley calls
“a chance to make a movie.
… It’s a complete thought
you’re expressing.”
To turn John le Carré’s
high-stakes espionage
yarn into a complete TV
thought, Farr shifted the
action from 1990s Colombia
to contemporary Egypt’s
“Arab Spring,” and teased
out a tight cat-and-mouse
between an ordinary hotel
manager and a wicked zillionaire
arms broker.
“It takes you back and
forth in time, plays with the
audience in terms of withholding
and giving information,
which can either
entice or frustrate,” he says,
but he felt he could rely on
the novel’s “strong skeletal
structure.”
In commissioning a
series lightly inspired by his
2009 movie about a highclass
call girl, Soderbergh
gambled on two bold indie
artists getting more out of
each other (and providing
It takes you back
and forth in time,
plays with the
audience in terms
of withholding
and giving
information,
which can
either entice or
frustrate.”
David Farr
gender perspective) if they
worked together and were
left alone. Seimetz and Kerrigan
divvied up directing
12 episodes equitably, wrote
the episodes together before
going to camera, and flipped
a coin for episode 13 rights.
Kerrigan reports, “Steven’s
notes were always
suggestions, take what you
want.” When all was said
and done, “Starz didn’t give
a single note,” not even
on the finale’s eye-opening
18-minute sex scene
among protagonist Christine,
a client, and another
male escort in what Kerrigan
calls “this cuckold fantasy”
of “intimacy, control,
and performance.”
The pair enjoyed creating,
in Seimetz’s words, “this
strange, unapologetic character
with a lot of traits
you would call, in cinema
or in television, much more
masculine.”
Kerrigan lines them up
as “selfish, contradictory,
manipulative, ambitious
… someone unpredictable
whom the audience would
hopefully be glued to.”
Christine ultimately
rejects family and the law
for continued escort work.
“If you were working in network,
you’d have her have
a big law firm and she’s
really successful, and she’s
still escorting,” Seimetz says.
“But that’s just not honest.”
In an edgier art form, she
can be made to act without
shame. “She’s like, ‘You
know what, I don’t want to
face that right now. I want
to focus on what makes me
feel good, and what I have
control over.’”
When it comes to riskiness,
the sophomore season
of “Fargo” probably took
the cake.
Hawley calls his “Massacre
at Sioux Falls” opening,
with its grainy, blackand-white
faux-film fakeout,
“a sort of reverse ‘Sopranos’
ending. I figured half the
audience would go, ‘Oh crap,
I thought we were watching
“Fargo”’ and they’d turn
the channel to look for it.
I kept waiting for FX to say,
‘You can’t do that.’” If viewers
stewed, Hawley justifies
his choice as directly
relevant to his story’s waiting-for-Reagan
and American
Indian themes.
Likewise the UFO
descent, allowing a working
stiff to dispatch a distracted
crime kingpin. In 1979,
Hawley remembers, “We’d
had ‘Close Encounters’ and
‘Star Wars’; we’d survived
Watergate. … There was
this deep-seated sense of
paranoia.”
In that context, a benign
alien intervention “had an
oddness-offness to it, funny
and unsettling at the same.
It’s one of those things
that’s so unprocessable, it
becomes sublime.”
JUNE 14, 2016 VARIETY.COM
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