© (C) 2009 TNT/Electric Entertainment Timothy Hutton in LEVERAGE - Season 1 - "The Second David Job"

Television:

Exclusive Interview: THE CREATORS OF 'LEVERAGE' REFLECT BACK ON SEASON 1 - PART 1

John Rogers and Chris Downey offer up their thoughts on the season finale (airing Tuesday night at 9:00 p.m. EST on TNT) and keeping the show consistent throughout all thirteen episodes

By CARL CORTEZ, Contributing Editor
Published 2/22/2009

Any first season show has the unenviable task of creating characters and a world that audiences are going to want to turn into week after week. And this year alone, the networks have struggled very often to make that balance work.

Luckily for John Rogers and Chris Downey, the creators of TNT’s new smash series LEVERAGE, they were able to hit their show out of the ballpark from the pilot on, with thirteen stellar episodes focusing on former insurance agent Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton) who teams up with a gang of thieves in order to take down the criminal rich who hurt the helpless poor.

It’s a timely series, but done in a very fun and breezy style. The series concludes its first season on Tuesday, February 24 at 9:00 p.m. on TNT following a marathon of the first 12 episodes beginning at 10:00 am (the show returns for Season 2 this summer) and iF visited the set during the filming of the finale to speak with Rogers and Downey about how far they’ve come.

The final days were spent at the now closed Ambassador College in Pasadena, CA which was used as base camp for a majority of “The Second David Job” filming.

Here is what the writers had to say about filming at this location and their thoughts on LEVERAGE’s first season as a whole.

iF MAGAZINE: This location has turned out to be quite a boon for the finale.

JOHN ROGERS: We were able to use a mansion which is the team’s headquarters for this particular operation. We have a restoration room, we have an art gallery, we have a coffee shop. It’s been a big episode.

DOWNEY: The college building we turned into an art museum. We actually feel we could convince passersbys that it’s an actual museum. If we put an ad on Craig’s List, I’m sure we could charge people at the door for people to see the world’s greatest art.

iF: You had me fooled.

ROGERS: [All the art] our production designer Lauren Crasco brought in and set decorated -- they actually built the walls for that gallery. They turned the entire place into a perfectly believable New York style art museum.

iF: Did you use this location exclusively for Part 2 of the season finale or both parts?

DOWNEY: They cross-pollinate a little. The interior of the art gallery is almost exclusively in the season finale, while the exterior of the party is mostly in the first part. It’s just inside and outside. We introduce the museum in the first half and we do all sorts of horrible things to it in the second half.

iF: Are you relieved the season is coming to an end?

DOWNEY: We’re a little happy and we’re going to be a little sad. I’m getting that feeling from everybody. People from the crew are coming up to me now and saying, “I can’t believe there’s four days left.” But the short answer is “yes, we’re pretty tired.”

ROGERS:  Right after the strike, when the show got picked up, Chris and I started reading scripts and breaking stories. We read 210 scripts for four jobs. We hired the tiniest writing staff in Hollywood, a grand total of four writing entities, most who have not worked in television before. We did the scripts and moved into production. Actually, because our writers were staff writers, their contracts couldn’t be extended. So it was myself, Chris and co-producer Amy Berg who were on for the last five episodes. A lot of them had been written by the other writers, unfortunately they couldn’t work on them. One of us would be on set, one of us would be writing the next one and the other one would be breaking the episode after that.

iF:  You have a small staff, but there has to be a value because when you have large staffs, you have off episodes. So it must be good that with a tight staff since everyone knows what's going on.

ROGERS: Both Chris and I were breaking every episode, except ones where he’d be off writing or I’d be off writing, but that’s it. One of us was in the room. There is a lot of value to a small staff. You really know each other, you’re really focused. I know some showrunners like running two rooms, but I’m not nuts about it. One room makes it feel like everyone’s writing the same show, especially when the entire staff is involved in breaking every episode.

DOWNEY: We created the show, but I can honestly say our staff with no experience, taught me how to write the show in a lot of ways. I learned how to write different characters from our staff. Just to give them credit, you get a script, with a new show, you read it, “wow, that is how you write that character.” I think having a small staff was very valuable, because we took different things from each other.

ROGERS: I have been on big staffs. There are a couple of weeks where you slack off, but here, we all sit at the same table, literally ten hours a day. We eat lunch in that room. So everyone on that staff was living, eating and breathing that show. The great thing is nobody’s ideas get passed up either. At no point, do you get drowned out in the noise. The writers brought a lot of great research in, a lot of great story ideas that might have been put on a shelf on another show because they were baby writers, but with us, “that’s really good, let’s build a show around it.” We got a couple of great episodes out of that.

iF: What have you learned about your show, now that you’re at the end of the season?

DOWNEY: Let me just say, I believe and I think I can speak for John, we did the show we set out to make. Some times you’re on the show, “the show is going to be about the couple,” and by episode three, “this couple is terrible and we’re going to make it about the friends.” And then you go with it, and make it about the friends for good or ill. We set out to make a ‘70s style fun show, about a team who does heists and cons which incorporated white collar crime you read about in the paper and that’s what we did. I don’t think the show, when I look at the episodes cut, is significantly different than what we set out to do.

ROGERS: It very much hit the tone. I also like to call it IT TAKES A THIEF spotwelded on to THE ROCKFORD FILES. It has a working class sensibility like ROCKFORD FILES, but the stories go all over the world, so there’s a fun high-class thief element to it with the heists, the cons and the tech. The things we’ve learned -- you don’t need to cram as much story in there as we thought. There’s also a temptation with a con or a heist show, to make them as complicated as possible to fool an audience. The thing we figured out as the season went on, the audience is just there to have fun. If you fool them, that’s great, but they want to see these characters do fun stuff. You can hang out more in the scripts and let the characters run.

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 OF OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH LEVERAGE CREATORS JOHN ROGERS AND CHRIS DOWNEY

To check out a sneak peak, click below ...

And for more exclusive interviews, clips and news from LEVERAGE, CLICK HERE

Reader Comments

M from sez....
Is there going to be part 2 of this interview?
3/6/2009 9:11:58 AM

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