#marcus chaplin

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So I started and finished "Last Resort" in 4 days, and I know I'm late but what an awesome show, was hoping it would get a second season, but at least it got a proper ending and sort of tied up all the loose ends. 

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Grace Shepard - Here's To Us by Si_Crazy

http://dlvr.it/33byjw

[awohali]

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Last resort 1x12: The pointy end of the spear

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"Last Resort" co-creator Shawn Ryan on the series finale, "Beverly Hills Cop" and more

"Last Resort" co-creator Shawn Ryan on the series finale, "Beverly Hills Cop" and more Where would the ABC submarine drama have gone if this wasn't the last episode? by Alan Sepinwall

Was anything significant changed about the next-to-last episode, or only the finale? Shawn Ryan: I'm trying to think. There may have been some minor dialogue tweaks. I can't remember what they were. The reason I ask is that there were certain scenes in that episode — Admiral Shepard calling Grace, or the reasons why Ernie Hudson killed himself — that felt like they might have been fleshed out more in a regular episode 13, rather than the one you had to make.  Shawn Ryan: In fact, you just reminded me. We had a whole storyline where Admiral Shepard was going to go on trial, and put a lot of pressure on Grace. Was there anything she could do from afar to try to save him? That was going to have some tragic circumstances. Once you knew you were ending the show with this episode, how and why did you decide that Marcus would go down with the ship? Shawn Ryan: There are a lot of choices to be made there. We felt he was someone who would go down with the ship, for whom there wasn't much left back home. And as long as there was a purpose to staying behind — in this case, to make sure that the sub wouldn't fall into Chinese hands — it felt like the noble thing for him to do. I always felt like his actions, whether you agreed with them or not, came from a place of nobility and principle, and he was someone I thought would sacrifice himself for that nobility and principle. Well, cancellation gives you a freedom to kill your main character in a way you couldn't do if the show was continuing. Shawn Ryan: (Laughs) It certainly does! Was there any pause from either ABC or Sony about that decision, or did they just say, "Well, the show's ending anyway, you and Karl do whatever you want"? Shawn Ryan: I have to say that they really let us do what we wanted from the very beginning. Any qualms that anyone has about the show can certainly be placed at my feet and Karl's feet. There was no panicky network, "Ohmigod, we've got to do this" notes. They would occasionally remind us that they were a network that was strong in female viewers, and that we should be careful that there were stories and characters that their female viewership could plug into, but ultimately, maybe we failed at that. But other than that, we said, "Here's what we want to do," and they said, "Great." We talked about this in the summer, and Paul Lee was fairly open about this: this show was not an ideal fit for ABC's brand. Given all that, is there anything you could have done with the show — forget about quality for a second, but in terms of making it fit in more with the brand to maybe make it more successful? Shawn Ryan: Probably. But nothing that I could have lived with creatively. In retrospect, probably the thing I could have done was sell it to NBC and have them air it after "The Voice." Okay, so let's talk creative now. This is a show that had a lot of moving pieces, and every new show has a learning curve. In terms of making these 13 the best they could be, is there anything that in hindsight, you wish you had done a little bit differently, or better than you did? Shawn Ryan: I think we struggled a little bit in the first couple of episodes after the pilot to find a strong, simple throughline for the story. I liked those first couple of episodes, but I didn't love 'em. I felt like we really got into a groove starting around episode 5. But by then, the ratings future was already written. Really, the ratings future was written on the pilot. When you start off at a 2.2 (demo rating), it's tough to maintain that. Yeah, I see all sorts of things I would change. It was a very, very complicated show. It was a very difficult production, being orchestrated from afar between Los Angeles and Hawaii, a very large cast, very sprawling story, and a large percentage of the 13 episodes, I would defend vigorously. And other stuff, I would acknowledge could have been better. One of the issues I had and that a number of my readers had was the idea of Serrat continuing to exist and be out in the world, not only after he killed some of Marcus's sailors, but after he participated in a chemical attack on his own people. How did you feel the material with him worked out? Shawn Ryan: I love the actor, and I loved him as a bad guy, and I guess you could say maybe we were guilty of falling in love with our bad guy too much, if that's the way you felt. In the third episode, he kind of lays out the case for why he feels he's untouchable by them in terms of having the people loyal to him, and death by a thousand cuts. In my mind, that was always something that lived in Marcus's head: that going directly after this guy might provide some momentary satisfaction, but might create real long-term problems at a time when they already had a very formidable episode in the United States on another flank. I guess my argument would be that Marcus, who we always played as a chess master of sorts, looked beyond the first move of, 'Oh, let me just take this guy out,' to what would the ramifications of that be, and making a more prudent move in that regards. But I understand the point you and the readers are making. You said before that the writing was on the wall even after the pilot writings. There are a lot of industry reporters who follow the ratings who were saying, "No, the numbers aren't good, but ABC could be doing worse, and this is an audience that ABC doesn't normally reach. Maybe they might want to stay in business with this a little longer." At what point was it clear to you that this was not going to happen? How quickly did you know there wouldn't be more episodes? Shawn Ryan: You always hope, and you see shows like "Fringe" lasting for five years, and you think, 'Why not us?' So I knew probably from episode 3 or 4 on that it was dire, but I really loved the show and maintained a lot of hope that it would continue. I didn't fluff my followers on Twitter with hopes that I myself didn't believe in. I believed that if we could solidify at a certain number, and we had some very good episodes coming up, in my opinion, and that we had a network that really loved the show — Paul Lee, creatively, really loved the show, and so did his execs, and we were on time and we were on budget, so we had a lot of goodwill over there. ABC wasn't looking to get rid of us, and Paul was a little heartbroken that America didn't discover it. I knew things were dire early on, and I just kept working and controlling what I could control. You've been through a few of these cancellations in a row now, with this and "Chicago Code" and "Terriers." Does it get any easier? Shawn Ryan: Listen, I have a bit of a Zen attitude about things. I try not to get too up when things are going well and too down when things aren'g going well. I tend to be more disappointed for others than I am for myself. I feel bad for the crew, who really worked their asses off, and who now don't have a job. I feel bad for the cast. In my mind, I know that I gave everything I could to the show, and I gave my best with it. I'm very proud of the show. My employers probably wouldn't like to hear this, but I'd rather be proud of a show that failed than not be proud of a show that succeeded.

Well, this ends a few days after CBS bought your "Beverly Hills Cop" pilot. It's a beloved pre-existing property. What can you say about it? And what are things you can look at with this show that fill you with confidence that maybe this time, after the last few, something will be different. Shawn Ryan: The biggest piece of confidence I have is that I've really been wrecked three different times: once on "Lie to Me," when I ran it for a year, then "Chicago Code" and now "Last Resort," where I've had to go up against my friend Bill Prady's show "Big Bang Theory." The best thing I can say about this is it would be on CBS, so they can't put me on against that show. So I feel good about that. When we sold the show in the summer, I still had high hopes that "Last Resort" would be successful. In my mind, this was going to be a palate cleanser from that, very different. I always try to do things that are different from other things I've done in the past. And you could say this is another cop show, and I've done "The Shield" and "Chicago Code." But this is very different tonally. I've always wanted to do something more comedic, I've tried to sell several sitcoms in the last 6-7 years and couldn't get them made. This is sort of a backdoor way in which the studio and network feels comfortable, because of my resume, to give me a shot at doing something more comedic. Shawn Ryan: I think you and I are both fans of a certain genre of movies in the 1980s, the "Beverly Hills Cop," "Midnight Run" kinda thing. And this is my shot at doing that on TV. Can you do visceral realistic grounded police work and action intermixed with real grounded, funny humor? A lot of movies and TV shows skew too comedic in my mind, and as a result, they feel too light and don't have stakes, and the bullets don't feel real and the stakes don't feel real. This is my attempt to get that alchemy right. This is another high-wire act. I never seem to give myself easy tasks in that regard, and living up to an iconic movie like that is going to be very difficult. But I like the high degree of difficulty tasks. I think we've got a real star in Brandon Jackson. I really really dig him and his acting and his sense of humor. I really bonded with him the last couple of months. It's the first time I've written a script where we already had the lead. It's a lot like a movie in a way, where you're crafting the character to the actor. I really enjoyed that. Listen, it's going to be a CBS procedural. We're going to solve a case every week, but we're going to do it with a lot of humor and a lot of fun. And I would say the stealth thing I would like to get in is, in a day and age when income inequality and class inequities dominate a lot of the country, this is going to be an opportunity to put a young working-class kid in Detroit in the middle of Beverly Hills, you can do a lot of stealth social commentary. What people remember about "Beverly Hills Cop" is the banana in the tail pipe, and Bronson Pinchot, and Axel making a big scene at the hotel check-in desk. A lot of that movie is really dark and really violent. Shawn Ryan: Well, it was supposed to be a Sylvester Stallone movie until about three weeks before it started shooting. So how are you going to approach that balance? Shawn Ryan: My approach is to update it and make it feel modern and 2013. The pilot opens with a 4-5 minute sequence which I think is really harrowing and really dangerous, that would be something that you might have seen on "Chicago Code" or "The Shield." I want it to feel grounded in that way. There'll be some opportunities for laughs after that. It's not a laughs come first show. What I loved about the movie, when I talked with Eddie Murphy a lot about what he thought worked about it, is that when he would walk into a scene, you really didn't have an idea, 10 seconds in, whether it was going to be funny or dangerous or violent or silly. It could go in any direction. They didn't tip it. And a lot of the comedy in that movie is played in two shots without a lot of cutting. They just let it play. They don't use the cutting to accentuate the humor, which a lot of modern-day comedy does. It just played. If it played funny, it was funny, and if it played less funny, the audience didn't notice the strain of trying to make you laugh. That's a lot of what I'm going to try to bring to this. Obviously, we have to hire a director, and the director will be a huge part of how this plays tonally, but there's a lot to admire from that era, but there's also a lot that could be updated and modernized as well.

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Last Resort Co-Creator Discusses the Finale and Where the Series Would Have Gone Had it Continued

Last Resort Co-Creator Discusses the Finale and Where the Series Would Have Gone Had it Continued - by Eric Goldman

Last Resort came to an end this week – a far too quick end for those, like myself, who loved the show. News of the cancellation came while production was underway on the show’s 12th episode, and the one silver lining was that the writers were allowed to complete their initial thirteen episode-order and, hastily, re-write what now was to be the series finale.

I spoke to Karl Gajdusek, who co-created Last Resort with Shawn Ryan, and co-wrote the final episode, about the process of quickly using one episode to wrap up so many storylines. We also talked about changes he made along the way to that finale script and storylines the show would have gone on had it continued.

IGN TV: I’ll start with the kind of obvious question, which is how much did you change from the initial script for this thirteenth episode?

Karl Gajdusek: We always knew that we were going to finish a bunch of arcs at 13. And so that episode already had a lot of closure built into it, but it also had new openings built into it. It wasn’t like we said, “We’re done, so we’re going to write a whole new episode that’s going to completely finish the show.” But we had an episode that had that feeling to it and then we had a chance to change it enough to make it a show closer. That didn’t mean reconstructing it from the ground up. It just meant looking at the last couple of acts and where people went and where the story went. And in a few cases, with a few characters, it meant saying, “Okay, this character really can’t do that. They’ve got to do something really different and we’re going to finish them.” And so we reconstructed that.

IGN: Marcus obviously stands out for having much different events happen than would have been the case if the show continued. What else stands out in a big way?

Gajdusek: We didn’t intend this to be an episode that featured Christine at all. We wanted to bring her back from her faked death in future episodes. And instead we thought, “Well, we can’t just leave her out of this episode. She’s important.” So we brought her back in after we knew we were done. That’s one. Kylie, we gave a giant arc to where we just meant her to have the beginning of a new dark path. Instead, we gave her this very big story. James and Tani, it was never a big episode for them. We gave them something that I think was a good conclusion for their characters, but we weren’t able to give them a giant story. But those were the big ones. And then Sam and Marcus are obviously huge… Marcus we gave probably the fitting end. I wrote a draft where Sam and Marcus went down with the ship, and Grace too for that matter. While I loved it and it felt very moving and strong, it also felt a little bit like a kick in the gut. So after writing that draft, I sort of slept on it for a night and re-wrote it, to get them home.

IGN: What about Prosser in that version? Because when Sam and Marcus first talk about letting the sub be destroyed, I did wonder “Are they all going to die?”

Gajdusek: Yeah, I should have mentioned Prosser too. In the draft I wrote that had the highest body count, if you will, we had Prosser and Grace ending sort of like Vasquez and Gorman at the end of Aliens. They sat there like old enemies now turned friends sort of hand in hand while the missiles came. It was a great ending, I loved it, but it was also pretty dark; pretty tough. I think our audience would have felt a little bit beat up.

IGN: With Marcus specifically though, did you look at the character and decide, “This is how it has to be”?

Gajdusek: It seemed right in many ways. I mean, I really fundamentally think that the captain goes down with the ship. It would seem Pollyanna to find a way for everyone to wiggle out of the situation. He always said he was putting it all on the line and I felt it was important that he did.

IGN: You only had so much time to deal with everything. One character that stuck out to me that we didn’t see again was Curry.

Gajdusek: Actually, this is sort of tragic… I did put him into the last episode! And Jay [Karnes], who’s an amazing actor, did fly to Hawaii and did shoot his scene. But the last episode was also a driving, huge episode with so much story and so much plot. And when it came down to the really, really tough decisions in the editing room, the scene was not essential enough to make it through, finally, when we had to start… when we were carving seconds off this cut. He had this great scene where he was with the mucky mucks in the DC story and you could tell he was a little uncomfortable because it seemed like he was getting displaced. All of the sudden, the power was no longer in his hands and for the first time, you start to feel a target on the back of his head. I dug the scene. It was very short, but it finally it was one thing that had to go.

IGN: You were slowly unveiling more about who was behind this conspiracy. If the show had gone on, did you have a specific person in mind who was behind it? Was the president the puppet master or was there going to be someone else?

Gajdusek: No, we were writing for something I felt was going to be quite delicious. The president, in the draft we wrote before we were ending, the president – and this is almost talking out of school because this is not what you see in the finale – but we had decided that the president was mostly unhinged and was being operated by those around him, primarily Kylie’s father, who was positioning himself to take over the reins. So as we moved into the second part of our season, we were going to see a president more and more sidelined with his own mental illness while the Currys and the Barton Sinclairs of the world manipulated him and manipulated the power of the presidency for their own ends. And so the first ending we had for the DC story for the finale episode was Kylie arriving back among the mucky mucks, having sort of proved her place in the pantheon of the bad guys and she’s there with her father. This man comes up and says, “Kylie, someone should dance with me,” and takes her and starts to dance around the world and she looks in the face of this man who is clearly mentally unstable – who clearly shouldn’t even have gotten into this room. And you see his handlers to the side, trying to get him back to his room. And she says, “Why, of course, Mr. President.” You realize the president is an empty shell for those handling and that was going to be our story going on. Now we changed that – we didn’t have time to tell that story, so we changed it when we knew we were doing a finale.

IGN: Kylie goes through the ringer in this final episode!

Gajdusek: [Laughs] Yeah, we sort of go darker and more Cassavetes than we usually do on our show with her in this episode. I thought they did such a great job in those two scenes. It was very different for our show. That little hotel room they did those scenes in is truly a skanky little hotel room in a terrible part of Honolulu. It was a grimy shoot for that and they loved it. She has a big story and her story going into the second part of the season had we gone on also would have been quite big. She would have been… perhaps a villain. I don’t believe in my heart a villain or in her heart a villain, but she was going down a fairly dark path at her father’s side.

IGN: At the end, we saw Sam on the news, we know the tape got out and we can assume that, to some extent, the conspiracy was revealed and the Colorado crew will be okay. But Kylie is the one person where you really wonder what happened to her, because even if the conspiracy was revealed – she killed the president! Do you have an idea of what happened to her after?

Gajdusek: I don’t think she survives the end. Now that’s just my opinion. Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean I know. I sort of suspect that those secret service people gun her down. But that’s my interpretation. I think it’s a sacrificial ending. I think curiously enough – and if you asked me this two months ago, I never would have guessed this – but I think the two big self-sacrificers of the finale are her and Marcus.

IGN: With limited time, you couldn’t just have a bunch of characters meet for the first time or suddenly go somewhere they hadn’t been. I know in the long term you talked about characters like Kylie and others making it to the island.

Gajdusek: Listen, we had Kylie’s high heels on the sand in the fifteenth episode. So we had already written that story. But once again, we were stopping and there was no time to do that. That would be opening up new possibilities as opposed to closing down arcs, so we didn’t do that.

IGN: I loved the moment of Prosser literally kissing the ground when he makes it back to America. Where did that idea come from?

Gajdusek: That was a great Robert Patrick improvisation.

IGN: [Laughs] I had a feeling about that!

Gajdusek: Yeah, that was him! I remember we were there and we had already shot the scene and then all of the sudden I hear this voice go, “Roll it again!” And they roll it again and all of the sudden, he did that.

IGN: Marcus and Anders’ confrontation plays out in a very satisfying way where right when it seems like there’s going to be a big one on one fight, Marcus pulls out that gun. Did you debate how that should play out?

Gajdusek: I always wanted Marcus to be at the breaking point. And I wanted simple, absolute violence. I didn’t want to play that out too much. I was a little frustrated with us... I didn’t think that we managed to make it clear in the cut that Anders was a threat and that scared me a little bit, storywise. He had a gun, but it’s not as visible in the moment as I wish it was. But I think you see it just enough, if you’re a careful viewer, to realize it was a quick draw situation.

IGN: Given how much you had to truncate, is there something that really sticks out that you wish you could have played differently or didn’t even get to do at all that you knew was coming down the pipeline?

Gajdusek: There’s a couple of things. Kylie’s whole DC story was a delicious thing coming up. Marcus becoming El Presidente of the island – moving to more of a Castro realm was something I always wanted to play and never quite got to. We were just getting there. We were just getting him from a man of reaction, of just keeping his people alive, to a man making policy and becoming a bit of a king. That was something I always wanted. I think that the love triangle we were finding our way through and I never wanted Sam and Sophie just to be an infidelity. I wanted to tell a mature love triangle. So it was essential to me to get Christine to the island before anything could really happen to Sam and Sophie. They could kiss under the influence of drugs, they could feel this attraction, but for them to get together, it seemed important to first break Christine and Sam in some way and we never got the chance to do that. Those are things that I regret. There’s a thousand stories we’ll never tell, so of course I regret that. But in terms of particular things I wanted to do more of… I loved the work between Andre [Braugher] and Jessica Camacho, between Marcus and Cortez. I thought that was the most strangely weird, sensitive, moving, inappropriate little dangerous romance. None of us really knew how to play it out. We knew that they weren’t supposed to jump in bed. That wasn’t the right answer for those characters. But something was growing between them, you know? I really wanted to figure it out. Lastly, we spent so much of what we did get to do on giving Grace a leadership role, making her prove herself, making her come up in Prosser’s eyes, and cemented bringing those antagonists together, but we didn’t get a chance to give her her future, and that was something I was really looking forward to. We’d just started down that road.

IGN: With the Marcus/Cortez thing, I remember a lot of people commenting on the interesting, off-kilter vibe in that scene where he talked her down when she was sent to kill him – some fans did wonder if they might even kiss there. Suffice to say, you wanted to explore that weird energy more?

Gajdusek: Yeah. I wondered too! Listen, we wrote it many different ways and it wasn’t even exactly clear what we were going to do until we were on the set – where we were going to take it. I knew they weren’t going to kiss, but I was never sure how much we were going to let it be respect and affection and how much we were going to let it be something with an obvious attraction… where something more visceral was building.

IGN: When this show began, even many people who loved it wondered how this concept would play out long term and what it might be in, say, year three or four. Did you have those broad ideas about how you wanted to map it out in future seasons?

Gajdusek: The short answer is yeah. The long answer is, and I know if Shawn was here too, neither Shawn or I really believe in the four-year map. You can have one and that’s great, but it’s way too confining, considering every episode you learn more about your characters and more about your actors. We had some vague ideas about four years, but it was never our intention or our desire to have a four-year plan. We had sort of a two-year plan. We knew that the show moved from survival to the building of a nation and a world and then the corruption and/or the prospering of that nation. Really the show that the audience saw was about survival. You saw them fend off many threats and start to make some hard decisions on about how to live on this island. What you didn’t get to was okay, now we’re here, we have a bit of a détente. We have some allies. Who are we going to be? What are we going to be? What are our laws? What are our beliefs? What do we say no and say yes to? What do we simplify? What do we abhor? And that was going to be sort of the second part of the second season. And then moving into the second season we knew it was going to be – and this is why we started to sprinkle in the stories of this mineral wealth – because after survival and after putting your feet on the ground and establishing yourselves, there was going to be the influx of capital. All of the sudden they were going to have money and that was going to be a whole new thing. You weren’t going to worry so much about the President of the United States, you were going to worry more about the Richard Bransons and the movers and the shakers, the money people coming. And then of course you have to deal with corruption and how you harden yourself and your ideals in the face of temptation. So those are the broad strokes!

IGN: What did Andre think about the wrap up to his character?

Gajdusek: I don’t know. I don’t think he ever said clearly, “I like it this way” or that. He said, “I get it. This is what I would do.” He knew and we all knew that we were taking him down a rabbit hole and that it was going to get weirder before it got less weird and that his actions were going to have to get harder and darker before they got truer and righter. So that was also where we all felt a little cut short. He was gearing himself up to how he could take a character that he truly believed in and loved down this dark path and so when we knew all of the sudden that we were going to end, he had to readjust that rather quickly and I’m sure that wasn’t fun. He certainly embraced it to play it, but it wasn’t the journey he was thinking towards most of the time.

IGN: I know it’s a difficult think to try to find the right answer for – or even figure out if there is a right answer. But why do you think it is that the show didn’t have a larger audience? You had critical support and fans who were watching who were very into it. Was it the wrong timeslot, the wrong network? What do you think?

Gajdusek: I think it’s a lot of things. I would never want to put it on exterior forces only, like timeslots or anything. I will say two things. The timeslot thing was a bear. Going up against the most popular comedy in the country [The Big Bang Theory] and then NFL football, which is our core audience in a way, and then The X Factor… I do think there was a group there that was just very hard to pull. The second thing was if you watched our show in-between clearly complicated political machinations and fairly mature subject matter, we were on at a time where people are still putting their kids to bed. And in the Midwest, we were on at a time where their kids weren’t even sitting down to dinner yet. And I’m not sure that did us any favors. I’m not sure how people watched that show in that timeslot, in a way… It’s a hard timeslot. Now that said, people have succeeded in these 8 o’clock slots, so what do I know? On our front, I think we were learning. We were on ABC, which is heavily identified as a female network. We were always very aware of that and felt that we could appeal across the board, including to woman, partially because we had so many great, strong women in our cast and partially because I think we told stories from a very emotional and not from a tactical or war-like point of view. But that said, I think as I watched our show and watched the pace of our show, I realized that we were perhaps, well, finally just not as female as I’d like to think we were. I would watch our show sometimes and I’d say, “Hmm, I know that we really want it to be broad appeal, but that felt pretty masculine to me,” if I had to be honest to myself. And I know that from the numbers and everything that we did have trouble maintaining our female audience. From essential subject matters, being about military people in a submarine to week-to-week subject matter, which tended to be pretty visceral and action-packed, I think that we may not have grabbed the audience that we needed to on that network.

IGN: No matter what, it must be a bittersweet experience. But considering so many shows are cancelled and that’s it, they stop filming, was it at least nice that you did get to do an ending, even if it was much more truncated than intended?

Gajdusek: No, it was great. We immediately said, “Oh, we have the greatest miniseries ever!” and we called it a day. [Laughs] No, it was not great. Obviously, we did not like being cancelled. We wanted to tell these stories for years. But it was very know in time to change the last episode. It was very nice to know in time to create, albeit in a truncated way, but nonetheless, create arcs that made the show into a story, instead of just the beginning of a story.

IGN: What’s on the horizon for you? What’s next?

Gajdusek: I sort of got the TV bug! I came out of features and there’s a temptation to just bounce back into features and sit in my little hole. But I just have to develop the next TV shows and I hope to. I think Shawn and I will be talking… Well, we already have been talking about what’s next. And I’ll just start. Running and writing this show was a bit of a full time job, and so it’s not like I have a ton of things in the brewing in the back pocket right now. Now is the time to just generate. And I think I’ll have something big coming soon, hopefully.

[lostprophet89]

Tribute to Last Resort

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(ajdlkajsdlkajkdslajsdlakjsdlkaj Last Resort was AMAZING! Spoilers under the cut.