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'Wanted' Explodes Police Genre
July 30, 2005
By Kate O'Hare
Zap2it.com
LOS ANGELES: At a bank in Culver City, Calif.,
about a block from Sony Studios, glass from shattered windows
crunches underfoot at the entrance and on the floors. Police cars
and ambulances crowd the parking lot. Inside the building, blood and
brain matter spatters walls, desks and filing cabinets.
In the middle of the chaos, a law-enforcement team gathers around a
tattooed, pierced computer expert as he scans surveillance video of
masked robbers brandishing automatic weapons.
All this violence and gore is just another day on the set of
"Wanted," TNT's new police drama, premiering Sunday, July 31.
Created by Jorge Zamacona ("Homicide: Life on the Street," "Oz"), it
follows a fictional team of officers from local, state and federal
agencies, tasked with capturing the 100 most wanted criminals in Los
Angeles.
As L.A. Metro SWAT Lt. Conrad Rose (Gary Cole), the team leader,
puts it, "We don't have to knock before entering."
"The idea," Zamacona says, "came from a bunch of stories I'd heard
about this unit that existed in the '80s. My tech advisor, Louis St.
Clair, had heard about this. In the middle and late '80s in L.A.,
the murder rate was over 2,000. So the Sheriff's Department and the
mayor and the LAPD got together and put together this group that
would just go hunt down the 100 worst guys."
As to whether the group still exists, Zamacona says, "Nope. They got
their 100 guys, and then the U.S. Marshals Service came over, and
they have a task force in L.A."
Zamacona liked the idea of a multidisciplinary force, with a variety
of tools and tactics, working just outside the system -- and
occasionally just outside the law -- to nail particularly heinous
offenders. But, he emphasizes, this is not the morally ambiguous
LAPD Strike Force portrayed in FX's "The Shield," led by
hard-hitting but ethically challenged Detective Vic Mackey (Michael
Chiklis).
"This is moral cops," he says. "It's heroic cops. It's not amoral,
corrupt policemen."
Rose, a father of two who's going through a divorce, has assembled a
team that crosses agencies, personalities and backgrounds. ATF agent
Jimmy McGloin (Ryan Hurst) can recite chapter and verse of the
Bible, never met a gun he didn't recognize, and is a political
conservative. Carla Merced (Rashida Jones, daughter of Quincy Jones
and Peggy Lipton) hails from Naval Intelligence, and is an expert
hostage negotiator.
Cocky FBI agent Tommy Rodriguez's (Benjamin Benitez) relentless
womanizing is both an undercover asset and occasional hazard. LAPD
technical genius Rodney Gronbeck (Josey Scott, lead singer of the
band Saliva) boasts a lot of ink and metal, but has a first-class
mind.
DEA agent Joe Vacco (Brendan Kelly) lives in the team's waterfront
warehouse headquarters because he's been booted from his own place.
The last to join -- in episode two, the one in production on this
day -- is U.S. Marshal Eddie Drake (Lee Tergesen), who studied under
Rose at the L.A. Metro Police Academy. He takes a break from bar
ownership to sign onto the team after a member goes down in the line
of duty.
The mix is intentional, especially the presence of McGloin's
conservative voice.
"Not everybody is a lefty liberal," Zamacona says. "I'm a little
left of Attila, but it's a balancing act. All we want is a balance.
He's not always right. Nobody's always right. I like these points of
view being represented in this group, because they come from
different training and disciplines. They don't get along. They're a
little pissy with each other."
Zamacona also wants the show to be about more than just nabbing
crooks.
"I think it has a strong moral core," he says, "with spiritual
overtones about right and wrong and good and evil. That's what I'm
after. I like flawed human beings who are trying to figure out what
right and wrong means for them, good and evil, what God is."
Does he believe evil exists in the world? "I do," he says. "I'm
interested in the notion of a card-carrying member of whatever
faith, all of whom have a common denominator of 'Thou shalt not
kill,' when part of the job is to kill or prepare to kill. What is
the emotional hangover of that?"
Cole sees a lot of that in the character of Rose. "I think what
Jorge's trying to portray, especially using the family, is how
tipped it is. What cops walk through and deal with, then they're
dealing with school principals and homework, picking the kids up.
It's almost schizophrenic.
"He goes from brutality -- some of the stuff, when it turns into
violence, gets unspeakable -- to domestic things and back again.
It's surreal. It's very unbalanced."
At the other end of the spectrum is the freewheeling Drake,
described by Tergesen as "a loose cannon with a quick wit," who's
just not introspective enough for angst. "Am I a rogue officer?"
Tergesen says. "Rogue sounds like a bad lieutenant. I'm a U.S.
Marshal. I do things my way."
Zamacona is doing this show with a smaller staff and a third less
budget than he had for his ABC police drama "10-8." In return for
that, he gets to do his pilot and 12 episodes without a lot of
middle-management interference.
"I'm loving this," he says. "They made me TV-MA (mature audiences),
Sunday nights at 10 p.m. No F-bombs, but the language situation is
great. It's a beautiful convergence of trust. They've trusted me
with the level of violence, blood and sex. They're not riding me.
They're trusting me to deliver what they can air."
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