TV Procedurals up Their Game, With Doctors on Cruises and Quirky Single Moms Solving Crimes
This image released by ABC shows Daniel Sunjata, left, and Kaitlin Olson in a scene from “High Potential.” (Carlos Lopez-Calleja/Disney via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — The idea for a new TV show came to Craig Sweeny as he was driving. The producer and screenwriter, thinking about how to put his own stamp on a medical series, had to pull over when a familiar figure popped into his mind: Sherlock Holmes.
Why not combine a hospital procedural with the lore of Britain’s greatest detective? It would have a medical mystery every week and also tell stories of Holmes’ good friend, Dr. John Watson. It was a mashup of two popular draws, the TV equivalent of peanut butter and jelly.
“They’re sort of each their own show-worthy premise in a way. And we’re blessed to have both. So they compete for space in a really interesting way,” says Sweeny.
So was born “Watson,” a CBS series starring Morris Chestnut as the titular character who leads a team of medical detectives set in a present-day Pittsburgh populated with Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters.
“It’s one of those blessed moments,” says Sweeny, who was well-versed with the world of Holmes after executive producing and writing for “Elementary,” a contemporary update.
“Watson” is not alone among the networks jazzing up the tried-and-true procedural. While the traditional form remains the bedrock of modern TV — think the prime-time blocks of “NCIS,” “FBI” and “Chicago Med” — new twists are emerging.
New TV recipes are heavy on the quirk
ABC’s “Doctor Odyssey” is a medical procedural aboard a luxury cruise ship and NBC’s “The Hunting Party” mashes up “The Blacklist” and “Criminal Minds.” CBS has Kathy Bates in “Matlock” playing an underestimated, retirement-age lawyer — with the twist that she’s really a hard-charging mom out for vengeance.
“There’s something really pleasurable about the self-contained, 43-minute procedural that gives you a beginning, middle and end, a little bit of a mystery and the fun of watching something get figured out,” says Jonathan Tolins, a playwright, TV writer and showrunner. “I think that the audience is so familiar with it that it does reward you if you come up with a sort of fun twist on it.”
Tolins’ own current take on the procedural is CBS’ “Elsbeth,” which takes the quirky character Elsbeth Tascioni from “The Good Wife” and plops her down in a “Columbo”-style police procedural.
Elsbeth, played by Carrie Preston, is a sleuth in bright colors and a bucket hat, blunt and unpredictable, playing off the guest star of the week. Tolins says the writers and camera crew try not to make her feel like the show’s lead, even though she’s the very title.
“I said early on that I think the show works best when it feels like a CBS police procedural with Elsbeth thrown into it,” he says. “We talked about always keeping her sort of out of the center of the frame in wide shots.”
Another elevated procedural with a quirky lead character is ABC’s “High Potential,” a police show starring a genius — but this time, she’s a single mom of three who has an IQ of 160 and is played by Kaitlin Olson.
“She’s a bit of a unicorn,” says Todd Harthan, executive producer and showrunner. “You throw a unicorn into the bullpen with a bunch of detectives and they go, ‘What are we supposed to do with this colorful creature with the horn coming out of her head?’”
Streaming’s menus push traditional TV forward
Supercharging procedurals comes as streaming increasingly offers subscribers a highly curated selection of unconventional, relatively short series with big names and high production values.
“I think that, inevitably, the innovations that streaming is doing bleed into what happens in network TV and challenge what we’re doing to compete for eyeballs in a healthy way,” says Sweeny.
Procedurals are often referred to as the comfort food of TV, offering a predictable, solvable hour with a familiar cast. So strong is our attachment to the form that streaming services have also been stretching their form with shows like the also “Columbo”-like “Poker Face” on Peacock and Max’s “The Pitt,” which takes a medical show like “ER” and breaks it down into different hours of a hospital shift, like “24.”
Harthan believes the gap between the streaming and network may be closing as networks offer writers a bit of a longer leash to try different things and streaming looks enviously at the broad audiences that networks pull.
“You’re always sort of learning and trying to glean certain things from different shows that are very different than the one you’re working on day-to-day,” Harthan says. “It’s just part of the growth of doing what we do for a living.”
Showrunners caution that mixing different elements into a show to raise the level can’t be done willy-nilly. The creator of “Watson” notes that its hero was already a doctor in the world of Sherlock Holmes, so making him head of a clinic makes sense.
“It is an exotic combo, but it’s also very organic,” says Sweeny. “Mechanically you don’t have to force anything into place. Everything’s already there.”
Network TV orders up a ‘gourmet cheeseburger,’ well done
A few years ago, the term “gourmet cheeseburger” was given to streaming shows that were both premium and commercial — take “Bridgerton” — and network TV may be going through their own gourmet cheeseburger phase.
“The more the two converge, the better,” says Robert King. He and his wife, Michelle King, are the prolific creators of shows on networks (“The Good Wife,” “Evil” and “Elsbeth”) and streaming (“Happy Face”).
“We love working in both and we don’t start with, ‘Oh, we must do a network show,’ or, ‘We must do a streaming show.’ It’s very much, ‘This idea we have fits more comfortably either in network or in streaming,’” says Michelle King.
Robert King considers one of the greatest TV hybrids to be “The Sopranos,” which mixed a comic premise with violence and put it into a serialized format. It was a hit for HBO but was originally pitched to a network, Fox.
“I do think the hybrid goes back to ‘The Sopranos,’ at least and I’m sure beyond that,” he says.
Tolins, who leads the “Elsbeth” writing room, recently got some nice feedback about his elevated procedural skills. CBS did a focus group about the new season’s premiere episode, which starred — spoilers — Nathan Lane as the killer of an obnoxious operagoer.
“One of the women who saw it afterwards kept saying, ‘This is network? I’m going to have to watch more network television,’ which of course was very, very satisfying for all of us listening,” Tolins says.
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