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Crime is Paying Off for NCIS: New Orleans

At a cover shoot for TV Guide Magazine, the five principal cast members of NCIS: New Orleans have just come in from filming a scene at the soundstage next door, but you might think they’d dropped by after a night at Tipitina’s, the Spotted Cat, d.b.a, or one of Orleans Parish’s other celebrated nightspots. Things are getting loosey-goosey—emphasis on the goosing—as the quintet squeezes in tight. Lucas Black is tickling Zoe McLellan. McLellan is borrowing Rob Kerkovich’s glasses for that sexy librarian look. It’s up to Scott Bakula to provide the voice of reason. “We’ll hate these shots, I guarantee you,” he says, right after having his manly bosom groped from behind by CCH Pounder.

“Are we confused as to the nature of this procedural?” asks Pounder, suddenly sounding a sober note as she takes her mitts off the series’ star.

“This is full-on thank God it’s Friday,” says Kerkovich, usually the show’s comic foil, adding his own note of mock solemnity to this touchy-feely free-for-all: “So many people have died so far.”

Well, yes, they have, rather reliably, at the predictable rate of one corpse per week, with occasional bonus deaths in instances involving a mad bomber or some such. CBS’s NCIS: New Orleans didn’t get to be the season’s top freshman show by not playing by the procedural rules. What sailor would want to be stationed here after watching a series, which, if taken literally, suggests that Louisiana has an exponentially higher mortality rate among active and former servicemen and servicewomen than any other seaport state?

Probably a lot of impressionable petty officers are champing at that bit, actually, since the series also suggests that it’s worth the risk of being infected with bubonic plague, murdered vampire-style in a cemetery, poisoned with radiation, or shot during Mardi Gras just to live and thrive amid the city’s infectiously celebratory spirit. And although all the principals have been given—in typical NCIS-franchise fashion—slightly angsty backstories, a typical episode is less likely to end on a brooding close-up than with the characters cooking gumbo for one another in the squad room’s kitchen. And can it even be called a squad room, when the cozily funky office set looks like the House of Blues blew up, albeit with most-wanted lineups on the overhead monitors instead of drink specials?

If procedurals are a kind of comfort food, the good-times-and-autopsies mélange of NCIS: New Orleans managed to attract a whopping 18 million viewers (including DVR), on average, in Season 1 by being primetime’s oysters on the shell or its sugary beignet or nightcapping Sazerac.

“Part of what drew me to setting a show down there,” says creator and executive producer Gary Glasberg, “is the contrast of people who work hard and have faced all kinds of adversity—whether it’s Katrina or socio-economic problems—but hold on to each other and rise up and celebrate regardless. And the beauty of New Orleans is that there’s literally a parade or festival for everything. So you’re constantly working around that.” Sometimes they’re also working around that festiveness psychologically, as the city’s eternally high-spirited side can carry over into a kind of light-headedness at the workplace.

“But,” says McLellan (Agent Meredith Brody), “then we have to be reminded, ‘OK, someone’s dead,’ and remember the urgency of the story we’re telling. Especially when the baby was missing [in the April episode “Rock-a-Bye-Baby”]. It’s like, ‘You care about this baby!’ Got to find the baby! Find the Navy baby!” That last singsongy catchphrase has become a running joke between Black and McLellan—with apologies to missing naval infants everywhere, we’re sure.

Maybe they’ve earned this levity, given the pressure everyone faced at the start of the season just to produce a coherent show, with very little time for conceptual lollygagging. “There was a lot of tension at the beginning,” Black says, “but after we got on air, people at the network began to trust us more, and it felt a little more relaxed on set.” A little? “There was a point during this season where we felt comfortable to do our own thing a bit more, because it was like, ‘Huh! People like us!’” And those people have made this the most successful first-year drama since Desperate Housewives exactly a decade earlier.

But in the first year of any show, says Bakula (a veteran of Quantum Leap, Star Trek: Enterprise, and Men of a Certain Age, among many others), “you just never feel like you have your legs underneath you.” He recounts the series’ hurried history, which began with an embedded pilot that took the form of a two-parter on NCIS in spring 2014: “When we actually got the formal invitation that we were being picked up, it was the beginning of May, and then the scramble began to start shooting July 21. This place [in a New Orleans suburb] went from an empty soundstage to something we were shooting on in five weeks. The first day of shooting, they’d barely sealed the paint on the walls and hadn’t hung any lights.

“We’re not all in the same place, either,” he continues, “so there are so many reasons why it should have been a disaster.” He’s talking about how Glasberg and the writing staff stayed in Los Angeles—and so, in a way, did Bakula, who flew home every weekend, not wanting to uproot his family just as his son was entering high school. Somehow, Bakula also flew to San Francisco a few times to shoot three episodes of HBO’s Looking, fulfilling his promise to wrap up a supporting role on that niche drama’s second season even as he was anchoring TV’s hottest new mainstream show. But that shoulda-been disastrousness “hasn’t been,” he says. “And because they picked us up so early, all our directors are lined up for next year, so invariably it’s going to be an easier process.” Not the big easy, mind you—since, Bakula says, “they keep making the episodes bigger and harder to do”—but easier.

First, there’s a freshman season to wrap. Back on the soundstage, Bakula is shooting a scene for the penultimate episode with Steven Weber (Wings), who has a recurring role as a presumably corrupt city councilman whose unctuousness can be measured by his insistence on wearing sharp suits even in the harshest humidity. You can see the familiarity between these TV pros when they both flub their lines and Bakula quips, “Together, we almost add up to one actor.”

Their characters are discussing the city-rattling repercussions of violence perpetrated by Baitfish, a villain who’s been Special Agent Dwayne Pride’s bête noire throughout the season. No spoilers here, but suffice it to say that Baitfish’s mayhem is the focus of the May 5 episode, which opens the door to an even wider world of crime involving the New Orleans seaport in the May 12 finale. Weber’s politician and Bakula’s determined Pride are going at it over who’s to blame for some very public casualties, before Weber finally lowers his voice and says, “No matter what you think of me, I love this city too.” Which may be setting Weber up to be more sympathetic in Season 2, because, really, how can anyone crush so hard on NOLA and be all creep?

Just as the medical profession’s primary dictum is “First, do no harm,” this show’s initial mission was: Don’t tick off the host city. By that measure, too, the series has been a smashing success—even if everyone you run into in New Orleans will eagerly tell you, unprompted, which actors get the accents right.

“Everybody thinks I’m faking it,” says Black (Special Agent Christopher LaSalle), the lone primary cast member with a real-life Southern twang, thanks to his upbringing in nearby Alabama. “I’ve worked on this accent for 32 years. I feel like I’ve finally got it down pat. It’s a struggle, what we go through as actors.” Another thing he doesn’t actually struggle with: “I love the steaming heat, and I get to laugh at everybody who doesn’t.”

Pounder, who plays coroner Loretta Wade, had a tougher time adjusting, even though she’s gradually shifting her home base from L.A. to New Orleans. “I have to have faith that if the first [NCIS] show has been running for 12 years, maybe the second show [NCIS: Los Angeles] will run for eight years, and maybe this show will run for six or seven.” But, she adds, “I’m a Caribbean person, and this is a Caribbean country, stuck in America. Well, not stuck—happily hanging out in America—and therefore it has all the problems that that has: The heat come summertime is hellish, and that’s when we start our [production] season. I’m hoping to drop enough weight so that the water’s not just pouring out of me like it did last year, when I thought, ‘I’m going to die.’”

Northeast native Kerkovich arrived at an analogy for the city after first visiting (and feeling out of place on) legendarily rowdy Bourbon Street: “A local reporter asked me, ‘What do you think about New Orleans?’ I said. ‘It’s like Bartertown,’ from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which couldn’t be more obscure, because Bartertown isn’t even in the title of the movie. I thought, ‘This interview has tanked.’ I referenced the third Mad Max movie?’” (Yes, the resident forensic scientist is at least as ready with the pop cultural references off screen as on.) “But it’s cool to not be in the L.A./Hollywood world. Here you can go into a coffee shop and not every single person is working on a screenplay. They’re all on their laptops writing jazz.”

Bakula, who’s developed a list of favorite local nightspots despite spending his weekends in L.A., laughs when he’s reminded how he initially hoped the series could be filmed in Hollywood. “There’s a huge commitment to trying to do it correctly here,” he says. “I’ve lived in a lot of great cities in the United States, but this one’s unique in that people are always saying to me, ‘We love what you’re doing here. How are you liking my city?’ There’s this possessiveness about it. You don’t usually hear people say, ‘How are you loving my Santa Monica?’ I love how the people do things outside their homes here, which is kind of counter to the world that’s becoming more like, ‘How can I watch a movie in my house?’”

Not that anyone at this photo shoot wants to discourage NCIS: NOLA binge-watching, although it can lead viewers to mistake the actors for their characters, which they still find amusing. McLellan recalls an exchange she had with a local on Frenchmen Street. “My sister and I went out to hear music,” she says, “and as I go up to the bar to get a drink, this college girl is standing there and is like [affects thick Louisiana accent], ‘Brody, oh my God, hi! Is Pride with you?’ I said no. She said, ‘Good, because I’d do him right here.’”

Perhaps they need to throw in even more morgue scenes, then? Because while this show may be big, it probably shouldn’t feel that easy.

NCIS: New Orleans airs Tuesdays, 9/8c, CBS

Stations of the Cross: How Jesus is Saving Primetime

It’s the greatest story ever told…and told…and told again. “Hollywood,” says Craig Detweiler, a professor of communication at Pepperdine University, “is constantly forgetting and then remembering this character who is revered and studied by hundreds of millions of people on a weekly basis.” Leave it to Jesus, who went momentarily unrecognized by Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, to be hiding in plain sight—at least as far as the entertainment industry’s attentions are concerned.

But executives don’t have ADD about the Bible anymore—they’ve got A.D. The Bible Continues, plus a batch of others besides. Even veteran viewers of Good Book–to–boob tube adaptations have never witnessed a wave of biblically based television and movies quite like the tsunami of Scripture TV descending on screens like so much white foam over an Egyptian army. You could see it as an ongoing response to the record-breaking box office of Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ ($612 million worldwide) or just a cyclical reiteration of how every third generation needs its own King of Kings or Ben-Hur. Maybe it’s even a sign that spirituality is blossoming in Hollywood’s executive boardrooms. (Insert holy laughter here.) But heathens and believers suddenly have more 2,000-year-old entertainment choices than you can shake a study Bible at.

Most have been one-offs, but NBC’s A.D. has the legs and plotlines to last well past Ascension Day. Attracting 9.5 million viewers in its Easter debut and handily winning the night, the series is scheduled for a 12-week run (airing Sundays at 9/8c)—and producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey hope it will score a second season. (If you saw the first-episode spoiler that had Jesus telling Peter, “One day you will die for me,” rest assured the show’s creators will be putting off the fulfillment of that Easter egg for as long as possible.) Religio-historical dramas aren’t just for basic cable anymore, not after Burnett and Downey’s The Bible premiered to 13.1 million viewers on the History channel in 2013.

For evangelicals, A.D. is the draw of the season, although other religious constituencies have also been addressed. The slightly skeptical had the National Geographic Channel’s Killing Jesus. For the somewhat more skeptical: CNN’s alliterative documentary Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery. Then there was CBS’s The Dovekeepers, Downey and Burnett’s fictionalized drama set at the first-century fortress of Masada, in which its comely leads got to know one another in the biblical sense.

A similar boom is evident in cinemas, with Burnett and Downey having successfully re-edited The Bible into the 138-minute 2014 feature Son of God. “The fact that Christians went to theaters and watched a repackaged version just because they wanted to make a statement is a sign of how desperate they are to see their values affirmed,” says Mark Joseph, a Christian producer and marketing consultant, about Son of God’s $68 million worldwide gross. Last year also saw a pair of fanciful Old Testament movies in Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings, although their disappointing returns may be indicative of what happens when auteurs tick off the faithful. It remains to be seen whether churchgoers will feel wooed or shooed by an adaptation of Anne Rice’s controversial Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt that’s in postproduction or by the movie about the New Testament’s most celebrated convert, Paul, that’s just been announced with Hugh Jackman, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon producing. Meanwhile, the redoubtable Burnett and Downey are behind a big-screen Ben-Hur remake that’s currently in production. Looking for a smart investment in 2015? You might want to consider the toga and tunic industries.

A.D. focuses on the apostles’ ministries after Christ’s resurrection and ascension—although you may notice a lot more foot chases, villainy, and bloodletting than the author of the Book of Acts ever transcribed. If the series does get extra-biblical, however, conservative Christians trust Burnett and Downey as two of their own. Last year, in promoting Exodus: Gods and Kings, star Christian Bale described his Moses as “likely schizophrenic.” No worries about any such heresy with this duo at the helm.

Phil Cooke, an evangelical writer and producer of the upcoming Christian-music movie Hillsong: Let Hope Rise, defends the traditionalist approach. “There’s no question that Hollywood is getting the message that the more biblically accurate the movie or TV series, the greater the audience,” he says. “Mark and Roma are proving that. The great challenge is that movie studios and TV networks aren’t Christian organizations. They’re driven by creative people who want to put their own spin on stories.” As a creative professional himself, Cooke understands that impulse, adding, “If I were shooting a classic fairy tale, I would want to bring something new to telling that story. And since many of these filmmakers aren’t believers, they look at these Bible stories the same way I’d look at a fairy tale.”

Author and radio host Eric Metaxas, a celebrated figure in evangelicalism since writing a best-selling biography of German Christian hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer, concurs. “Mark and Roma bring a much-longed-for respect to biblical narratives, one that’s been sorely lacking in recent decades,” he says, adding that exhibiting perceived contempt for your core audience will never fly. “[Martin] Scorsese’s unintentionally hilarious The Last Temptation of Christ, with Willem Dafoe as a mealy-mouthed pseudo-savior, was the first of these fiascoes. A.D. is proving the magnitude of the audience interested in a serious treatment of biblical subjects.” His enthusiasm has been echoed in positive notices from the presidents of the National Religious Broadcasters, Focus on the Family, and the Southern Baptist Convention, among others.

Although Killing Jesus didn’t get nearly the same endorsements, the three-hour drama made a killing (sorry) for National Geographic; with 3.7 million viewers, the premiere boasted the network’s largest audience to date. The big bow came in spite of brickbats from such conservative Christian outlets as Movieguide.com, which warned that the TV movie offered “a Jesus who’s not divine, who performs no miracles, and who’s full of doubt,” before concluding, “We suggest viewers skip watching Killing Jesus and watch A.D. instead.” One person who’s been involved in marketing religious projects to Christians (and prefers not to be identified because nearly everyone in evangelical media circles ends up working together at some point) posits that Bill O’Reilly, an executive producer and coauthor of the source book, “essentially did a secular version of Jesus’s story, and the only reason it didn’t get organized protests is because he’s on Fox News. A lot of Christian viewers like his political views but can’t figure out his faith.”

Getting pegged as the open-minded person’s guide to Christ was fine by Nat Geo, which wanted to play Killing Jesus as religiously nonpartisan. “This is a story that has been told trillions of times,” says Heather Moran, the network’s executive vice president of programming and strategy. “By stripping away what was most familiar to so many, it [became] such a powerful story. That was a very conscious choice of ours, to keep those details open to interpretation so different viewers with different perspectives could come to this historical spine of a story and use it as a jumping-off point for what they personally might bring to the table.” In the end, Killing Jesus split the difference between faith-based and secular audiences—leaving any resurrection off screen but still showing an empty tomb—and for all the publicized emphasis on outside history and scholarship, it took many of its events and dialogue straight from the gospels.

A.D. gave us a majestically backlit warrior-angel rolling away the stone, while the dustier Killing Jesus preferred to let the mystery be. What the two have in common is how they essentially play out as political thrillers, not spiritual reveries. In the days of such Cecil B. DeMille biblical epics as 1949’s Samson and Delilah, the joke (and maybe reality) was that churchgoers ostensibly came for the piety but stuck around for the chance to see sinful temptresses in skimpy outfits. The modern analogy is in how much these new projects make the religious aspects somewhat secondary to the machinations of the bad guys. None has gone quite as far as the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, which had the temerity to bump Judas up to colead. But Pontius Pilate is almost always going to wind up being a more fun character to depict than a Messiah whose most famous cryptic aphorisms aren’t about to get a dialogue polish.

If you’re a Christian tired of seeing the Messiah alternately portrayed as a stiff, saintly victim or (occasionally) tortured neurotic, you might consider the historical taboo on filmic portrayals of Muhammad and develop a slight case of Muslim envy. Back in the CinemaScope era, Christ arguably made a greater impression as a cameo player in Ben-Hur, showing up just long enough to have the hem of his garment touched, than he did in the whole of The Greatest Story Ever Told. So part of the canniness of A.D.—not to get too irreverent about it—is that the series kills off this dramatically risky and unwieldy character before the first commercial break and doesn’t even let Jesus stick around past the second hour, so as not to get in the way of all the bloodshed, Lady Macbeth–style conniving, and disciples-on-the-run
action that make it more of a diverting potboiler than a Sunday-school lesson.

The Old Testament doesn’t present as great a risk in adaptation as do Jesus’s red-letter words. But filmmakers can still run into danger—as demonstrated by Exodus: Gods and Kings director (and Killing Jesus executive producer) Ridley Scott’s divisive decision to portray God as a petulant boy and Darren Aronofsky’s infamous rock monsters in Noah. “In order for a biblical epic to be financially successful, you need the evangelical audience to become engaged,” says Matthew Paul Turner, author of Our Great Big American God and a leading figure in the progressive Christian movement. “But evangelicals are nitpicky about the details of their Bible stories, often carrying the persona of ‘protectors’ of God’s stories. That’s why Noah infuriated many of them, because rather than being able to sit back and enjoy a creative expression loosely based on Genesis, they squirmed at every turn away from how the Bible portrays the Great Flood.” There is a mainline church audience that isn’t hung up on absolute biblical literalism, says Turner, who believes “progressive Christians mostly just want to see a well-told story, one that doesn’t overplay the torture of Jesus for dramatic effect and one in which Jesus isn’t a hot white guy.”

The emphasis on bloodshed in most of these adaptations doesn’t sit well with some mainline Christians—not even when it’s Jesus’s blood. “In journalism, the standard is ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ and I think it’s the same in these sensationalist film depictions of Christ,” says Rev. Kathy Cooper-Ledesma, pastor of Hollywood United Methodist Church, which has many constituents from the entertainment industry. “They’re all about the substitutionary-atonement theory, focusing on violence and guilt and the belief that God required a blood sacrifice. That’s not the God I believe in at all. The greater story we celebrate is the love of God, but these TV shows don’t consider that dramatic enough.”

And then there are believers who just think other TV shows are better at illustrating the Bible than, say, The Bible. “I’m far more intrigued by the spiritual, ethical, and moral questions raised by Orphan Black or Sons of Anarchy,” says Cathleen Falsani, author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers, “than I am interested in another film interpretation of a biblical story that may or may not have a hidden religious or political agenda.”

A.D., as it goes along, will inevitably delve more into the realm of pure speculation, as accounts of the disciples’ post-Pentecost lives get harder to divine from the sketchy scriptural narratives. And based on the good will that Burnett and Downey have already built up in conservative Christian circles, they’ll probably get away with making up more of the details. But in one early scene in A.D., before Jesus leaves the building, you get a glimpse of what could have been in a straightforward Christ-tale telling. Jesus, popping up at his followers’ hideout, at first spooks them with his ability to forgo niceties such as entering through doors. And then, with a big grin, he asks, “Is there any food?” That’s a Jesus we could still stand to see more of on screen, even after all these tellings: one who is as in touch with his human side—and not even in a tortured way—as his followers are hungry for divine revelations.