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PAGE 6A
THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 2014
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
TELEVISION
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
'Enlisted's' producers strive to make peace
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
LOS ANGELES — Writer-producers Kevin Biegel and Mike Royce decided in 2012 to create a TV workplace comedy about the military.
Prime-time television, once home to madcap military adventures like Sgt. Bilko on "The Phil Silvers Show," "Gomer Pyle, USMC," "Hogan's Heroes" and "MASH," hadn't supported a military comedy in years.
The odds were not in their favor.
That might have been in part because the U.S. had been at war for over a decade. Maybe the Army just wasn't funny anymore.
"It's basically a workplace that is very important to America and has disappeared from television," said Royce.
"It is kind of sacred ground," Biegel said. "People were like, 'Maybe you shouldn't do that.' But for us it was the opposite. We thought, 'Of course we should.'"
The duo made their sale on the first pitch, to Fox executives who embraced the concept heartily.
"Why isn't this show on the air right now?" Jonathan Davis, president of creative affairs at 20th Century Fox, remembers asking himself. "Why isn't anyone doing this yet?"
The resulting Friday night show, "Enlisted," premiered in January. The ensemble
comedy follows a serviceman who is demoted after socking a superior officer and reassigned to lead a group of Army misfits.
Prior to "Enlisted," Biegel cocreated "Cougar Town" and wrote for "Scrubs." Royce was a producer for "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Men of a Certain Age."
The goal with "Enlisted" was "to show, just like any good workplace comedy, how these people grow and bond and how they live their lives every day in this workplace." Royce said.
Trouble was, though Biegel grew up with two brothers and a father in the armed forces,
"There were a lot of things wrong with the pilot, not done out of disrespect, but done out of not knowing."
GREG BISHOP
Advisor
neither he nor Royce had served in the military.
As a result, the pilot was sprinkled with inaccuracies. The soldiers' hair was too long. Their uniforms were not to code. They didn't salute senior officers when they should.
Leery of producing a show that was disrespectful _ "We're not trying to poke fun at the institution," Biegel said _ the "Enlisted" men reached out for
help.
After the pilot was shot, they hired Greg Bishop, an advisor at Musa Military Entertainment Consulting, who viewed the show and found it ... lacking.
"There were a lot of things wrong with the pilot, not done out of disrespect, but done out of not knowing." Bishop said. "We said, 'Wow! They could use our help.'
Bishop worked with the creators to make the show more authentic and also helped with publicity by reaching out to military members.
Changes to the show included perfecting the uniform (such as putting badges in the right place, and making sure actors wore their hats inside and outside) and helping with set details (including adding stock numbers on grease barrels that appear in the background).
It even meant putting some cast members through several days of a "mini boot camp" in El Paso. The actors stayed in barracks, wore uniforms, did basic training, and underwent surprise checks for "contraband" such as books, cellphones, laptops and candy. Some of the cast members were even shunned for not flushing their toilers.
The improvements in accuracy didn't make for a hit. The first of the season's 13 episodes averaged just 2.4 million viewers and got a weak rating of 0.7 in the advertisere desired 18-to-49 demographic.
FILM
The Old Testament recieves the Hollywood treatment in 'Noah'
MCGLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Big, beatific and (more or less) Biblical, Darren Aronofsky's "Noah" is a mad vision of a movie, an action/ adventure take on The Flood that cleansed the Earth.
Aronofsky ("Black Swan") envisions this epic through the lens of Hollywood, interpreting the Bible as myth and telling one of its most fantastical tales as a grand and dark cinematic fantasy _ a "Lord of the Rains."
And with Russell Crowe as his "Master and Commander" and shipbuilder, Aronofsky has concocted an accessible, modern and mythic version of this oral history that may make purists blanch even as it entertains the rest of us.
But out there, in the world begat by Cain, his descendant Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone) is offering up an alternative theology. Tubal-cain's
A prologue tells of the spawn of Cain, who spilled blood, left the Garden of Eden, populated the world and made a mess of things. Ten generations later, Noah (Crowe) and his small family (Jennifer Connolly, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth) wander the wastelands, waiting for ... a sign.
Noah's dreams tell him The End is nigh. By fire, his grandfather, Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), wants to know?
The wicked world "which men have broken" will be flooded, the pure will rise and float above it. The rest? Drowned.
More visions, and Noah starts building an ark, first, by planting the forest that will be hewn into that ark. Stone creatures straight out of "Lord of the Rings."
"Fire consumes all," Noah prophesies. "Water cleanses."
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
violence, meat eating (Noah's people are vegetarians) and weapons are attractive to Noah's son Ham (Lerman, aka Percy jackson), who has no female companionship in their tiny circle. Shem (Booth) has the foundling they raised, Ila (Emma Watson). Ham is tempted to change sides to find a woman.
Still, animals gather and are sedated, the ark nears completion, and then the skies darken and empty.
It took guts to change Noah from the pious naval architect into a man of action, and then to cast Crowe in the part. But it works. Noah's fanatical devotion to his faith and his task make him capable of anything.
Hopkins and Watson and Connolly provide the tale's moving moments — scenes of heart and humility and hope. The acting is of the first rank, as you'd expect from a cast with three Oscar winners
and some of the brightest rising stars in film in it.
But the gutsiest move on Aronofsky's part is in the film's interpretation of this tale through modern eyes. Here is a myth that allows Creation and Evolution to live in the same film.
Effects assist the telling at every turn, but so does arresting geography.
Maybe it's a little too sci-fi (check out the costumes, the metallurgy, the pre-historic boots). It isn't "The Ten Commandments" and Crowe is no Charlton Heston. But "Noah" makes Biblical myth grand in scope and intimate in appeal. The purists can always go argue over "God Isn't Dead." The rest of creation can appreciate this rousing good yarn, told with blood and guts and brawn and beauty, with just a hint of madness to the whole enterprise.
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