by Rob Lowe
I was taught that when dealing with addiction, you can use your more flawed characteristics as strengths. I am both super-competitive and prone to selfishness. It’s a full-time job for me to subvert these qualities that often don’t do me any favors in life. But in sobriety, they have been my strong suit and extremely helpful. I often look around a room at people in recovery and think, “I am going to be the one who stays.” And while I know that today is the only day that matters, I hoard my string of sober days like a major-league hitting streak I’m not about to give up. With some divine help, there is no outside influence that is ever going to make me drink. Not you, not anyone. Not anything. Selfish and competitive.
In rehab I learned to love alcoholics and addicts for what we are and what we are not. We truly view things differently from others and that is our curse and blessing. We have characteristics that are uniquely our own. We are the lives of the party, the dreamers, the romantics, the storytellers, the masters of the grand gesture. We are emotional, passionate and capable of a depth of feeling that is usually the source of our problem. (It’s no accident that so many of us are drawn to the arts.)
Unfortunately, we can also be heartbreakers of the highest magnitude: frustrating, maddening, confusing and disappointing quicksilvers who flirt with tragedy on a daily basis. There is no one who can inflict unwarranted pain on the ones they love like an alcoholic/addict in full flower. But in recovery, we learn how to take our daily medicine, which is an honest admission of powerlessness, and we begin to beat back the tide. I started this on May 10, 1990, and it has made all the difference, every day since.
For many years, I kept a page of legal paper folded in my wallet. On my last night in treatment I made a list of the most inspiring things I had witnessed there. I never wanted to forget that bond I felt with those there with me. I wanted to have something to look at to remind me of their inspiration. My list lasted about seven or eight years, tucked between my driver’s license and photos of my wife and kids. One day I took it out and it came apart at the folds, in pieces in my hands. It was time to throw it away. I still think of that paper today. I can no longer remember many specifics of the list; the memories of those connections also broke apart over the decades. But I do remember the first entry. I can still see it written in green Sharpie pen, just as I wrote it in the cafeteria, sipping that awful caffeine-free iced tea. To be inspired, to be humbled, to be reminded, I wrote in big block letters:
“#1: REMEMBER BUCK.”
With Sheryl, the day I left rehab.
The Lion’s Den
Untreated substance abuse is often treated as “cool” and as sort of a counterculture badge of honor, a way of proclaiming, “Look out, dullards, I’m still dangerous.” Likewise, sobriety is sometimes looked at as a fertile ground for the has-been and those who may have lost their edge. I was always scared of losing mine, and so, with ninety days sober, I got a tattoo to show I was still all about it. However, one of the gifts of recovery is authenticity, finding your true self. Today I know that I don’t care so much about being cool, much less edgy. I’ve seen too many good friends chase that image to the gates of prison, insanity or death. I still like my tattoo, but it means nothing to me now other than being a reminder that I’ve found my authentic self. And my authentic self is someone who wouldn’t get a tattoo.
I am still capable of admiring those who have a well-known proclivity for partying, when warranted. For example, I still love some of the writings of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Recently, he posthumously rose in my estimation when I discovered he was the one who came up with the idea for the Don Johnson television series Nash Bridges. Clearly Dr. Thompson’s well-known reservations about the entertainment industry didn’t inoculate him against its charms. Nash Bridges brought the world six seasons of Don Johnson wearing vests (years later, in the same time slot, on the same network, another blond cutie named Simon Baker would don the same look on The Mentalist), and both Don and Hunter made a mint off of the show’s long, successful run.
To my understanding, Dr. Thompson never wanted to, or even attempted to, create another hit show. If there was any doubt that he was an iconoclast, look no further than that. So it makes me love his famous quote about the TV industry even more. The guy went one-for-one, hit a grand slam in the TV world in his only at-bat, and still said this:
“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”
I would only add that television is also, when it is good and people watch, probably the most fulfilling medium to work in today. With movies becoming almost exclusively about little-seen (and low-paying) passion projects or giant, simpleminded, lowest-common-denominator, theme-park-driven cartoon franchises, television is where actors can act and writers can write. Because people watch in their beds and on their couches, without total strangers surrounding them, while they check their Facebook status, the audience feels a much more personal connection to the actors of television than those of movies. I know this because I’ve been both.
This year I ended my wildly fun and tremendously fulfilling run on Parks and Recreation. What started out as a sort of six-episode experiment ended up as a four-year comedy master class.
I had just been told by the network that aired my then-current series Brothers & Sisters that they found my character’s political story lines boring and that I would now be playing mainly a diaper-changing daddy and pie-cooking partner to the ladies on the show. Which was not exactly what I had signed up for. So we agreed to part while we were in love.
Somehow the folks at NBC found out I was about to become a free agent, as did the brain trust on their critically acclaimed but struggling second-year comedy. A meeting was set up.
Mike Schur and Greg Daniels, who co-created and wrote on The Office (respectively), and I spitballed about my coming on board Parks and Rec. We hit it off at once. We made each other laugh and I loved the fresh, young, iconoclastic energy of the show. It felt like I was in the bull’s-eye of elite, contemporary American comedy.
I joined the show and it got picked up for the next season.
At the beginning, I was still finishing on Brothers & Sisters and appearing on Californication. To my understanding no one had ever starred concurrently on three different shows on three different networks at the same time (and in three different genres!). Chris Traeger became a character that people just seemed to love. He was insanely, dementedly positive and his ruination of the word “literally” literally led Merriam-Webster to change the official rules on how it could be properly used. My English-teacher mother would not have been happy. Or maybe very happy, come to think of it!
One of the things I try to strive for in my life is diversity with consistency. Anyone can have a couple of big years in their line of work; the real deal is being able to survive and have a very long string of good years. I’ve also learned the hard way (and there is no other way to learn) that to have longevity, you will surely have to endure your share of misfires, to go along with hits like Parks and Rec or my most recent, Killing Kennedy.
I’ve had a few of those along the way.
After the success of The West Wing and my departure from it, I was in the enviable position of being the guy people wanted to anchor their new shows. There was an amount of speculation about what my next career move would be, and I had no idea myself. I did know that I didn’t want to wait; I wanted to leap back into television soon, and in the best way possible. I’ve never been one to be a follower; conventional wisdom held that after a long run on a hit, you sat out at least a season before coming back on a show. But that felt arbitrary to me; I had interesting opportunities and love working. Why wait? (Sidebar: In the years since, actors routinely jump right back into the fray, some doing more than one series a year. The world moves too quickly and there is too much competition and not enough attention span in the zeitgeist to
demur.)
Television is the most cyclical of businesses, and at the moment drama was king. It seemed to be the golden age of network drama. ER, Law and Order, CSI, 24 and The West Wing dominated the ratings and were creative, groundbreaking, buzzed-about hits. It’s hard to imagine today, when all the great dramas are on cable, but there was a time.
I had learned so much on The West Wing, from how a great show should and shouldn’t be run, to how to cast great actors, to the complications of studio–network politics. It was time for me to do my own show. I would produce it and star; I would be in the trenches from start to finish. But first I had to find the right concept.
I read every script around: shows about helicopter medics, airport security personnel, homeland security, spies and suburban family drama. Some were good, some were bad, but most, like all “pilots,” were in the middle, in that danger zone where it has equal possibilities to end up a huge hit or a huge bomb. Rarely, if ever, do you get a script where it’s a no-brainer. It’s always a gamble to be won and lost in a multitude of conscious choices and unforeseen, uncontrollable acts of fate. It’s Vegas at its worst, and with higher stakes.
One afternoon I read a script for a show about an idealistic lawyer caught up in a web of moral ambivalence and conspiracy.
My father is a lawyer and my character on The West Wing was recruited out of a big law firm to the White House, so I knew my way around that world. I liked it and it spoke to me. It felt authentic, which is nonnegotiable when developing a show concept. NBC was looking to find a traditional legal drama and would put the show on the air if I was interested. At the time NBC was the best network on TV and felt like home after so many years on The West Wing. So I read The Lyon’s Den and jumped on board.
The “Lyon” of the title was a play on the law firm’s name of Lyons, LaCross and Lavine. By the end of my experience working on the show, it would be less cute wordplay than a literal description of the life (and death) of this particular show.
The concept of the series was this: My character, Jack Turner, was plucked from his free law clinic and brought to the white-shoe firm of Lyons and LaCross after the mysterious death of his mentor Dan Barrington, who ran the place. Owing it to his memory, Jack leaves the world of street law and involves himself in high-stakes cases as he becomes increasingly convinced his mentor was murdered, possibly because of something or someone at the firm.
We set out to find a cast of great actors. I read with everyone we saw, culled the field down to two or three finalists for each role and selected them to bring before the studio and, if they survived the cut, the network. Studios and networks have their own mysterious matrix for choosing actors, but my criteria were clear (and remain the same today). I want actors who can actually act, I don’t want everyone to look like a model, I don’t care if they are “old” or “young,” I am not interested in skin color of any hue, I would prefer if they knew their way around a joke when needed and above all they have to have charisma. This has nothing to do with physical appearance and is unfortunately and surprisingly a matter of taste. There are “stars” whom I wouldn’t watch if they took off all their clothes and self-immolated on the commissary steps, and yet many seem to love them. I wanted actors who I thought had the possibility of “breaking out,” as we say in industry-speak, meaning: I wanted people who could be stars on their own shows someday.
Our final cast was: Kyle Chandler, Elizabeth Mitchell, David Krumholtz, Matt Craven and James Pickens Jr. Eventually they would carry their own hit shows, Friday Night Lights, Lost, Numb3rs, Resurrection and Grey’s Anatomy, respectively. It was a stellar group, and we were lucky to have them.
We shot the first script and all was well. The network liked it enough to give us the coveted ten P.M. Sunday slot, or “beachfront property,” as they say. The legendary former head of NBC Warren Littlefield stopped me at lunch one day and called The Lyon’s Den “the pride of the fleet.”
But so was the Bismarck.
Our airdate was set for September 28, 2003. By that time we would already have six episodes in the can. So there would be no ability to write to the audience’s interests or to minimize elements of the show that people were less interested in.
When I read our second script I knew we had trouble. The mystery of who killed my mentor at the firm was now even more confusing and muddled. The cases I was involved in were not as exciting as I had hoped and there was little tension in a show that professed to be a thriller. Desperate, I sat in the same chair for twenty-four straight hours and rewrote, gave thoughts and made suggestions, but neither the studio nor the network seemed as worried as I was about the writing. Each week, my instincts continued to catch fire. Soon, as one of the show’s executive producers, I urged my bosses at the studio to make a change before it was too late. They too thought the storytelling could be improved but were unwilling to replace the head writer; it would be too expensive and send a message that this big, shiny new show was already in trouble.
Weeks later, they would finally act, but it would be too little too late. And it is a great lesson: Creative issues do not magically sort themselves out; nine times out of ten, they only get worse. If you feel like a change is necessary, do it early. No one gives you brownie points for patience, and you don’t get extra Nielsen ratings for misplaced loyalty.
As our premiere date approached, few appreciated that we were then in the final years of the era of big network ratings. The rise of cable series and the allure of the Internet and DVRs were just beginning to erode the giant numbers everyone was accustomed to. Unfortunately for The Lyon’s Den, NBC was still judging ratings by standards that had changed and expecting numbers that would never again be at the levels of the recent past.
On premiere night we drew ten million viewers for a 3.4/9 share in the coveted eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old demo. Today, that would make us a big top-ten hit, but then it was considered a “soft” opening.
On the day before our debut, I couldn’t get anyone to talk about improving our show. The day after, the studio and network were crawling all over us to “fix” the series.
Finally! I was all ears.
The brass wanted to write a four-episode arc about an opposing lawyer with whom I would fall in love. It sounded great to me. I wanted to cast someone unexpected, not just a “hot” actress. I had seen the Ang Lee movie Ride with the Devil and liked the performance of Jewel, the singer/songwriter.
The network and studio were dubious at best. Jewel’s personal narrative was well-known; she was a country gal from Alaska who grew up using an outhouse.
“Why would we believe her as an Ivy League, top-gun, big-city attorney?” I was asked by one of the executives.
“Trust me. She’s talented, she’s interesting, it’s a cool choice. And if she’s good enough for Ang Lee, she’s good enough for us!” Using all of my goodwill and capital with the studio and the network, I got Jewel the job.
But there was a hiccup.
Jewel, it turned out, wasn’t sure she wanted the part. I was enlisted to cajole her on a phone call.
“Do you really want to do more acting?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, this could be the type of part that people will notice and it’s outside of anything you’ve done. You will have complicated, sophisticated dialogue, play a Harvard grad, wear beautiful, classic, sexy, modern businesswoman wardrobe—it will be as far away from ‘country’ as it gets! And that’s what acting should be. Moving out of what you are known for.”
“Will there be an audience?”
“Um, no,” I explained, “this isn’t a sitcom. It’s a traditional drama, it’s not shot live or anything.”
“Oh, too bad. I like audiences.”
We had a nice chat and by the time she asked if she could read me some poetry, she seemed to be excited to do the part.
As an attempt to be closer to my family, I had, as part of my contract, a stipulation that the show would be shot at a studio in
the San Fernando Valley, a good forty-five minutes closer than the studios in Hollywood proper. But to save costs, instead of shooting at Warner Bros., Universal or any of the other lots, a paint-thinning plant in an industrial area of the Valley was retrofitted for us. Sometimes in the late-fall San Fernando heat, it would be one hundred degrees on our jerry-rigged “soundstage,” and people would faint from the paint fumes. Pornos were shot in the same industrial park and directly next door was a bustling dildo factory. As our ratings continued to slip, shooting in this porno-paint hinterland didn’t help anyone’s confidence or mood.
Each day, in spite of being in almost every scene, I found myself in an emergency triage of some sort: meetings on future stories, casting sessions, talking to local affiliates and doing the press that drives a show. It got to the point where acting in the show was considered an afterthought, and I hated that. On most series, the head writer, or “show runner,” would handle these tasks, but not on this one. He was a first-timer, timid by nature, probably overwhelmed. He was also very involved in a drastic diet, which, he proudly told anyone who would listen, was “for the Emmys.” Having been to the Emmys, and won, four years in a row with my last show, I didn’t know how to tell him that we were not likely to need our tuxedos. At least not yet.
I began to understand that our show was not “bad” by any standard; in fact, it was among the smarter and more well-made dramas on any network. But it lacked a constant point of view, moved too slowly, was good-but-not-great and was damned by that. If it had been clearly inferior, there would have been a will to fix it.
Back at the paint-thinning plant, the Jewel experiment had promising early results. She was, as I had hoped, sort of extraordinary in her pencil skirts, rattling off sassy legalese in our scenes where we would spar and flirt. Everyone was optimistic and for a moment, our show felt ascendant.