USA
Executive Producer Michael Sardo Shares What to Expect on FAIRLY LEGAL
In a conference call with NiceGirlsTV, creator and executive producer Michael Sardo talked about what inspired him to create the series Fairly Legal and what to expect with the characters on the show.
Sardo explained that over the course of the past six years, he has been toying with the idea of a show revolving around mediation. He had watched several friends go through bitter divorces which began amicably and turned into an all out war once the attorneys got involved. But then he saw how his friends who opted to go the mediation route had a much better experience and it intrigued him. The more he researched it, the more he loved the idea. He said, “The more I thought about it, I realized it was great fodder for drama” — because mediation is just putting two people in a room and working out a solution.
Fairly Legal stars Sarah Shahi as Kate Reed, a disillusioned attorney who jumps at the opportunity to be a power-player when she takes a job as a mediator. No longer content to chafe under a system where Kate cannot champion her clients adequately, she jumps into a world where suddenly she is mediating cases ranging from ruthless Fortune 500 company disputes to volatile divorce cases. It becomes her personal challenge to see that each party gets a legal result that they can live with. Because justice is not swift, cheap or even fair when it takes years to litigate; mediation provides an appealing alternative. But it puts Kate on the line to ensure that both sides get a fast, affordable and fair resolution.
Also featured in the series is Kate’s new boss — her stepmother, Lauren Reed (Virginia Williams) — and Kate’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Justin Patrick (Michael Trucco), a top attorney at the DA’s office. With such close familial ties and entanglements both at work and at home, Kate’s life is in desperate need of a little mediating, or perhaps a better balance between her personal and professional worlds. Fortunately, she has her trusted-assistant Leonardo (Baron Vaughn) to fall back upon.
In casting the pivotal role of Kate Reed, Sardo shared that after auditioning over 90 actresses, what really caught his attention was how nearly all the women would step back when approached by a robber, yet Sarah Shahi stepped forward. He said, “That’s who Sarah is as a person, and that’s who Kate is. It was right then I knew that she was Kate, because you cannot solve conflict by moving away from it.” He further explained, “That’s what most of us want to do intuitively, the counter-intuitive thing for the person who is Kate Reed is to move toward it, because you solve it by getting in close to the people and to the problem.” Yet from that moment forward, he knew that Sarah was Kate Reed. He happily exclaimed, “I’ve never had a doubt about it!” It was simply because Sarah’s instincts were to engage the person and work out a resolution — not to avoid the situation — he knew that he had the right person for that is exactly how a mediator would react; and it was those instincts that got Sarah the role.
Read our interview with Sarah Shahi.
Sardo also confessed that he wanted to have his character Kate Reed live on a boat simply because he has a sailboat of his own that he uses as an office and liked the idea that Kate would be the type of person to live on a boat. She would be comfortable in that environment after dealing with so much conflict at work and needed an escape. He explained, “I wanted to show that she was something different. People who live on boats tend to be a different breed. She takes the ferry over to San Francisco, but she’s not part of it. She works at the law firm, but she’s a mediator. She was married to a lawyer and she was a lawyer, but she’s no longer that. It just symbolizes to me perfectly Kate’s ‘other’-liness, so she is not quite what everyone else is. It just seemed like a very beautiful, interesting, unique environment to put her.”
Sardo shared, “Kate is someone who no matter how obtuse the conflict that someone may have in a mediation Kate can find a way to get to the center of it and to get people to see both sides of the problem and to join them in creating an equitable solution. What she struggles with is doing the same thing in her personal life. She’s such a passionate person that her passions overrun her when it comes to the relationships she’s closest to.”
One good example is Kate’s complex relationship with her new boss/stepmother, Lauren. Sardo admitted that he worked very hard to create a character that has not been seen before. He said, “On the surface, if you just looked at [Lauren’s] stats, you would think she’s a trophy wife, but she’s not. She had true love with Kate’s father, and she’s a woman who believes in truth and justice as strongly as Kate does, she just approaches it very differently. She believes in the letter of the law and in following that, and that’s where all truth derives from. Kate believes in questioning everything. So they are on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how you find truth and justice.”
As for the role played by Michael Trucco, Justin (Kate’s ex-husband), Sardo described him as, “[He’s] an Assistant District Attorney for the city of San Francisco — is equally committed to the law, has a more obvious heart than Lauren in terms of his approach to the law, and a very open heart when it comes to Kate.” Sardo said that upon peeling back the layers, that, “[Justin] also believes in the system itself, and Kate is always questioning the system. So her relationships with them and her breaking free from that system, because she was an attorney previously, she worked with him and one of the things that blew up her marriage was she kept questioning the law. Ultimately, the only person she could question it with at night was Justin, who took it as a personal indictment, and sometimes it was: ‘how could you keep doing this, this system that I don’t believe is the best for people, and I want to do something else.'” This differing viewpoint is a bone of contention and yet still provides the common ground of interest that keeps Kate and Justin entangled in each other’s lives.
Sardo also noted, “Kate’s relationship with Lauren and Justin, are actually going to define her as a person as she enters this new phase in her life.” He tried to illustrate it as, “The way I see relationships around me, and my own, they’re never neat, and Kate and Justin’s certainly aren’t. So it was difficult to write, but it was quite a lot of fun I think they play it beautifully the two of them.”
The third person in Kate’s life is her assistant, Leonardo, who Sardo described as, “The interesting thing about Leonardo is that he is the only person at the firm who is not of the firm. In other words, Leonardo has this Watchmen-like graphic novel he’s been working on forever, his magnum opus. What he loves about it he actually gets a lot of inspiration from Kate; she’s almost like a superhero character to him. She trusts him completely, and having Leonardo keep her center, tell her where she is at any given moment, is what allows her to have that freedom to hurl herself off in any direction because she knows ultimately she has Leonardo there to bring her back to center. . . they actually care very deeply for each other and respect each other tremendously, though they are reluctant to show it overtly.”
Another fun tid-bit that Sardo included in the show was that Kate has a distinctive cellphone ringtone: it is the “Wizard of Oz” theme. Even that small bit of layering was done deliberately to convey a subliminal message about Kate. Sardo explained, “At this point in Kate’s life, when we meet her as the series begins, she is very much Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz in that everything she knows — all her touchstones of her life — have been swept away from her. She was a lawyer at her father’s law firm, who is the towering figure in San Francisco, as well as in her life and in the firm. He just died, her marriage just broke up, she just left the law; everything she knows has been swept away. Just sort of fancifully, without a lot of conscious thought, she doesn’t go, ‘Oh I’m Dorothy,’ she just one day put in her phone she thinks of Lauren as the Wicked Witch. It just came to her one day. Then she started populating her phone, making her ring tones the rest of the characters of the movie, which just sort of fell neatly into place. At this moment when we see her, she’s Dorothy and she’s trying to find her way back to a comfortable spot. That’s a lot of her evolution throughout the show and what we’re going to see from her. We don’t hit the Oz theme as hard every week as we do in the pilot, but it’s an idea that’s there so you get a sense of who Kate is when we first meet her. She’s very much far from what she thought of as home, and she’s going to make her way back and we’ll see how she defines that and where she winds up.”
Sardo is proud and protective of Kate as a character and wanted to ensure that she was well represented. He said, “I was interested in someone who had an unbreakable confidence in her own ability to find out what the truth is in any given situation. What that means is not that you’re all knowing and confident of every step, but that you’re willing to be lost at times during that process, again which is a more complex character. She’s not self-righteous at all. She knows that she’ll get there and she’s comfortable making missteps along the way. That just seemed to me, I guess maybe parts of it, when you write characters there’s always a piece of you in every character that you write. . . . But I started with that initial idea of someone who just would throw themselves into this question of truth, even if it were ugly along the way.”
Then cautiously talking about the mysterious figure that Richard Dean Anderson will be playing in the series, Sardo revealed, “I was interested in the idea that Kate has this figure of her dad, and the idea he is this very important figure in her life. So when he dies she starts to learn some other things about him. Because I don’t know if people on the line have children or not, I do, and it’s hard for them to imagine that you were ever anyone other than their parent. But of course we had lives before then, and they may have been markedly different from the life we’re leading now. . . So he is the person who starts to say to Kate that maybe your father wasn’t who you thought he was. At the same time, maybe what’s important is not living in his shadow or thinking about him too much, but what you think he is leave it at that and now become the person that you want to be. Then she’s also going to develop a separate relationship with him.”
Sardo was also quite pleased that they were able to get such a high-caliber actor as Anderson to work on the show, happily noting, “We’ve had a lot of fun with Richard; he brings so much to the screen in so little time. It’s what we were looking for with him is that there aren’t a lot of people who you can say, ‘come in and we want you to do a scene, and we want that scene to resonate over the course of a couple of episodes and have it be memorable’ — and Richard’s that. There’s a reason he’s been on television for decades; he has that gravitas that can carry over.”
Finally, as to why Sardo elected to set the show in San Francisco, he explained, “I go from the point of view of let’s create the most interesting, vibrant environment, hopefully one that you’ve never seen before, and see who’s interested in that. Some people want comfort food; they want the same thing delivered the same way every week, and this would be the wrong show for them. We’re trying to tell stories that we haven’t seen before that are very human, that engage us.” He further explained, “It’s a matter of how well you draw those characters, how relatable they are, how much we see ourselves in them, and how closely you engage with that particular story being told. So I think we’ve told very engaging, relatable stories, and as to who will be interested I’m kind of curious to see myself.”
As for the choice of selecting San Francisco over other great cities, Sardo said, “I wanted a place I thought in what kind of city what would be the crucible in which a character like Kate is formed. It had to be a place where you weren’t spending your life in a car locked away from people, like I’m sitting in my car right now doing this interview. . . So I wanted a city that was multicultural, that had a wide range of economic strata so that you could have people from all walks of life, all cultures bouncing off each other. That’s where you get conflict and interesting stories, and I just thought it was a great environment for Kate, as well as a very picturesque one.”
And with those insights and teasers, Fairly Legal will be fun foray into the legal realm as seen through the eyes of a woman seeking to provide justice in a way that guarantees a better outcome. Be sure to tune in for the premiere of Fairly Legal (right after a new episode of Royal Pains) on Thursday, January 20 at 10/9c on USA Network.
0 comments