Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 23, 1991 TAG: 9103230347
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL E. HILL THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That's when it was last seen, this video harbinger, about this time last year. And the season before that it emerged in June as a TV movie. But critics and numbers of viewers seized upon the show, embraced it and made it their own.
NBC trots the series out once more for a limited spring run of eight episodes. This week, and probably this week only, it airs Saturday night (at 9 p.m. on WSLS-Channel 10 in the Roanoke viewing area).
For this outing, executive producer Stan Rogow has added a group of feature screenwriters to turn out "Shannon" scripts. On hand are Ernest Thompson ("On Golden Pond"), Joan Tewkesbury ("Nashville"), Eric Hughes ("Against All Odds"), Kit Carson ("Paris, Texas"), Tom Rickman ("Coal Miner's Daughter") and Gene Corr ("Desert Bloom"). John Sayles ("Eight Men Out") remains as executive script consultant.
This season Rogow has also sought the counsel of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, author of "Reversal of Fortune," which was successfully turned into a feature film.
"The ongoing mandate - and what `Shannon' hopefully proved - is that there are a lot of talented people in Hollywood who would not think of doing TV, but who will work on a show like this," said Rogow.
Rogow, a former Boston attorney who once described himself as a radical, hippie lawyer, has given much of the shape to the character of Jack Shannon, played by Jamey Sheridan.
Shannon is a Philadelphia lawyer who dropped out of an established law firm about the same time he dropped out of his marriage, in a tailspin complicated by a penchant for poker.
As viewers met him two seasons back, he was a man trying to pull his life back together and set up a practice with the help of loyal Lucy, his tougher version of Perry Mason's Della Street, a confidante and occasional kick in the rear played wonderfully by Elizabeth Pena.
And there's Richard Edson in the role of Shannon's bagman-legman-enforcer, the guy Jack palms off, variously, as his stock broker or paralegal.
Shannon is, in short, a flawed hero who gets pushed around, loses cases and, win or lose, seldom goes near a courtroom.
Rogow said he hopes to bring Shannon's character flaws back into focus during this short season and give him back an edge that got a bit dull last time out.
"We took too much of the edge off the main character," said Rogow. "This is a guy carrying substantial baggage. Let's explore the baggage. This year he gets into some serious gambling difficulty - that's part of Saturday's premiere. Jack's past will catch up with him in other ways, and that will give us other ways to understand him. He got where he is through his own devices, his own will and, in some cases, his own lack of will."
One of Shannon's problems, Rogow said, is that he was not a good leaver.
"He can't leave relationships. So when he was desperately unhappy about how his life was going - his family breaking up, leaving the law firm - he turned to gambling. Sometimes instead of your saying, `I'm out of here,' they say, `You're out of here.'"
In Dershowitz, Rogow has enlisted the advice of a fellow with an edge himself, and who, like Rogow, feels an identification with the legal style of Jack Shannon.
"I discovered through writer David Mamet, who lives on the same street, that Dershowitz is a `Shannon' fan," said Rogow. Soon Dershowitz was signed on as a consultant, to keep the legal language correct and the legalities plausible.
In "Shannon," Dershowitz sees a character who could be a model, and a program he feels is the best law-related show on television.
"Shannon's the kind of guy who doesn't take the canon of ethics all that seriously, in the interest of higher justice," said Dershowitz.
"L.A. Law," he said, is all courtroom and bedroom. Shannon is where the legal action really is.
"There are no courtroom scenes," Dershowitz said. "Cases are won in the field, during the investigation. The personal relationships are important: who knows who, whose passions are moving in which directions, who's willing to sell whom out. Their cases are not won in the law library or courtroom."
He did give "L.A. Law" credit for being an improvement over films like "Witness for the Prosecution" and the "Perry Mason" TV series. But "Shannon" has more realism, and it has Jack Shannon.
In "Shannon's Deal," the line between winning and losing is often fuzzy, and Jack's not a character out of Central Casting. "Shannon has a more cynical edge," Dershowitz said. "Things are not black and white on the show: They're gray. That's my approach to the law.
"There's a little bit of Shannon in me. If I weren't here at Harvard, I'd be him rather than Arnie Becker."
by CNB