CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 7/17/09

Rockford Revisited:
Leverage's Chris Downey and John Rogers

BY DAVID MICHAEL WHARTON

As TNT's hit show Leverage returns for a second season, CS Weekly chats with co-creators Chris Downey and John Rogers.

To hear Chris Downey and John Rogers tell it, their benevolent heist show Leverage was born in John's garage. Friends for over a decade, the two writers worked together on the late '90s show Cosby, but hadn't collaborated on anything since. When opportunity finally presented itself, it was courtesy of two of art's great catalysts: alcohol and chance. "We were drinking in John's garage one day, and we started talking about how there's no Rockford Files anymore," recalls Downey. "All the one-hour shows are dark and grim. There are no fun shows like we grew up on." As luck would have it, Rogers had that very week been speaking to producer Dean Devlin, who wanted to do a heist show for TNT. "You can tie yourself up in knots about how you should manage your career," says Downey, "but if something interests you and seems fun, you should do it." The results speak for themselves: in a crowded media landscape where most shows don't even survive a full first season, Leverage returned for its second this past Wednesday on TNT.

If Danny Ocean has taught us anything, it's that the key to a successful con is starting with the right group people. Much of Downey and Rogers' initial brainstorming on Leverage was about filling in the personalities and the talents needed to make the show fun and fascinating on a weekly basis. "Once you have a team show, and you're a fan of [the heist genre], you know what roles belong in a grift crew," says Rogers. The end result was a team of five, lead by former insurance investigator Nathan Ford (Timothy Hutton). Filling out the rest of the crew: a hacker (Aldis Hodge), a grifter (Gina Bellman), a thief (Beth Riesgraf), and the muscle (Christian Kane). Like a latter-day A-Team (or Robin Hood, if you prefer your comparisons less awesome), the crew use their talents to take down the sort of people who always seem to get away in real life.

Coming into season two, Downey and Rogers were painted into a corner of their own making. The first season ended with Ford and the crew going their separate ways. "Don't end your first season by breaking up your crew," laments Rogers. "That was a valuable writing lesson." But while the consequences of their first season were tripping them up, headlines were presenting Downey and Rogers with a wealth of content. "The entire world financial system melted down between our first and second season," says Rogers. "A lot of rich, white dudes managed to get out of it okay. Although we can do nothing about it in the real world, we can punch them in the neck on our show." The show also ran into a real-life obstacle courtesy of actress Gina Bellman's pregnancy. "You don't want a pregnant woman running away from an explosion," says Rogers. Downey adds, "It forced some of the characters to take on unfamiliar roles, which is always a good thing. You need to put your characters in over their heads and see how they handle it and how it changes the dynamic of the show."

Rogers describes the show as "wish-fulfillment," and says he and Downey knew from the start they wanted to keep the tone light and fun. "You should be able to go back in time and slot this between It Takes a Thief and Rockford Files." From the crew's good-natured bickering to the countless pop-culture references (in one instance, the group chooses as aliases the names of actors who have played the lead in Doctor Who), the writers always strive to keep things light and fun and fast paced. One structural conceit they've used to good effect is the quick, cutaway flashback, used for everything from sight gags to filling in backstory. "That's something you'll see on Scrubs and 30 Rock, but you haven't really seen it on an hour show," says Downey. "We were kind of dipping into the sitcom toolkit."

Keeping the tone light isn't always easy, especially when the show veers into darker material, such as in season one's "The Stork Job," where the team went up against an Eastern European adoption-scam ring. "By the end of the day the writers were under the table, weeping," jokes Rogers. That episode not only combined all the usual twists and turns with a healthy dose of character work, but, despite the subject matter, it managed not to leave the audience suicidal. The key was to balance the grim reality with a generous helping of lunacy: "The con [in that episode] involved a fading wannabe Eastern European actress being conned into appearing in a fake movie about NATO troops attacking werewolves," explains Downey with a laugh. "Had you not had that story, that episode could have sank into despair."

Leverage has also embraced an old standard of the genre, the "ah-ha flashback." It's the moment in Usual Suspects where all the pieces of Keyser Soze's identity fall into place for Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), and it's something the showrunners struggle to find the right balance for. Rogers compares it to the moment in old Ellery Queen mystery novels where the reader has all the same information as the detective and is challenged to formulate their own theory before reading on. "I really wanted the feeling that the audience could stop at the end of act four and think, 'How are they gonna get out of this?'" says Rogers. "And they might be able to figure it out, putting together what they've seen." It's a tricky structural conceit: spend too much time explaining things and casual viewers might lose interest. How do the show's writers find that balance? "You guess," admits Rogers. "The problem is, we're inside the tunnel, so sometimes we think we've given enough information, sometimes we don't think we've given enough." The showrunners' general rule is that these flashbacks are always approached from a different angle, or pick up slightly before or slightly after what has already been seen. "You want [the audience] to have the 'ah ha" moment,'" says Downey, "but you don't want to spend a lot of time [on it]."

"We got a lot of mileage last year out of reading the newspaper and going, 'I hate that guy!'" says Rogers. Downey adds, "A lot of these cons are dependent on human weakness, and we've gotten a lot of great stories by spending time on our villains." Rogers says that the challenge for year two was not just finding new cons—"You do all the easy ones in your first year"—but trying to put a new spin or angle on each of them. One thing that means is research…lots and lots of research. Some of it is the responsibility of the writers penning individual episodes, some comes out of ongoing back-and-forth in the writers' room, and some is simply the result of having an "intellectually curious staff." Rogers cites a recent Wired article about an infamous diamond heist. "[The writers] all showed up the next day with it clutched in their hands," he says. Leverage also benefits from a diversity of backgrounds and interests. Downey is a former lawyer, Rogers studied physics and did stand-up, Christine Boylan is an archaeology junkie, Albert Kim a former sports writer, and the list goes on.

That diversity isn't an accident. When it comes to hiring new writers for the show, Downey says one of the things they look for is "somebody who has had a life outside of being a TV writer." An affinity for puzzle-solving is also a plus; Rogers jokes, "Is Will Shortz out there? We'll hire you!" When evaluating a potential writer for the show, Downey and Rogers say they look for a quality they call "heist head." "A lot of cons and heists are geographic," explains Rogers. "They're built around understanding how things work in 3-D space. Even if the story doesn't quite work, [we look for writers who] understand how a heist show is supposed to play out." On a more basic level, Rogers adds that it's important to dig in and learn what the specific story challenges of the show you're pitching are. "It's not 'just like a Law & Order' or 'just like a House.' What is particular about this show?" The showrunners suggest that one of the best tests of an idea is to pitch it to someone who has never seen the show. "There is a good story and there's a not-good story," says Downey. "Whether it's John or myself or if you just pulled somebody off the street, there would be a general consensus when you hear a story that works. That's not subjective; it's objective."

With so much time spent planning the perfect crime(s), it seems Downey and Rogers would have a ready-made retirement plan as high-flying con men. For the immediate future, however, the pair are sticking to the writers' room. "On our show, there's a lot of rappelling," says Rogers. "I don't think I want to rappel."



David Michael Wharton is the managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting. His own career as a grifter was cut short after a tragic "cups and balls" accident.



Leverage courtesy Turner Network Television

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