A controversial lesson plan

Fox's Boston Public has drawn criticism for its focus on sex and violence during what used to be called the family hour. But those who make the show say creator David Kelley adds meaning to the madness.

By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV Critic

© St. Petersburg Times
published February 25, 2002

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. -- Kathy Baker had an idea. And it was wrapped up in her coat.

Shooting a scene in the sprawling studio that houses Fox's high school-based drama, Boston Public, Baker was just supposed to stand in the office of her character's beau, Winslow High School vice principal Scott Guber (played by Anthony Heald) and ask why he didn't want to spend the evening with her.

And then inspiration struck: Why not play with her coat?

"I said to the director, "What if I just hand him my coat, like I expect him to hold it for me?'. . . which is a very in-your-face, controlling . . . a bit of an old-fashioned gesture," said Baker, who plays a formerly abusive parent turned teacher's assistant, Meredith Peters. "Because for actors, every scene is about finding that obstacle and getting through it."

Watching the scene, set in Guber's drab, claustrophobic office, you see the wisdom in her impulse. Fumbling with the coat subtly puts Heald's character on the defensive, just as he is about to berate her for sabotaging her son's budding romantic relationship because the girl is black and he is white (the girl also happens to be the principal's daughter).

Heald, a methodical actor who is meticulous about preparing for performances, nails the scene in a couple of takes, using the coat-fumbling to ratchet up the discomfort level.

"You always worry when your character goes through a shift, because you never know where it's going to take you," Heald said about Guber, a lonely, emotionally distant guy who began dating Mrs. Peters this season.

"But the great thing about Kathy's character is, like Guber, she's got these two sides," he added. "She's this real ice queen. . . . But she can melt, in moments when that vulnerability comes flowing out. Which is the really beautiful thing about the two of them coming together."

It makes a certain kind of sense that Boston Public boasts two characters with such stark duality; the series itself often seems to walk a fine line between extremes.

Crafted by prolific producer David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, The Practice, Picket Fences), Boston Public balances soap opera-level melodrama with expert acting, clever plot twists with over-the-top absurdity, and artful drama hinting at the complexities of modern education with titillating bursts of violence and sex.

Set in fictional Winslow High School, Boston Public focuses more on the teachers than pupils. It sets complex relationship and societal issues within the universe of an impossibly eventful urban school.

Consider story lines from this season and last: A student running for class president (played by Tampa native JoAnna Garcia) performs oral sex on a competitor to get him to drop out of the race; a teacher beds a girl he believes is a college student only to find she's a senior at Winslow; another teacher gets into a fistfight with a student and punches him into unconsciousness.

Tonight the show tackles the n-word, showing two students -- one black and one white -- tossing the term around until a third pupil, who is black, gets offended and starts a fight. When a white teacher starts a class discussion on the issue, a black teacher demands he be fired. Expect to hear the word used often.

And don't forget Baker's Mrs. Peters, who was tied up in her basement by her son, Jeremy, who eventually cut off her right hand.

The formula works: Boston Public is Fox's highest-rated drama, earning viewership 14 percent above once-hot Ally McBeal on Feb. 18, according to the trade industry Web site Mediaweek.com. As of Feb. 17, the show was ranked 38th among all prime time shows this season, ahead of ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, NBC's Third Watch and CBS' The Education of Max Bickford.

But the series' button-pushing use of sex and violence has drawn the ire of more than a few critics, including the Boston Public Schools system.

Chagrined by the story lines (and the use of a shot of East Boston High, which serves as the fictional Winslow High), Boston school officials denied NBC's Crossing Jordan permission to depict that show's star in another school's yearbook, according to the Boston Herald.

"Shows like Boston Public perpetuate the lack of confidence people have in public schools," said John Dorsey, a spokesman for Boston Schools superintendent Tom Payzant, in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times. "Boston Public treasures this kind of publicity, because it gets their name out there. But it also offers what (teachers) in the trenches say is an irresponsible representation."

A coalition of conservative advocacy groups petitioned the Federal Communications Commission this month to crack down on Boston Public because of its racy content.

Other network series -- say, NYPD Blue or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit -- may feature more explicit content. But Boston Public airs at 8 p.m., in a time once known on network television as "family hour."

Though family hour hasn't existed in years -- the scheduling of sex-heavy sitcoms such as Friends and Spin City at 8 took care of that -- advocacy groups including Morality in Media, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council seek a return to times when extreme content was removed from the first hour of prime time.

The Parents Television Council (affiliated with the conservative Media Research Center) has named Boston Public the worst show on prime time network TV for the 2000-01 season, citing gratuitous sex, violence and language.

Such activism is nothing new for these groups: In 1997, the Media Research Center bankrolled an advertisement in Daily Variety protesting gay comic Ellen DeGeneres' "coming out" episode on her ABC sitcom.

"We are writing to ask that you stop the outrageous flouting of the FCC's decency regulations by the Fox network," read the coalition's letter, dated Feb. 5. "It is our view that shows like Boston Public and its ilk do not belong in prime time when any child in America can see them."

Relaxing in his comfortably furnished office at Kelley's Manhattan Beach studio complex, executive producer Jonathan Pontell chuckled about the Parents Television Council ranking weeks before its letter showed up at the FCC.

"We were even voted worse than (WWF) wrestling," Pontell said, shrugging slightly. "Partially, it's because these organizations need a cause. They can rally people and raise money. To do that, you need an enemy, and we're the enemy."

Director Mel Damski took a moment from supervising Heald and Baker's scene to give his take on why Boston Public so often dabbles in explicit subjects.

"David is always interjecting thoughtful and provocative story ideas," noted the director, saying Kelley often challenges the modern focus on greed and self-indulgence. "But if you didn't have the racy content . . . if you didn't have the sexy content, you'd never get the audience to sit still for the interesting, value-based messages he puts in. Even on Ally McBeal, silly as it is, he's constantly tweaking people because of their values."

Chi McBride, who plays Winslow High principal Steven Harper, had a more pointed response for critics.

"They ought to grow up. At the end of the day, it's just TV," said McBride, who was criticized several years ago for deciding to play a black butler working in Abraham Lincoln's White House in a UPN comedy. "We're not doing a news show. And if you want reality, you can have your life."

Before she talks about the challenges of playing an emotionally closed-off woman or an amputee, Baker wants to help with a spot of talcum powder.

It landed on a reporter's jacket while greeting the actor, who uses the powder to ease slipping on a tight plastic prosthetic hand that helps her play Mrs. Peters ("If I keep it on, my hand gets numb and . . . I feel as though I really lost my hand," Baker said cheerfully).

Like the devoted mother of two she is, Baker can't help reaching over to brush off the powder and straighten the jacket -- a motherly instinct that, curiously, binds her to a character who may be the worst mother on the planet.

"As David Kelley says, she definitely needs parenting classes . . . but in her head, she's a good mom," Baker said, laughing. "I decided I liked the way she was very sure of herself and said whatever she wanted to say. She was a little more brave than I was."

Initially hired for two or three episodes, Baker found her role expanded by Kelley to at least 15 shows this season.

As an experienced film actor (Clean and Sober, The Right Stuff, The Cider House Rules), Baker is enjoying a job that's close to her home and children. She is mining her personal experience for connections to a character who is, in many ways, her polar opposite.

"I had a serious problem with surgeries that I had in my hip . . . so I can go to feeling unsure about myself physically," said Baker, 51. "I was divorced this year and am dating someone . . . after 15 years of being married. So I can get what Meredith is going through. David, he knows my life."

To illustrate, Baker tells a story about the day she discovered Mrs. Peters would lose her right hand. "I said, "I'm right-handed, so I think it should be my left hand.' They said, "David specifically requested it be your right hand.' In other words, she really has to deal with (the loss)."

Perhaps best known for playing slimy Dr. Frederick Chilton in Silence of the Lambs, Heald, 56, peppers producers with ideas for Guber. Heald also found out how connected Kelley can be to his actors when the producer sent over a script in which Guber tries out as an orchestra conductor, a longtime dream of Heald's.

"We have this joke that David has hidden microphones and cameras all over the place, because he really seems to key into our fantasies," the actor said. "I'm one of those "in the bathroom' conductors. But I had no idea how to really do it."

Pontell likes to call himself Kelley's "general" on Boston Public.

As a prolific writer who creates scripts for Ally McBeal, The Practice and Boston Public (writing with a Paper-Mate pen in longhand, no less), Kelley depends on executives such as Pontell to handle all the nonwriting duties of an executive producer. That means hiring directors (Pontell also directs three episodes a year), casting, production details and more.

"I like to say David hands me a script and I hand him back an episode," said the producer, who met Kelley when the two worked on L.A. Law and has grown used to his quirky plot lines.

"David seems to be fascinated with disembodied body parts," said Pontell, laughing. "We did an episode of Picket Fences where there was a serial hand chopper very early on, and many people got decapitated. I'm not sure what it means. Maybe we need to put him on the couch or something."

A large blueprint of the Boston Public set is pinned to the wall behind his desk (right next to a photo of Pontell with R&B legend Barry White on the Ally McBeal set). The Boston Public set is sprawling, stretching 260 feet over two soundstages and built at a cost of $1.5-million.

For Pontell, it's a tribute to the industry's confidence in Kelley, who knew this show about urban high schools would push boundaries of content from the first episode. "Fox pretty much gave us assurances they would be relaxed about content, and they have been, more so than most 8 o'clock shows," he said.

"Pretty much everything we've done has happened in a school," he added, repeating a line the actors often use when asked about the plot lines. "It just happens in a more concentrated sense."

But Stan Karp, a high school teacher in Paterson, N.J., has disagreed. He called Boston Public "a trendy veneer of social relevance stretched over an empty skeleton of TV cliches," in an article for Rethinking Schools magazine.

In his commentary, Karp said Boston Public "rarely shows teachers actually teaching, or students learning anything," backing away from substantive discussion of real issues in education (boring curriculum, inaccurate standardized tests, lack of resources) while showing an impossibly compliant student body led by dangerously activist teachers.

"A good teacher, the show suggests, isn't someone who has mastered the craft of teaching or who works overtime to create imaginative lessons that move students," Karp wrote. "Instead, a "good teacher' is one who personally empathizes with students and who intervenes, sometimes quite dramatically and inappropriately, in students' private lives."

It's the kind of criticism those close to Boston Public are used to hearing. But for Heald, it also missed the point.

"There's no precinct in the world like NYPD Blue, there has never been a group of doctors like those on ER, and the real West Wing is nothing like that (series)," he said.

"Besides, I can't place too much credence on what anyone else says, positive or negative. If you believe the positive things people say about you, you have to believe the negative, too."

Material from Times files was used in this report.

AT A GLANCE: Boston Public airs at 8 p.m. on WTVT-Ch. 13. Rating: TV-PG.

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