Name of the game
Iconic buddy-cop drama Lethal Weapon is back, but it’s no ripoff. Steve Kilgallon finds out more.
The trend in American television right now isn’t very original. Take an old movie, re-cast it in half hour chunks. Repeat. The Exorcist, Training Day, The Departed, Snatch and Get Shorty are all due the treatment.
It left writer and executive producer Matt Miller wondering if maybe he should come up with a new name for the cop-buddy comedy-drama he was working on. In the end, he stuck with Lethal Weapon. After all, he says, if there are kids watching who’ve neither seen nor even heard of Richard Donner’s flash-bang 1987 original movie, ‘‘then it just seems like I’m smarter and I came up with everything’’.
But Miller admits: ‘‘It feels like everyone has got this idea ... some of them work well and some of them don’t.’’
Miller wasn’t sure he would have got commissioned without the title, but acknowledges that with plenty of TV retreads tanking, there was also some risk.
‘‘It cuts both ways. Maybe to a certain extent, it’s appealing to them [the studios], but I also think they understand there is a backlash with some of these shows and maybe there is a saturation of them.
‘‘But it certainly helps to take something which isn’t the highest concept, about these two broken cops who need each other; in a world where things need to have a big splash and a big pop, if I had just pitched that version of the show without the title, it wouldn’t be as appealing.’’
Miller says the reason behind the tide of remakes is gaining brand recognition with an audience now split between multiple networks and platforms. However, when he tested his pilot episode of the new show, he began to wonder. ‘‘People loved it and there was a question in our minds ‘do we change the name?’
‘‘There have been a lot of unsuccessful versions of movies as TV shows and we asked ourselves does it work on its own, do we need the title, is it better for us not to have this baggage? We ultimately decided it is a better title for a broader audience.’’
The remakes Miller likes – Fargo, Bates Motel, Friday Night Lights – he reckons have a shared characteristic. ’’Ultimately, it comes down to not feeling like you have to repeat the exact story of the movie, rather than taking the spirit of them and forging your own path. That feels, hopefully, what we are doing here. Maybe some of the ones that haven’t worked have been too reliant on the concept or the story.’’
He has the same plan. He was a fan of the ‘‘darker’’ first movie in the Lethal Weapon quartet, which focused on traumatic Vietnam vet Riggs’ suicidal tendencies, than the lighter, more comedic sequels, and intends his series to spend more time exploring Riggs’ mentality. The new Riggs, of course, hasn’t served in Vietnam – ‘‘he’d be very, very old, it certainly wouldn’t have played as well’’ – but he is still recovering from the loss of his wife and (unborn) child in a car accident. The use of flashbacks mean his wife is an actual character this time around.
‘‘We get to live through Riggs’ pain, it allows us to make it something that has a little more longevity than just having a character who has lost someone and meeting him when he has already had that heartbreak.’’
Finding that new version of Riggs was the hardest part. Miller wrote the Murtaugh part (played by Danny Glover first time around) with Damon Wayans in mind, and it took merely a lunch meeting to get him on board. Getting the right partner for Wayans wasn’t as simple. ‘‘We looked all over, we auditioned people in LA, and New York, Canada, Europe, Australia, probably New Zealand as well.
‘‘We just searched high and low and everyone, whether they were aware of it or not, even if they were not a huge fan of the franchise because they were too young, every one of them had seen the movie before they auditioned and everyone had this idea in their mind of the way Mel Gibson played the role.’’
Miller didn’t want a Gibson clone, so eventually his search led him to the Alabama farm of indie movie actor Clayne Crawford. They’d seen Crawford play nutty before, and they liked it: ‘‘He had this real manic, slightly unglued sensibility that didn’t feel like he was doing ‘oh I am crazy’ in the way Mel Gibson did, he was damaged, and able to play damaged well’’.
Crawford, who was working on an obscure cable show, needed some convincing. ’’We wanted to do something a little different and special. He was worried we were going to do a cookie-cutter version of the original and we talked about how we wanted to swing for the fences with something interesting. We think it’s worked out great.’’
Lethal Weapon starts September 25, TV1, 8.30pm.
It certainly helps to take something which isn't the highest concept, about these two broken cops who need each other; in a world where things need to have a big splash and a big pop, if I had just pitched that version of the show without the title, it wouldn't be as appealing. Matt Miller