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July 29, 2015
In The Mix

Partners in Sublime

With their complementary skill sets, writer-producers Jon Robin Baitz and Walter F. Parkes were ideal collaborators for The Slap, a broadcast drama with the ambition of cable.

Juan Morales

NBC’s The Slap was a complex drama fraught with tension, betrayal and violence. But making it was something close to bliss.

“Creatively, it was a fantastic experience, with nothing but boundless support from the studio and network executives,” says Jon Robin Baitz, cowriter and executive producer. Adds his fellow writer and exec producer, Walter F. Parkes: “I think everybody involved said, ‘We have the opportunity to do something special, so let’s make the most of it.’”

Based on an eight-part Australian production of the same name (adapted from the novel by Christos Tsiolkas), The Slap — a limited series from Universal Television — examines the unraveling of a tightly knit family and close group of friends following an incident at a backyard barbecue.

A father, intervening in an argument among the kids, slaps another couple’s preschool-age son. Loyalties are tested, charges are filed and a bitter court battle ensues.

The Slap is one of the truly great ideas I’ve come across,” Parkes says. “Usually high-concept ideas spawn wonderful action movies or comedies. But it’s rare to find a high-concept drama. The idea of a father slapping someone else’s child, and then exploring the repercussions — as a pure dramatic premise, it’s extraordinary.”

When it comes to high-concept ideas, Parkes is something of an authority. He began his career as a screenwriter of such films as Sneakers and WarGames and went on to produce such hits as Twister, Men in Black and The Mask of Zorro. With his wife, Laurie McDonald, he ran DreamWorks SKG when it made such Oscar winners as American Beauty, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind.

Baitz has an impressive résumé in his own right. One of the most heralded American playwrights of the past quarter-century, his theater credits include The Film Society, The Substance of Fire, Three Hotels, A Fair Country, The Paris Letter, and Other Desert Cities.

Though longtime friends, the two men were somewhat unlikely TV collaborators. For starters, Parkes has been making movies for more than 20 years. As for Baitz, his previous TV experience did not end well.

He broke into the industry by writing episodes of Alias and The West Wing, and enjoyed initial success as creator–executive producer of ABC’s Brothers & Sisters. But an impasse with ABC over the creative direction of the series culminated in his ouster.

But when NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt acquired the rights to The Slap and approached Parkes to develop it for American television, Parkes immediately thought of Baitz, whose ability to probe character was an ideal complement to his own affinity for story and structure.

“I’ve always felt very comfortable with a kind of external storytelling and writing,” Parkes says. “My wife used to joke that I was good as long as the movie had a clock or countdown in it. So the opportunity to work with someone like Robbie, and to work with such rich material, was a revelation at this point in my career.”

The emotional volatility and frequently unsettling nature of The Slap were a departure from most broadcast network fare — which only heightened its appeal to Parkes and Baitz.

Similarly, the depth and resonance of the characters attracted a first-rate cast that included Peter Sarsgaard, Thandie Newton, Zachary Quinto, Uma Thurman and Melissa George, who reprised the role of Rosie, mother of the child who is slapped, whom she played in the Aussie original.

When Baitz and Parkes got to work on the adaptation, they shifted the setting from the sun-bleached suburbs of Melbourne to a grittier Brooklyn.

“It’s multicultural, and not everybody is rich, though it’s harder to be poor in New York than ever,” Baitz says. “I was fascinated by exploring the theme of dissatisfaction in the story. It’s almost particular to New York — people whose ability to count their blessings has been stunted by their own narcissism.

"I thought that was a great backdrop to bring into this story about a group of people who want and want, but they don’t know what they want.”

Like the original, each episode of the American Slap focuses on one character, though Baitz and Parkes shuffled the order to heighten the impact of the court case. “In the Australian series, the trial is resolved in, I think, the fifth episode,” Parkes notes. “So we made a decision early on to keep the trial going to the end.”

Although the original included salty language and occasionally explicit sex, both Baitz and Parkes say content was not a major issue. “My best friends, I say jokingly, were the standards-and-practices people,” Baitz recalls, “who were entirely on our side and could not have worked with us more.”

A more daunting hurdle was time. “The Australian episodes are 60 minutes each,” Baitz explains. “So the concerns of commercials and 43-minute storytelling [on NBC] presented challenges. You had to choose what to leave out and what was important.

"I think there’s a case to be made for the ease with which an Australian audience can relax for 60 minutes; the storytelling is a little looser and Altman-esque. That doesn’t quite exist for American network audiences, so tightening was probably a good thing.”

Perhaps most vexing was an aesthetic intrusion that arose when the show began airing. “My main source of dismay has to do with the interruptions,” Baitz says. “Not just commercials, which are a given. But also you end up with a kind of Gowanus Canal pollution of the bugs that pop up at the bottom of the screen.

"You’re on a closeup of somebody kissing or crying, and suddenly —with all possible respect to James Spader — his face pops up at the bottom of the screen and it says, ‘Coming up next, don’t forget to watch [The Blacklist].’”

Despite the challenges and occasional frustrations, both Baitz and Parkes emerged with positive feelings about the project and NBC’s decision to pursue it.

“This was but a first step in an evolution of network television catching up to cable in terms of storytelling,” Baitz says. “I was attracted to the ambition of it, and I like that Bob Greenblatt has recognized the need for a change in thinking.”

“When a network makes a show like this, it’s not about running for five years and 100 episodes,” Parkes says. “It’s about trying to do something that hasn’t been done before. I have to hand it to everyone at the network and studio that they followed through on that. I don’t remember a smoother relationship.

"While I’ve had a long and satisfying career making films, I completely understand why people start to do television. On a creative basis, it’s in so many ways more satisfying.”

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