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We talk to the writer/producer about the shortened season one, the new season, and a giant cockroach that tries to kill him.

May 2, 2008 - Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles turned out to be one of the saving graces during the writers' strike. It was one of the only new shows on the air. It was originally supposed to be paired with 24, but the strike pushed that show into next year. So Sarah Connor had Monday night all to itself.

Based on one of the biggest action movie franchises of all time, the series had some rather enormous shoes to fill. There's also the fact that this would be the first Terminator story told without the participation of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who got a bit busy being Governor of California. In Arnold's place came Summer Glau, who is pretty much the physical opposite in every regard. Taking over for Linda Hamilton is Lena Headey, best known for her role as Queen Gorgo in 300. Stepping in to play John Connor, and the third actor to do so (fourth if you count Michael Edwards, fifth if you count Dalton Abbott) is Thomas Dekker – previously seen on NBC's breakout hit Heroes.

The series quickly established itself as its own entity. It would not be "Terminator chase of the week." Instead, the series set up a series of events that changed the game, essentially undoing the events of the third movie in the series and we find Sarah and John taking the fight to Skynet, the super computer that brings about Judgment Day. Considering that this is a major franchise for FOX, the choice of Josh Friedman seemed strange at first for one reason: he'd never worked in television before.

Friedman has had a long career as a screenwriter for films such as Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds and Brian DePalma's Black Dahlia. But, he turned out to be the right guy for the job, as the series got better with each episode. The last episode that aired, which ended up being the show's writers' strike-imposed finale, was probably the best of the season. For a while it seemed touch and go whether the show's increasing number of fans would get their wish for a second season, but FOX recently delivered the good news. We decided to go right to the source and talk to Friedman about the show's first season and what's planned for the next.
IGN TV: What's the first thing you did when you got back?

Josh Friedman: The first thing we did is pull all the writers in and have a big long brainstorming session, analyzing last year and talking about this year. Like you would if you'd won or lost the Super Bowl; take a look at the game film and see where we're at and try and see what we can do better going forward. We spent a lot of time together during the strike, but we hadn't spent any time talking about the show, believe it or not.

IGN TV: So what do writers do when they're together but can't actually work on their show?

Friedman: We just walked the picket lines. When we were on strike we talked about the show to the extent that that's when it was airing. We would talk about what people were responding to. But we didn't do any actual work, it was just "Oh people were surprised by this, and this episode seemed to go over well…" You become sort of a weird outside fan of your own show, because there's nothing you can do about it – you're just watching it happen.

IGN TV: How much time did you spend checking out what message boards and sites were saying during that time?

Friedman: Oh, quite a bit. By the time the show had aired, I would cruise a few message boards. I like to get the general feel of what was working or not working or what was clear or wasn't clear.

IGN TV: You've mentioned before that one thing you think you can do better with the show is having all the plates spinning or balls in the air a bit better. Can you elaborate on what you think may have been lost in the shuffle or bogged down?

Friedman: I think that what happens is that you try and be very ambitious within each episode. You want to tell this A story, this B story and then you see if you can sneak in the C and the D story and by the time you're halfway down the alphabet you're out of the 43 minutes. So you end up cutting stuff, and you end up cutting entire storylines. And I think that that becomes a little problematic. What I want to do this year is, within each episode try and tell fewer stories but tell them more in depth and so no one storyline is on the chopping block. That happened a lot to the high school stuff last year is that it was always a story line that we had going but it was never the highest priority, and when we're trying to decide between more Sarah or more high school intrigue, we always settled on more Sarah. So the high school stuff went away, because we rarely committed to it as a large block of story.

IGN TV: Speaking of that stuff, will we see Cheri again? (that was the mysterious girl at John's school)

Friedman: I think we'll see her a little bit.

IGN TV: Another thing we wanted to follow up on was your plan to bring Kyle Reese into the show directly into the story. But James Middleton (series consulting producer) convinced you that the idea would just anger the fans of the movies. Can you talk about what the original plan was?

Friedman: The plan never got into a lot of details. I always believed that in some version of the time travel theory I could bring Kyle Reese to the present day from the future and not upset the continuity of the previous movies. I had a whole way it worked in my head and the more I tried to explain it to people, the crazier it sounded.

IGN TV: So you mean Kyle would come back to protect Sarah a different way?

Friedman: Sort of, yeah.

IGN TV: Without having any of the experiences of the first movie?

Friedman: Yes.

IGN TV: Because the future changes, with Judgment Day moving, so Kyle's point of origin would also change?

Friedman: Right. But it becomes confusing when you have certain characters living with that character in a certain way and other characters experiencing them a different way and he's dead in one version of their past, and he's alive in their future…I think it makes sense but it's one of those things where James sat across from me at the table and said "Dude, you've gone down the rabbit hole." People are going to go crazy.

IGN TV: So it never made it to the script point?

Friedman: Not it never got past the coffee point.

IGN TV: Let's talk about the other Reese. Brian Austin Green said something to the effect of "Nobody was thinking of me for an action series…" I don't think that's true anymore. How did it happen? Did he just come in and impress you?

Friedman: Yes. It's nothing much more complicated than that. You're casting a role and you see 50 guys and the casting person says "I'm bringing Brian Austin Green in" and you say "Really? That guy?" It's strange. God bless our casting people who said "Look, he's going to come in and do it. Trust us." So I said, "OK, I'm here." And it was in the first two minutes that I knew. I hoped I knew.

IGN TV: When did you feel vindicated in that decision?

Friedman: Probably the first day of shooting. I think the second day he did was when Ellis was showing him pictures and interrogating him. It was the first time the crew had really seen him do anything and everyone was standing around. Anytime you have somebody new, and Brian was kind of high profile but kind of being re-contextualized in some different place. Everyone was sort of standing there on pins and needles wondering "What is Josh thinking?" And then he did the first take of the scene and everyone kind of nodded their head going "Okay, I get it now."

IGN TV: The way he was able to win the audience over was pretty impressive.

Friedman: It is. And it's gratifying and I feel really good for Brian. I don't want to just say that he reinvented himself, because I think actors are always reinventing themselves in every role they do. He's never going to be doing David Silver again, and he's done various things. He's grown up and a lot of people don't realize that he's grown into this man. I didn't know. It's gratifying and he's doing a good job and selfishly I'm happy about it because it's really helped the show.

IGN TV: When did you decide to add him as a regular cast member?

Friedman: We played it by ear. You never know. You want to make sure the actor plays the part well but you also need to have enough material for the actor. Sometimes you have a great idea for five episodes but after that five episodes you go "All right, I've got this person but what am I going to do with them?" So you always want to give yourself as much flexibility as you can. In the case of Brian, everyone responded to him, we really responded to him and the good and and the bad of that is that other people want to hire him. So we had to make a decision pretty quickly going forward, which wasn't a difficult decision to make. It makes it easy in many ways because you don't have to go convince the studio and the network to commit all that cash.

IGN TV: You do seem to be casting people that other shows want. The same is true of Garret Dillahunt and Dean Winters. Is that difficult or are you trying to lock them in for what you need right away?

Friedman: It's a nightmare! Last year it was a nightmare because both of those guys were busy. Dean was flying back and forth doing 30 Rock, Garret may have been okay last year but with his movies he's become extremely popular. He's always been one of those guys that everyone liked but nobody could place necessarily. In Deadwood he was unrecognizable, in John from Cincinnati that was an odd little part. He's been doing this for a long time but is only just now getting more real to a larger audience. It makes it more challenging for us because you have to be more aggressive in terms of making commitments to people. And you have to a plan, because if you're going to commit the money you better have things for people to do.

IGN TV: It seemed by casting Jonathan Jackson as Kyle Reese that we might see him again. I mean, he is "Tuck Everlasting" after all. How many episodes are you planning to do that involve that future?

Friedman: I don't know how many. That episode was "The Future Episode" and we knew we had all this stuff to do. And other times we'll just be doing little flashes and we won't be doing the whole thing. A little bunker here, some night time here, and it's less of a commitment. I love him and I think he did a really good job. It was one of the last things I did before I went on strike. It was a day or two before we went on strike that I cast him. It was very nerve-wracking because I knew we needed someone special for the part and I was leaving in a couple of days. Casting is a bit like looking for your car keys. They're lost, they're lost, they're lost and "Oh, there they are!" It's almost a binary state. Sometimes you might have three or four great ones when you're trying to figure out your own take on the character, but most times it just presents itself to you. The cast we have, the person we have was absolutely the person I wanted and it was very obvious to me that that's who it would be.

IGN TV: Can you talk about not casting Earl Boen as Dr. Silberman?

Friedman: One, he's not really acting anymore. And two, I have at this point avoided any kind of Terminator movie cameo thing – because I just think it's distracting.

IGN TV: Is it because you have a different John and a different Sarah, it would be weird to have the same Dr. Silberman?

Friedman: Yeah. I just think it's our own little world, and it's enough to ask of people "Hey, this is our new John, our new Sarah, and these are our new Terminators." I think that cross pollination has a weird "where's Waldo?" quality to it where you go "Oh, there it is!" I don't want the show to be a trivia contest or a game. We have things in the show mythology-wise that I do think reward people who are really big fans. We try and have stuff for those fans. That's because we're fans too. Believe me, a lot of people in the writer's room said "We have to go get Earl Boen!" It just felt wrong to me. He was so good, but I felt like we had to strike out on our own frontier.

IGN TV: How'd you decide on Bruce Davison?

Friedman: He's just a really great actor. I think again, you see a bunch of people and you want somebody who has that combination of being a little supercilious and arrogant but have an emotional component to him, because he has sort of been converted. Bruce came in very last minute and we handed him about eight pages of dialogue of the scenes of he and Ellison in the cabin and he just knocked 'em out. There's a reason why people use him all the time. There are actors who you can just count on to really nail it. And in TV a lot of times you really need that. You need to know that a guy can come in, take eight pages of difficult dialogue and really be able to deliver. God bless him.

IGN TV: You get so many questions about your allegiance to the Terminator movies, but the show is so clearly different. What influences your approach to this?

Friedman: I don't know if there's any particular influence. If you talk about things I watch or things that I read, I'm a huge Battlestar fan. I can sometimes only watch so much of it because it treads so close to certain topics.

IGN TV: You mean topics that you want to do in Terminator?

Friedman: Yeah. I think Battlestar owes a lot to Terminator and now our Terminator owes a lot to Battlestar. One of our writers is a Battlestar writer and we have Bear McCreary (composer for both shows). Sometimes Toni Graphi our Battlestar writer will start talking about something and I have to stop her and say "No! No! I don't want to talk about it, I don't want to know anything about it. We're not going to go in that direction." I feel like the Terminator mythology in the first two movies, I have everything I need from it but it's all inside now. Our show sort of owns it and is evolving – not beyond it – but into something else. It has to. You have to keep growing the show and moving the characters and still keep the larger conceit alive. The fun part of TV is taking little left hand turns with your characters and driving around the block a few times before you get on the freeway.

IGN TV: Let's talk about the last episode that aired, "What He Beheld." That had what I think was the best scene of the show, when Ellison and the S.W.A.T. team faces Cromartie. How did you decide to not show that fight, and stage it the way you did?

Friedman: It's pretty simple. We were sitting in the writers' room and we had to have this S.W.A.T. shootout and I said "I want to do it all from the bottom of a swimming pool." And everyone laughed at me. Not in a "you're an idiot" way, but as if I was joking. But I kind of acted out what I wanted to see, and Ian Goldberg, who was going to be the one writing the script was taking notes and he wrote it down. When the director came on board it was interesting because he came to us…and he said, "I love this pool shootout. What movie did you take this from?" I said, "No movie, this is just what we wanted to do."

I'm a big fan of Rescue Me, and I think one of the things they do so well is that whenever they show a fire, that fire has a point of view. It has its own story – whether it's a character story or a filmmaking story or a piece of music. It'll be a story about how nobody can see, or hear, or a case of mistaken identity – there's always some big idea with those fires. Because you can imagine they say we're a firefighter show and we're going to do 15 a year or whatever they're going to do. How are they going to make these special?

That was something I preached last year about our Terminator fights. A – what makes them a Terminator fight as opposed to just a normal fight or action sequence, and B – what is special about it? What can we do that is exciting for us? That one was the one that worked the best. I'm a big Johnny Cash fan, I'm actually wearing a Johnny Cash baseball hat right now. My son's middle name is Cash. And we always talk about the Terminator equating death, and Ian said "We should call this episode 'When the Man Comes Around.' Then we decided to use the song, and we find a version of it online and we all got really excited about it. For rights reasons we changed the title to "What He Beheld."

IGN TV: With Joss Whedon coming to FOX with Dollhouse, is there a little part of you that thinks he's coming to take Summer Glau back?

Friedman: (laughs) Yes! I will say that some of my more uncomfortable moments as executive producer of this show involve me, Joss Whedon, and Summer Glau at Comic-Con standing together. I felt like I'd gotten into the middle of a very intense relationship that I shouldn't be a part of. So I just had to walk away. I'm kidding, but you know – he's been very supportive. She uses him as a mentor and I know that she called him before auditioning for the part to ask if he thought it was good for her to do it. And he was very supportive of her being involved in this.

IGN TV: It's not just Whedon coming to FOX. There's J.J. Abrams coming in with Fringe, Ron Moore's new show just got announced called Virtuality, and Shawn Ryan maybe with The Oaks. They all sound like genre shows that's not just for the genre audience. So are you showing these guys around the place?

Friedman: Joss has been at FOX before, with mixed results. I think it's fantastic. I think that it's the smartest thing that they can do. It seems to me that you have to embrace it. It's quite a line-up and it's a good group of shows with people who have strong visions for them. Those guys, certainly more than I do, have a brand that brings with it a group of fans. I only hope that a year from now we will all be grouped together on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. Though I'll be the guy in the back bringing coffee. "Not Pictured: Josh Friedman."

IGN TV: I know you don't give any, and it's good that you don't; so how can you tell us what's coming up without giving anything? What's your best spoiler-free pitch?

Friedman: I haven't figured it out yet! Last year this was a problem too, when we would have casting we wouldn't always tell the actors what roles they were reading for. And it makes it hard on them. They come in and they're halfway through and they say "Am I human or not? What am I supposed to be reacting to here?" It was a pain in the ass for us. It worked out pretty well. I still wish people would tease stuff more. I wish FOX would be a little bit more mysterious. Their job is to get people to watch the episodes, but it's my job to get people to actually enjoy the episodes. Sometimes I think those two run counter to each other. You drive people to an episode by showing them something fantastic, but then when they watch the episode they say, "Oh, there's that part, and that part, and that part." And they're checking boxes and watching passively.

That's a long way to say…what can I tell you? I'm a big fan of resetting character dynamics. I really like the idea that you can take character dynamics from one season and turn them on their heads. As it relates to this being a family story, about a very interesting family, I think that it's sort of up to me to shuffle up those relationships a bit. I'm going to do that. It's a coming of age year for John. Last year he was still a boy, and this year he's going to move towards becoming a man.

Source: IGN.com

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