Chasing another TV first

Press, 19 June 1986, Page 19

Chasing another TV first

By

LEE GOLDBERG

“The Paper Chase” has made television history — more than once, and now it is doing it again. The law students who have spent 58 episodes (three years of their education) being terrorised by Professor Kingsfield are going to do what few students in a TV series do — graduate. Then school will be out on the “The Paper Chase” for good. “Some shows are not endless and it’s sad to see a show become tired. Why not go out with a bang?” says Brad Johnson, the vice-president of programming for Showtime, which began producing the programme after it was dropped by C.B.S. “There’s a nice logical way to end the series and maintain the show’s dignity.” Dubbed “The Gradua-

tion Year,” the final six hours of “The Paper Chase” will bring to an end a series that represents three cable TV firsts — the first dramatic series, the first series to emigrate from a network and the first series made exclusively for cable television by a big studio. “This has ended so many times that I’m not altogether convinced this is the end,” says the John Houseman, the actor who won an Oscar in 1973 for his portrayal of Professor Kingsfield in the movie “The Paper Chase.” “We’ve managed to set quite a few precedents along the way.” The show began as a 1976 book by John Jay Osborne that was adapted into a movie about a midwestern farm boy, James Hart, who goes to a prestigious eastern law school, where he is terrified by his professor and falls in

The makers of “The Paper Chase” have tried hard to portray college students as they really are. Now that the time is right they are letting them do what few other TV series’ students have been allowed — to graduate.

love with the professor’s daughter. Then it became a 1978 series about the lives of a group of first-year law students (James Stephens as Hart, Tom Fitz Simmons as Ford and Tom Keane as Bell) and their relationship with Houseman’s Kingsfield. It was cancelled after one low-rated but critically acclaimed season.

“I was petrified that people had remembered the show as being so wonderful. What if they remembered something we’d never be able to recreate?” says Roth. "So we took advantage of the freedoms of cable, eliminated the false-act ending that commercial breaks make you have, and tried our best. We take our time to explor subtleties. We may have made the show a little more intelligent because we were allowed to. We didn’t have a network that was constantly telling us. ‘They (the audiences) are not going to understand.’ ”

It should have been written off as a noble failure and forgotten, but it broke the rules. It stayed on the air. P.B.S. re-ran the series in 1980 and discovered there was a diehard audience of loyal "Paper Chase” fans. “The show did incredibly well,” says Lynn Roth, the executive producer of “The Paper Chase” on Showtime. "We tried to interest the P.B.S. stations into gathering up enough money to make original episodes. They loved the idea, but they couldn’t afford it.” Showtime could, “The Paper Chase" went into production again four years after its demise and “instead of making the students Peter Pans who lived forever as freshmen, we moved them into their second year,” explains Houseman. “Everyone became a little older, a little more adult, and a little more concerned about the world than they were when they were all terrorised as freshmen.” New characters, including Lanie Kazan as an older divorcee who returns to school, were added and John Jay Osborne wrote several of the scripts.

The show has thrived quietly on Showtime for the past four years and is ending now because "it seems like the right thing to do.”

Though plot details are being kept quiet, Roth says one regular will not graduate and that Hart is offered a faculty post, but Kingsfield “sabotages it so he will go out into the world and learn.” The decision to end “Paper Chase” this way is indicative of the thought and care that has always gone into the programme. “College students tend to be portrayed as always having sex, getting drunk and speaking in monosyllabic words like ‘hey’ and ‘wow,” says Roth. “You never heard them talk like articulate human beings, which they are. College students know big words, they know grammar, they are enormously bright. That’s how we portray them.” Yet they have stayed true to reality. These students do have sex and

they do swear, though that is not the sum total of their behaviour.

They have also stayed true to the show’s theme.

“What has always been unique about our show is that it’s a serious programme about the law and the teaching of the law,” says Houseman. “When we were on C.B.S. there was a tremendous temptation on the part of the sponsors and everybody to try to jazz the show up. We always fought a rear-guard action to deviate into sex or sentiment.” Those battles were not fought on cable. They had other temptations to worry about. “I think everybody was worried the show would be nothing but nudity and swearing because that seemed to be the appeal of cable,” says James Stephens. "But that never happened on ‘The Paper Chase.’ The writing has maintained a very high standard. It doesn’t try to ride the crest of a wave and be terribly sensual or adventurous. It’s much more true to life and naturalistic.”

Is that why is has survived? Is that why it has maintained a quiet audience of loyal yuppies?

“We ask ourselves that question a lot and I think — and this is going to sound corny — it’s because the show is about integrity,” says Roth. “I think in this day and age, when you smell something with integrity you want to grab on to it because it’s not in abundance these days. It’s a theme that pleases a lot of people on a deep level.”

Houseman thinks the show’s allure is Kingsfield’s relationship with the students he horrifies.

“I’ve always felt that it was simply a recognition on the part of people and students, including high school students, that, in everybody’s life, there suddenly appears a charismatic teacher who pushes you beyond the limits of what you know is possible of yourself,” says Houseman. “We may have hated the teacher, but the teacher made a big difference. The gratitude and acknowledgement of that has a lot to do with the creation of Kingsfield’s character.” — “Los Angeles Times,” Syndicate.