Trauma’s Derek Luke, Kevin Rankin and Dario Scardapane – Field Medics

Derek Luke as Cameron Boone and Kevin Rankin as Tyler Briggs in the season one Trauma episode "All's Fair." Photo by Paul Drinkwater and copyright of NBC

FROM executive producer Peter Berg (NBC’s Friday Night Lights) comes Trauma, the first high-octane medical drama series to live exclusively in the field where the real action is. Like an adrenaline shot to the heart, Trauma, is an intense, action-packed look at one of the most dangerous medical professions in the world: first responder paramedics. When emergencies occur, the trauma team from San Francisco City Hospital is first on the scene, traveling by land, sea or air to reach their victims in time. From the heights of the city’s Transamerica Pyramid to the depths of the San Francisco Bay, these heroes must face the most extreme conditions to save lives – and give meaning to their own existence in the process. 

Starring in Trauma are Cliff Curtis (Push) as daredevil flight medic Reuben ”Rabbit” Palchuk; Derek Luke (Notorious) as stoic paramedic Cameron Boone; Anastasia Griffith (Damages) as strong-willed paramedic Nancy Carnahan; Aimee Garcia (George Lopez) as tough rookie helicopter pilot Marisa Benez; Kevin Rankin (Friday Night Lights) as edgy EMT Tyler Briggs; Taylor Kinney (Fashion House) as rookie EMT Glenn Morris and Jamey Sheridan (law & Order: Criminal Intent) as mentor Joe Savino. Peter Berg, Sarah Aubrey (The Kingdom, Friday Night Lights0, Jeffrey Reiner (Friday Night Lights), Peter Noah (The West Wing) and series creator Dario Scardapane serve as executive producer. The pilot was written by Scardapane and directed by Reiner. 

Last week, Derek Luke, Kevin Rankin and Dario Scardapane spent some time chatting with myself and other journalists about the series. The following is an edited version of our Q & A. Enjoy! 

I wanted to know if any of you were aware of the online following that you all have as far as a save the show campaign and backing the show with social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook? 

DARIO SCARDAPANE - We’re very aware of it, and watching the show’s Facebook fan page grow by about 1,000 people a week over the last few weeks has been amazing. And being a Facebook addict myself, I’ve had a lot of contact with a number of the fans. It’s been kind of a strange rollercoaster to be on, with the show on and off the schedule [due to the recent 2010 Olympic coverage], with more episodes ordered and a lot of strange things that have happened. But it’s been pretty great to hear such positive feedback and to see people doing things like sending Band-Aids and calling the network on our behalf. It’s a great way to get direct feedback from the audience. 

KEVIN RANKIN - With the Internet and these kinds of things, you’re not powerless as a viewer any more. At least you feel like you can do something, even if it doesn’t work, you know, at least you can have some sort of closure. A lot of shows get yanked after a couple of airings, so we’ve been very lucky and I would love to think that it has something to do with the great fans we have out there who are spreading the word. 

DEREK LUKE -Wow, this is funny, because my wife has been asking me to get on Facebook. But for me, I’ve been getting so much word of mouth from people on the street who have been asking me, ‘Where’s Trauma?’ And I tell them, “The Olympics,” and they’re like, ‘Man, we’re waiting for your show to come back.” So I think word of mouth is working as well as things like Facebook and Twitter. 

This question is for Derek and Luke – can you tell us a little bit about the audition process for your respective roles and some of the challenges you guys initially found stepping into these roles? 

KR - I previously worked with Jeff Reiner and Peter Berg on Friday Night Lights and then Trauma came up. I got a phone call, came in and met with Dario. We hit it off immediately and just started spit-balling ideas for the character. So it was nothing but a golden process for me. Of course, I did have to come in and test for the network, but probably my biggest challenge with the show has been a lot of the medicine and medical terminology. At the beginning of the season, though, it’s finding your character and something that’s going to speak to the people and just trying to tell this story of Tyler Briggs. 

DL - Kevin and I have a lot in common as far as behind-the-scenes. I’d worked with Peter Berg before, and then I met Jeffrey and Dario in the initial [audition] meeting. I was excited about playing Boone just because when I read the script there was so much meat and integrity in the words. Again, having worked with Peter on Friday Night Lights, this role was, like Kevin’s, a straight hire. One of the challenges for me besides the medicine was when I asked Pete, “What’s the difference with building a character on TV as opposed to in a movie?” He said, “You just have to play it moment by moment.” So I came in with a lot of questions, but I love the fact that we’re in different situations week-to-week. 

Dario, where did your inspiration for the series first come from, and what, for you, were some of the challanges getting Trauma off the ground? 

DS - Well, I’ll flat-out say that the inspiration was Emergency and the generation that grew up on that show. When Pete came to me about redoing or coming up with something that had the same kind of emergency medical adrenaline, it was just like, “Yeah, I have to.” I’d worked with NBC as well as Sarah Aubrey and Pete Berg quite a bit over the years, and this just seemed like something perfect. I’d never done a medical show before, and being the son of a doctor, the grandson of a doctor, the son of a nurse, the nephew of a doctor, and coming from an Italian American medical family where I am without a doubt the black sheep, it seemed like the right way to come up with a little off-center medical series. As far as the challanges of getting the series off the ground, they were the same ones that face just about any TV show. Our pilot was huge and perhaps kind of mis-sold as something about explosions and car wrecks, and now it’s a show about characters and this amazing group of people who go into the fray when others would run away. 

Kevin, what’s been the best argument Tyler and Boone have had so far, or which one is your favorite? 

KR - It’s just one continuous argument of who’s going to drive, who’s going to clean the rig,  and just these little nit-picky things between friends. I really don’t think it bothers Boone and Tyler too much. It’s just part of their MO [modus operandi]. However, you’re going to see in the next couple of episodes that when they do have arguments, that some lines will be drawn in the sand, but you can wipe those lines away real fast. So they’re always going to butt heads, but thing always come out in the wash and it’s always a good time with them. These guys are great friends and it’s a great friendship to see play out. I love it. 

DS - And their friendship will face a very, very big challenge in the final two episodes of the seasons. 

Dario, with so many medical dramas out there, what do you think might set Trauma apart from those and make people curious to tune in? 

DS - The bulk of our action takes place before you hit the double-doors of the emergency room, and I also think that we’ve avoided a lot of the tropes and clichés of many other shows. This is faster, funnier and a little bit weirder, and I mean that in a good way. Trauma also deals with street medicine; it deals with the medicine on the sidewalk, the medicine inside the cab of a rig. More importantly, what sets it apart from a lot of the medical shows out there, some of which came out of the same developmental season as us and have not stuck around, is that most of them rest on guest-star patient stories. So and so comes in and there’s a guest-star who has a horrible thing happen to him or her and it’s resolved at the end of 42 minutes. Our show rests on the job and the toll of the job and how it affects our core ensemble cast of characters. Trauma has a pretty unique tone, unlike most other medical shows. 

KR - We said right from the get-go that this was, you know, punk rock, not Burt Bacharach. I’ve definitely had that in the back of my mind from the beginning. 

DL - I love the energy and the current relationships. It seems like Trauma is very current and I think it takes a look at how our world affects us and how we affect our world. 

Kevin, how did you approach playing a gay character? Was it something that you were really conscious of, or did you not even think about it? 

KR - With any character, things like that are costuming to me. It’s wardrobe, because with every character that you play, you’re playing the human, and the heart of the character. I said from the beginning when I was approached to play a gay character that, like anything else, he’s going to be a guy who happens to be a paramedic who happens to be gay. I thought it was a unique opportunity to play it differently as opposed to putting this character into a stereotypical box that network television and a lot of other TV has done over the years. 

People see a very flamboyant, homosexual character on TV and then they go home and think, “Oh, I don’t know any gay people because that’s how gay people are.” But what they have to understand is that everyone knows someone who’s gay. They may not throw it in your face, they may not tell you about it, but I just thought this is a really unique way to get the message out there that, hey, we’re all the same. So I don’t think I approached this any differently than any other character I’ve played. In Friday Night Lights I was a quadriplegic in a wheelchair. If you saw me wheel into a scene, you forgot about that chair pretty quickly. You just saw the human, and I thought this is really great because we introduce Tyler at the beginning of the season and you don’t know he’s gay. 

Dario, you said earlier that maybe the show was sold incorrectly in the beginning, with it being about explosions and what not. Do you wish you had a do-over? 

DS - Not at all. The pilot process is kind of crazy and so breakneck, and way back when, even at the [network] upfront, I remember saying something, and thank God it’s still in print, about the fact that this isn’t a show about explosions, this is a show about people. In the cascade of 30-second soundbites and what you see in the first few minutes, it became evident that, wow, this show has a lot of crap blowing up. Now, though, we’re 10 episodes in – we’re shooting the 17th episode – and there’s a lot less stuff blowing up as far as cars and tankers, and more stuff blowing up amongst people, which I feel is more compelling. So I really hope that audiences give it a chance and dig in with these guys. I don’t think people come to television for spectacle. I don’t really have much fun writing spectacle for television. I’ll do that in features. 

Are you able to tease us a little bit as to what might happen should there be a season two of the show? 

DS - Well, season two will see all of our characters in a different place, quite literally and figuratively. Some will remain where they are in terms of inside the box – again, literally, the medical rig – while others are going to have to forge new paths, to sound really vague. Let’s just say that all bets are off in season two. You’ll notice by the end of the first season, that one of the characters isn’t around, and what happens with that and the ripples that that has for everybody’s lives are going to play out in season two. I’ve got the first three episodes of the second season kind of sketched out in my head, and I really hope we have the opportunity to make them. 

Dario, at one point we’d heard the show was cancelled, and then it was back and you were given more episodes. What has this been like psychologically for you and the cast to go through as far as we’re on again, off again, we’re here, we’re there, etc? 

DS - Honestly, it’s been amazing because it’s brought us together. It’s made the actors speak up about what they want to do and they’ve been our partners in this. And I have to say that we’ve got the best crew ever. I was on-set a week ago when we were at the end of a 14-hour day and I looked around and the entire cast was there. We were filming some additional footage for our very first episode back [after the 2010 Olympics] and it felt wonderful. We’ve survived the odds, you know? We thought we were off the air after 10 episodes and here we are getting ready to do 20. Talk about a great feeling.

As noted above, photo by Paul Drinkwater and copyright of NBC, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!

Ron Moore – Virtual Vision

ABOARD Earth’s first starship, the Phaeton, a crew of 12 astronauts is on the verge of embarking on an epic 10-year mission crucial to the survival of life on Earth. They have reached the “go” or “no go” point, the critical part of the journey where the crew must commit to traveling to a distant solar system millions of miles away. If they “go,” they cannot turn back.

Executive producers Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek: The Next Generation), Michael Taylor (Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek: Voyager) and director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock) present Virtuality, a breakthrough Science Fiction thriller set in two very different universes: outer space and the seemingly limitless virtual reality.

To give the crew a measure of privacy as well as a vital recreational outlet on the long journey, the ship has been equipped with revolutionary virtual reality modules. Each crew member can assume adventurous, avatar-like identities as they explore self-created worlds and scenarios, or simply spend quality downtime as themselves in the ultra-life-like simulators From a war hero to a rock star to secret lovers on an island, these are their psychological lifelines, and each module’s unique setting was chosen by the crew member before departing Earth.

But there is a bug in the system.

As crew members go in and out of reality, they realize that a virus has entered their private world. Questions are raised, and suspicions fanned; is someone on the crew responsible? When the interloper’s intrusions cross a violent and disturbing line, the ship’s commander makes a difficult decision to shut down the modules. But before he can, a tragic even threatens the mission. Is it an accident or a crime? Real or virtual? Whatever the case, it’s too late to turn back, so the group ventures forth into space, fearing that they may be harboring a person or presence determined to derail their vital mission. Meanwhile, tensions are further heightened as surveillance cameras capture their every move for a reality series back on Earth.

From executive producers Ronald D. Moore, Michael Taylor, Gail Berman, Lloyd Braun, Peter Berg and Sarah Aubrey, this captivating original feature invites viewers to join the crew of the Phaeton on a journey into a near-future, one that is a heightened version of our own Internet- and entertainment-mediated reality. A journey that will become even more surprising with each new revelation.

The cast of Virtuality, which airs Friday, June 26th from 8 p.m. - 10 p.m. EST/PST on the Fox Network. L-R: Kerry Bishe (as Billie Kashmiri); Ritchie Coster (as Dr. Jimmy Johnson); Eric Jensen (as Dr. Jules Braun); Nelson Lee (as Kenji Yamamoto); Joy Bryant (as Alice Thibadeau); Clea DuVall (as Sue Parsons); Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (as Commander Frank Pike); Sienna Guillory (as Rika Goddard); James D'Arcy (as Dr. Roger Fallon); Jose Pablo Cantillo (as Manny Rodriguez); Gene Farber (as Val Orlovsky); Omar Metwally (as Dr. Adin Meyer) and Jimmi Simpson (as Virtual Man). Photo credit: Kharen Hill/Fox and copyright of Fox Broadcasting

Earlier this month, myself and several other journalists participated in a Q & A conference call with Virtuality writer/executive producer Ron Moore. Here is an edited version of that conversation.

How is this [Virtuality] different from Star Trek where you would have the holodeck and people would get lost in that artificial environment?

RON MOORE – Well, it’s a different concept. The holodeck was an actual space that you would go into and three dimensional forms were physically created in front of you, which you were then able to feel, touch, interact with, etc. The computer would generate them as long as you were in there. This, however, is truly a virtual space, which is much more akin to putting on contemporary, sort of virtual headsets, but then taking that to the next level where you do have an experiential ability to touch, sense, taste and smell things in your mind, so it’s on a different mechanical level.

In terms of story, we’re not playing the idea that if you die in the virtual space, you then die in real space. It’s more like gaming is now. You go on-line, play a game and if you get killed, then you’re kicked out of the program, but you’re not dead in real life. We’re using these [virtual reality modules] much more psychologically as well. Essentially, the virtual experiences that the astronauts have aboard the Phaeton are the types of things that are psychologically motivated. They go in there and do things for entertainment and to pass the time of day while they’re on this very, very long-range mission. In the process, you’re also learning things about them personally as well as where they choose to spend their time, and when things go wrong inside that space how does that then influence them in the real world. That was the thing I was most interested in; how virtual space impacted the real story that was going on aboard the spacecraft and vice versa.

Given the nature of Battlestar Galactica, you had to be very serious dealing with the spaceship and everything. Does Virtuality allow you to have a little bit more fun with the concept of people in space?

RM - Oh, yes. It’s a much less serious situation than Battlestar dealt with. Battlestar was literally a post-apocalyptic show where the future of humanity rode on their every decision, and death was stalking them continuously. This [Virtuality] is not set up in the same way. The crew on-board the Phaeton signed up for what just seemed like a very straightforward mission of exploration and they were chosen with that in mind. They were also chosen to participate in this sort of reality show that is being broadcast back on Earth.

So there was a conscious attempt on the part of the people who put the crew together to have  an interesting mix of people. There are debates amongst the crew itself when it comes to who was chosen just for their demographic content as opposed to who is legitimately supposed to be there. Now you’ve got a group of 12 people stuck in a metal tube going in a straight line for a decade or so, and that’s going to result in a lot of tension, friction and manipulation, and cause problems between the characters. It has a strong element of fun and suspense and interesting plot twists in terms of what characters will do with one another. Battlestar, on the other hand, was very much driven by the internal pressures of the huge weight that was on all of their shoulders from the beginning of the miniseries. So there’s definitely more humor. Let’s just say that in the first 10 minutes of Virtuality there is probably more humor than there was in the [entire] run of Battlestar.

When did you come up with the idea of blending a Sci-Fi thriller with a reality show element to it?

RM - It was sort of in stages. When we first started talking about the concept it was about a long-range space mission, which I was intrigued with. Like I said before, I was interested in the idea of what do you do with 12 people in a metal tube for that long. I thought there were interesting dramatic possibilities right there and, OK, what would they realistically need to do. What would NASA or the space confederation do at that point to keep them from going crazy? They would probably have a really advanced virtual reality program to help them pass the time, and there’s interaction between those two worlds.

Somewhere in those discussions, we began talking about when they would be broadcasting pieces back to Earth, like astronauts do today, and, hey, what if they made a reality show out of that? Then it all kind of started to come together. You had these three layers of storytelling going on in the show where you had what was happening in the real world on the ship, what was happening in the virtual space, and then what was the reality show that was seen back on Earth. Were the needs of the reality show starting to impact what was happening on the spacecraft? Were people being manipulated in order to make better drama for the reality show? So it evolved into this really interesting psychological crucible that our characters would all be put in.

When you were writing this were there any major hurdles or blind alleys? Did it get confusing?

RM - Yes. I mean, it was a tough thing to juggle. It’s a very ambitious piece, and I think that was the reaction on the part of Fox when they saw it. It’s a very challenging, complicated piece of work and there are a number of moving parts. We knew that going in and writing the script wasn’t easy. There was a lot of trying to decide how much time to spend in any one of these three categories, and at what point do you shift from the audience’s point of view to the other. What’s the language for that? Where are we going to introduce certain characters? How often do you go to the first person confessionals and the reality show, etc. So there were several complicated questions, all of which were still there in the editing process. When do you switch to which piece of material? I found it all a fascinating challenge.

In the virtual world are there avatar-style characters or are there real people?

RM - The actors play themselves in the virtual space. What we did during the production was shoot all of the virtual reality scenes using green screen. So for instance, the story opens with an extended piece that involves the lead character within a Civil War virtual space. None of that was shot on-location, and we didn’t build a set, either. It was all done on a green screen stage using a computer. We kept that language for all the virtual pieces to give them all a sense of continuity so that you always felt that you were in a virtual space.

This was originally supposed to be a pilot for a TV series, right?

RM - It is a pilot. Fox is going to broadcast it as a two-hour movie, but in my mind it’s a pilot and it always has been.

So it can still become a series?

RM - I think you never say never. It hasn’t been picked up yet. The network’s attitude is, I think, to kind of wait and see what the reaction is going to be. What are the critics going to say? Is it going to get word of mouth. Are fans going to gravitate to it or is the Science Fiction community really going to turn up for it? Is there going to be a certain buzz and excitement? Right now it doesn’t look like it’s going to series, but I think if enough people watched and got excited about it, then anything is possible. It [the story] certainly does not resolve itself in two hours. Some pretty heavy things go down in it, and by the end of it you’re kind of left thinking, “Whoa! Where is that going?”

Why do you think people have become so obsessed with reality TV? What is the attraction to it? What made you want to include it in this particular story?

RM - The first two questions are kind of complicated and I’m not sure what the answers are. At first, I think I was one of those skeptics who doubted that reality TV was going to be with us for any great length of time. Certainly that has been proven wrong. There seems to be a fundamental interest of real people watching other real people, or at least what they perceive to be real people, as opposed to watching fictional programming. There’s a powerful draw there of us wanting to look in on other peoples’ lives and seeing them pretty much exist as they actually do.

As for why we’ve included it in Virtuality,  we just felt like it’s become such a staple of pop culture at this point in time. It seemed interesting to then incorporate it into a Science Fiction setting, which was something that we had never seen before or heard of. We’ve all seen video that’s been broadcast back by the astronauts from the Apollo missions to the Space Shuttle, but we’ve never seen it done in a format where it’s trying to be a reality show. I thought it was kind of a different hook for the audience and might be a cool angle for our story.

What do you think of the network climate right now, especially in light of Terminator being cancelled and Dollhouse having been on the cusp? It seems like anything complex aimed at a younger audience has a really hard time staying on.

RM - Well, I think it’s a difficult time for the networks in general, and scheduling kind of reflects that. Everybody in this business has a sense that television is changing right underneath our feet, and while we all say, “Yes, we’re going to be ahead of the curve and we know that TV is changing,” no one has an idea of what it’s changing into. It’s that sort of anxiety and lack of knowledge about where TV is headed that contributes to the overall atmosphere of fear and panic where networks are saying, “Oh, my God, this didn’t work. We can’t afford the time to stick with this show. We gave it four episodes and that’s it.”

And that’s unfortunate because many of the most successful shows on TV had rocky starts and really required networks that believed in the process and were willing to stick by them. For example, they really had to believe in Seinfeld, and it turned out to be not only a critical hit and one of the great comedies of all time, but also incredibly lucrative. So there’s certainly a strong argument for having patience along with faith and really trusting your audience as well as your instincts and going with programming.

And here are some closing remarks from Ron Moore.

There is a series of webisodes that were created for Virtuality. These webisodes, however, are not just your traditional here’s an extra piece of story that you didn’t see on the show, and here’s another little segment to tease you. These webisodes for Virtuality are actually segments of the reality show within the show itself, so in theory, when you logged onto the website, what you would see when you clicked on webisodes would be pieces of the reality show as it was broadcast back to Earth. That was in our original pitch to the network. We said, “Everyone is always looking for this sort of interaction between the broadcast show and driving people to the website.” It’s always been sort of an uncomfortable marriage and they never quite seem to marry up in an interesting way for the audience. Ours had this sort of organic way of doing that where you could go to the website and experience Edge of Never, which is the name of the reality show.

The concept and the plan would have been if the pilot went to series, that every week you could log onto the website and see pieces of the reality show. And buried within those pieces would be actual information and clues that would not be accessible to the people watching the broadcast of the show. There was going to be a deliberate effort to sort of say, “Really, if you want to get all of what’s going on and to even crack some of the underlying mysteries to what this series is about, then you have to go and watch these pieces of Edge of Never.” There is, in fact, a Facebook page for Edge of Never, and I would encourage people to go take a look at it because I think it’s a unique bit of Virtuality.

As noted above, the Virtuality cast photo is copyright of the Fox Network, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any form. Thanks!