Hollywood Dream Team : Brand-Falsey Duo May Be Making a Lot of Trips to the Emmy Podium Sunday Night

During one three-month block recently, TV writer-producers Joshua Brand and John Falsey had virtually every day booked, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with meetings on the half hour. No breaks, just continuous meetings.

During another monthlong stretch this summer, the two partners didn’t see each other once or even speak on the phone because they were so busy.

They have been pulled in dizzying directions all summer trying to keep up with their two ongoing TV series, “Northern Exposure” on CBS and “I’ll Fly Away” on NBC, while launching “Going to Extremes,” a new drama series for ABC.

The two will be forced to take a break Sunday night, however, to head over to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium for the Emmy Awards. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has recognized Brand and Falsey for their dogged efforts with 31 Emmy nominations for “Northern Exposure” and “I’ll Fly Away”--including pitting them against each other in the competition for best drama series.

The 16 nominations for the whimsical “Northern Exposure,” which ascended the ratings ladder last season to become a major hit, are the most for a single series since “L.A. Law” received 17 nominations in 1989. “I’ll Fly Away,” a civil-rights drama set in the late 1950s, is hoping its 15 will provide a much needed ratings boost come fall.

Starting Tuesday, Brand and Falsey will have a prime-time series on all three major networks when “Going to Extremes”--about a group of medical students studying at a cut-rate college on a developing Caribbean island--premieres in a choice time slot at 10 p.m. behind a successful comedy block that includes top-rated “Roseanne.”

“They are clearly the new generation of the producer superstars,” said Leslie Moonves, president of Lorimar Television, which signed the duo in June to a lucrative and exclusive three-year contract extension that includes feature films under Lorimar’s parent company, Warner Bros.

“The day we signed Josh and John, I got a call from all four network presidents,” Moonves said. “That’s an unusual situation, being the president of a studio and having them come to you like that. They basically said, ‘What do we have to do to be in business with Josh and John?’ ”

“Given the success of ‘Northern Exposure’ and the tremendous critical acclaim that ‘I’ll Fly Away’ has heaped upon it, they’re definitely hot,” confirmed ABC Entertainment President Bob Iger.

Iger believes that Brand and Falsey provide viewers new experiences in series television. Even the look and feel of their programs are distinctive, he said. In what has become something of a trademark, “Going to Extremes” is filming on location in Jamaica, well outside the established Hollywood system, while “Northern Exposure” is based in the Pacific Northwest (to double for Alaska), and “I’ll Fly Away” shoots in Atlanta.

Brand and Falsey find all these accolades a bit overwhelming.

“They talk about the Olympic basketball Dream Team--this has been our dream year,” Falsey said. “It really has been. Whether it ever repeats itself or not, we’ll always have 1991-1992.”

Brand and Falsey have won only one Emmy before, for their 1986 Christmas miniseries “A Year in the Life,” a modern family drama that later became a celebrated but short-lived TV series. Their best known creation before “Northern Exposure” was the hospital drama “St. Elsewhere,” which did win several Emmy Awards but not until after Brand and Falsey left the series after the first year.

Riding their current wave of success into the future will be no small task, considering how intimately Brand and Falsey work with each of their series. When “Northern Exposure” was picked up for two more seasons earlier this year, the producers had announced their intentions to quit their creation midway through the coming season to spend more time nursing along “Going to Extremes.”

Ultimately, however, they decided their elaborate system of managing series productions from afar was streamlined to a point where they could handle a third series, so they will continue with “Northern Exposure.”

“John and I have been working together and have been close friends for 13 years, so, like in any relationship, we’ve developed our own shorthand together,” said Brand, 41. He first met Falsey, 40, in a screening room in 1978 when the two were viewing the pilot for the CBS drama “The White Shadow,” the series on which they both had landed their first Hollywood writing jobs.

Brand is from Queens, N.Y., the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His parents were working class, his father a tile man. Falsey grew up against a more privileged backdrop as an Irish-Catholic in Connecticut, where his father was an attorney.

Both felt somewhat like outsiders growing up, which is a haunting theme in all three of their character-driven TV series. “Northern Exposure” follows the trials of a yuppie in the outback, “I’ll Fly Away” deals with racial inequality and “Going to Extremes” introduces Western ideals to a Third World culture.

“What’s of great importance to us is the idea of ‘the other,’ ” Brand said. “The sense that there is ‘the other’ out there. The world is filled with ‘the other’--black people, red people, Christians, Jews, Muslims. We’re interested in sort of forcing these elements to deal with each other.”

“Josh and I write primarily about people,” Falsey added, “all different kinds of people. We’re not joke tellers. Our humor comes out of real people. And the drama of an ‘I’ll Fly Away’ doesn’t come out of car chases and shooting, it comes out of races learning to understand each other. It comes out of human relationships. That to us is the real comedy and drama.”

Brand and Falsey work out stories with their series staff writers in their offices in Santa Monica, occasionally writing or rewriting scripts themselves. Prior to shooting each new episode, they hold exhaustive “tone meetings” by telephone with directors on location, going through every single page of the script, scene by scene, explaining where the drama and the laughs are.

When the finished footage is shipped to Los Angeles--if it meets approval and no scenes need to be reshot--Brand and Falsey supervise the editing.

“I spent all my time last year editing ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ and Josh edited ‘Northern Exposure,’ ” Falsey said. “This year we found ourselves in the editing room together on an episode of ‘Going to Extremes,’ and it was not working. I’m so used to having my way, and he’s used to having his. We decided the best way to do this, because we’re great friends, is to let him do one episode, then I’ll do the next one.”

“As our involvement grew in numerous projects, we basically had to say, ‘You watch my back, I’ll watch yours,’ ” Brand said. “ ‘You head this way, I’ll head that, and we’ll meet up in a few days.’ When you’re involved with several projects, the time and energy you have to use up by running everything by the other person can be non-productive. So we back off and do it our own way, and hold respect for each other.”

“When you’re launching a new series, nobody knows what the series is yet,” Brand said. “There are no windows into each other’s heads. So we have to hammer out the larger and smaller issues. That shake-down period also takes place between us and the actors, the studio, the network, the writers. At first everybody sees the show differently. What you hope over time, like a team of horses, is that at some point in the process everybody is pulling in the same direction.”