A Shift on the Mean Streets

This must be hell.

That’s what it looks like in Red Hook, amid the abandoned industrial buildings and brick warehouses: the dumping ground for old mattresses, rusted oil drums, a stripped and burned Mercedes-Benz and whatever useless trash that’s been tossed vicariously out a car window. It’s Brooklyn’s junkyard district, a place God has forsaken, where the Manhattan chic wouldn’t be caught dead.

Nothing grows here, especially not in the winter, except maybe a few weeds. Children don’t play here. No one comes to this place, except, as the locals call them, “the less desirables,” and the audacious production crew and cast of “Third Watch.”

There, in the midst of this urban squalor, in the wreckage of what was once upon a time the Revere sugar refinery, the cameras are rolling on Michael Beach, who plays sage paramedic veteran Monte “Doc” Parker on the NBC emergency trifecta about paramedics, firefighters and cops. Beach is sidelined working triage with co-star Anthony Ruvivar, as his cocky, young partner Carlos Nieto. Meanwhile Amy Carlson, as able firefighter Alex Taylor, in the line of action, backed by a team of some 40 extras from the New York Fire Department, is tugging at a hose, readying to battle the flames that are yet to come in the next scene.

From 12 open widows of an empty six-story structure the smell of kerosene is wafting through the air as the high winds whip off the New York Harbor, making for one of the coldest days in New York this winter, around 28 degrees according to a weather report. But it’s at least 15 degrees colder, according to my numbed fingers and toes.

“This is nothing,” says Beach, stopping in the middle of the interview, to rescue this shivering visitor, stuffing hand warmers he’s taken from his pockets into my insulated mittens that are on loan from the wardrobe supervisor, who also provided a thermal parka to layer over my wool winter coat. “If you’re freezing now, we’re freezing all the time, but it really adds to that stuff you can’t get on a set somewhere in L.A.,” he says. “You feel how cold you are? This is what it is.”

Consider this guerrilla filmmaking, says Christopher Chulack, who executive-produces with co-creator John Wells and is one of a handful of directors for “Third Watch’-the name referring to the shift from 3 to 11 a.m. Unlike such Gotham-based dramas as NBC’s “Law & Order” or CBS’ just-canceled “Big Apple,” which primarily shoot on enclosed sets, “Third Watch,” on average, shoots 90% of its July-through-April schedule outdoors under some of the most extreme conditions imaginable for a network television show.

The cast and crew are in tenements in Harlem at 2 a.m. and crack houses in Queens. They’re uptown dodging the traffic of taxicabs, messenger bikes and actual emergency crews whizzing past. With the exception of a hurricane last year, which shut down production-and New York-for a couple of days, they’re shooting: in driving rains and blizzards, in snow flurries, in 90-degree heat with humidity to match.

“We know we’re going to be out in the elements,” says Chulack, “so we’re prepared to deal with whatever is dealt. If we have four inches of snow the night before we shoot a scene, we try to integrate that into the scene. Obviously it makes it hard if you’re doing a trauma scene where we’ve created a car wreck, and you’ve got people lying on the ground that’s now covered with snow. It makes it really difficult for the actors.”

“We’re in the most ridiculous scenarios,” says Ruvivar, shivering during a break on-set here in Red Hook. He’s referring to a recent episode in which it snowed during a scene as he and Beach teetered off a bridge in a Winnebago. “We do all of our own stunts unless it’s something extreme. I’ve been hanging out of 20-story windows with just a hook on my back-but explosions are fun,” he jokes. ‘ ‘Although it’s a little weird when [the director] is like, ‘You can be right by the explosion, it’s no problem.’ But you realize he’s telling you this through a bullhorn 200 yards away with a long-lens camera yelling, ‘It’s fine!’ That’s when you need to worry.”

It’s a bit later, and Carlson is sitting on a pile of bricks, still wearing the 35-pound fire-equipment pack on her back. “I get to do all kinds of things I would never get asked to do as an actress-climbing ladders, carrying hoses, and getting the gear on-just the whole experience of working with the firefighters and the fire. But there have been times when I’ve gotten nervous because it is still fire.’?

Every precaution is taken to ensure no one gets hurt on the set today during what promises to be the largest pyrotechnic display they’ve shot all season, for an episode slated to air Monday. (Although the producers and Warner Bros. Television declined to disclose the budget, the production costs were averaging $2 million per episode during the first season, according to sources close to the show.) By nightfall, 12 hours into what will eventually be a 14-hour day, the building is ablaze, with fire licking the windows, as the firefighters scurry on the ground, and the paramedic team is in action.

A helicopter roars overhead, while a New York Fire Department emergency boat sails into the harbor. Everything is running smoothly, as it should, because they only get one shot to get it right. In essence, it’s art imitating life-with all its chaotic, grueling, tedious and unexpected possibilities, not to mention some pretty harrowing circumstances.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” says Molly Price, who plays long-suffering officer Faith Yokas and admits she’s nervous half the time she’s at work, speeding down the streets in a police car or jumping from rooftops chasing after a “perp” with co-star, Jason Wiles, her brash on-the-beat partner. “To try to explain it to people, you sound like such a ‘baby head,’ but it’s dangerous.

“If we’re shooting in front of a crack house, these guys aren’t watching television, they have no idea what ‘Third Watch’ is,” she continues, “and they see Jason and I running across the street with our guns drawn. There’s no protection if some crazy addict opens the window and shoots you. So you’re always aware of that.”

The process and the place at times prove sobering. “The sick part of that is, as an actor, it’s like you’re being breast-fed with what you’re able to work with. We really bare the brunt, so it doesn’t require you to have to act a lot,” Price says.

But in the first season, the high-octane action took center stage over the nine principal characters-two pairs of cops, two pairs in the paramedics unit, and a firefighter (Carlson is the newcomer to the squad this fall). Albeit an adrenaline rush for the eyes, the harried 46 minutes of nonstop rescues left viewers detached from the players, unable to distinguish one brave hero saving a life from another. And the disconnect was reflected in the ratings. After one preview in “ER’s” time slot in September 1999, the show settled into its original 8 p.m. Sunday slot, where it languished with ratings that for most other shows would have meant certain death.

But the ailing series was revived for a second season, largely due to Wells and his reputation as Emmy-winning producer of “ER” and “The West Wing.” However, that second chance came with the mandate from NBC that a change needed to be made.

“We spent a lot of time talking about how we should actually proceed,” remembers Wells. “Having taken one direction that we thought was working OK, but not yet working as well as we wanted it, it felt like we really only had one more chance to get it into a direction we’d be more interested in.”

By the time fall rolled around, “Third Watch” had switched its focus from action sequences and four-or five-character story lines an episode, to storytelling that Wells says is akin to novels, with chapters that spotlight only one or two characters each week.

“They’re lives are all interrelated, so in one chapter, or one episode, a whole show may be about that character, and in the next episode, that same character may be a smaller part of another story line,” he explains. “It’s a variation on the large ensemble, but it still requires a large ensemble to do.”

For Beach it allows the audience and the actors to “get to know more about these people and their situations and what makes them tick. That’s why an audience tunes in, to feel something for the characters.”

Sources close to the series say producers are hoping to land a two-year commitment for “Third Watch” as sort of a package deal with Wells’ “West Wing,” which has already solidified its two-year pick-up. Chulack denies that such a deal is being brokered with the network.

Nevertheless, the possibilities of “Third Watch” making it to 2004 are good, as it consistently wins its time slot with 18-to 49-year-old viewers, the creme de la creme demographic for finicky advertisers. And it continues to build on its audience Monday nights-it’s a second-place contender to CBS’ “Family Law’-with its hard-edged subject matter.

In one of this season’s most powerful episodes, written by Wells, Faith battles with her alcoholic husband over an unexpected pregnancy, a third child he wants but she doesn’t and is considering aborting. It initially appears that Faith will lose the baby when she falls in pursuit of a rapist. Yet, in an unexpected twist, Wells made the decision to have Faith follow through with the abortion, going so far as to see her lying on the table with a wrenchingly painful expression.

“I had heard that the network was a little uncomfortable about dealing with that subject,” Price recalls. “John felt as though it wasn’t so much about abortion as it was about making hard decisions. And I liked going into that part of me, because it’s probably the part of me that’s the most vulnerable, the part you don’t want to have to deal with. It taught me a big lesson. It taught me to be humble.”

That episode is an example of the kind of ambitious, detailed storytelling that was missing from the series last season, says Ed Bernero, the show’s co-creator and supervising producer. “Last year, we tried to stick with a story that stayed within that eight-hour shift, and we realized we needed to free ourselves from that for storytelling purposes,” he says. “We really took the handcuffs off, and are telling the stories we wanted to tell.”

“We try to find a story that’s interesting about the character first,” says Wells, “then work the other elements of the action back in. That’s actually much easier than the other way around .... If you’re just writing action, what is it really about? It’s just the events, and the event itself isn’t inherently interesting.”

A perfect balance of the two airs Monday night, in the episode featuring the inferno. Eddie Cibrian takes the lead as firefighter Jimmy Doherty, a hapless playboy forced to come to terms with his past transgressions. He’s also contending with the possible death of his best friend, a fellow firefighter, who’s trapped in the burning building. In about an hour, at the sugar refinery, Cibrian shifts from a fast-paced tactical alert scene (with guest star Jason Sehorn of the New York Giants) to a somber, emotional scene in which he searches for missing firefighters in a blackened, charred warehouse.

The aim was to weave the action and the emotion together to create something more powerful through the combination of those separate forces. “We wanted to take Jimmy Doherty to the next step in his development as a father and growing into a man,” says Bernero. “At the same time, we wanted to do an episode that portrayed firefighters as the complete heroes we see them as.”

Certainly it was one of the more grueling for Cibrian. “It’s tougher when it’s your episode, because you’re working a lot harder, because you’re in almost all of the shots. But it’s OK, because then when it’s not your episode, you have more days off and you can relax,” he says. It’s his day off after wrapping his eight-day shoot, which was completed during what was expected to be one of New York’s worst snowstorm. “Yeah, the storm of the century didn’t happen, but we were the only show scheduled to shoot on those days. Everyone else canceled,” he says, laughing.

“We’re crazy,” Cibrian jokes. “That’s all we are is crazy.”

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* “Third Watch” airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on NBC.