Breaking a 180-Year-Old Story

NBC’s two-hour “Revenge of the Whale” on Friday will tell the gruesome tale of woebegone whalers whose ill-fated voyage from Nantucket to the Pacific Ocean led them to murder and cannibalism.

It’s high drama that is all the more remarkable because it is a true story, well-documented in diaries and books from the eight who survived the 1820 voyage on the whaling ship Essex and left behind a detailed historical trail.

But rather than turn this tale into a made-for-TV movie, NBC has chosen to tell it in a much more cost-effective way through its news division. The historical drama format is the first of its kind for NBC News in recent memory.

The result, almost a year in the making, is an unusual hybrid, a drama that, to stay true to news division standards, tells some of its most gripping episodes not through actors but through the relatively dry form of a narrator reading diary entries while an oil painting of the diary writer is shown on the screen.

Several books have been written on the Essex story, credited with being the true-life inspiration for Herman Melville’s novel “Moby-Dick.” One recent best-selling book, Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea,” won the National Book Award and drew the interest of Hollywood, which optioned it for a movie.

Then-NBC News President Andy Lack, now NBC’s president, and NBC News’ “Dateline” newsmagazine unit were enthusiastic as well.

The news division had already expanded into producing material for sister cable channel MSNBC and other programming to precede NBC’s theatrical movies, and executives were brainstorming for “what other kinds of things we could do, with less narrow thinking,” said David Corvo, now the executive producer of “Dateline” and the “Whale” show’s executive producer.

“It was a passionate project for Andy,” said NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker. “We loved the book, loved the story,” and Philbrick, who is interviewed in “Revenge of the Whale,” was enthusiastic, Corvo said.

Moreover, the extensive documentation available lessened any problems NBC News might have presenting with historical accuracy material that is nearly two centuries old. Conflicts in the diaries are reported in the documentary.

How to tell the story was another matter. “What we didn’t want to do was some cheesy re-creation,” said Corvo. “That was out from the beginning, because it doesn’t work, and we’re not making a feature film.”

The use of actors “never came into it,” he says, but at the same time the producers thought it would be odd to take footage of a whaling ship out on the ocean “and then pretend there was nobody on it and it was somehow sailing around the world on its own.” The compromise was to shoot footage of actors in period dress working and rowing on historically accurate boats, focusing more on their hands and torsos than faces.

Experts from the Mystic Seaport maritime museum in Mystic, Conn., designed and rigged replicas of the Essex whaling boats based on research, and Mystic sailors took them out on the ocean for the filming.

Corvo likens the footage to the kind of pictures of, say, police officers getting into their cars or shoppers at a grocery store that NBC News would use to illustrate a story on police statistics or shopping trends. The difference was that the actors reenacted their generic scenes at NBC’s request. “In a funny way,” Corvo said, “we had to create our own B-roll,” as such stock footage is known.

The result is a program of a type more common on public television than on a commercial network. Zucker praised the producers’ efforts, calling the program “something to be very proud of.”

Nonetheless, he says, its airing will be “an interesting test if this is what the audience wants to see on network television.”

Zucker, who was promoted from executive producer of NBC News’ “Today” show to the entertainment post while the show was in production, says there was never a question in his mind of not airing the program, just of finding the right time period.

“Obviously I don’t think we wanted to take this experiment [into the official fall] season, yet,” he said. “This one is just impossible to predict.”

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“Revenge of the Whale” can be seen Friday at 8 p.m. on NBC.