Shawn Ryan Speaks About his Latest Soon-to-be Failure

Well, going by his track record. Sure, THE SHIELD was hot. But TERRIERS? And THE CHICAGO CODE? (Although CODE did bring a heterosexual Jennifer Beale to us and that’s a major plus.)

Shawn Ryan Talks LAST RESORT, the New ABC Drama Series Centering on a Rogue U.S. Submarine Crew -by Christina Radish

The new ABC drama series Last Resort, premiering on September 27th, tells a suspenseful, emotional and action-packed story about what happens when a U.S. submarine crew receives an order to fire nuclear weapons at a foreign country, and then ignores that order.

While at the ABC portion of the TCA Press Tour, show creator/executive producer Shawn Ryan(The Shield) talked about telling such an ambitious story, how the characters will come first, how realistic and technical the show will be, why director Martin Campbell was the perfect person to bring the series to life for the pilot, putting their very healthy budget on the screen, how much edge they can bring, how the special effects elements will come into play, and what shows he’s currently enjoying on TV.

Question: Following The Shield, you did Terriers and then The Chicago Code.  Have your ambitions been increasing, over the last couple of years, or have you had this story in your pocket for awhile?

SHAWN RYAN:  My ambitions have grown, and the story started with Karl [Gajdusek].  I want to give Karl credit.  The initial nugget of this story was his, and then we joined forces.  But, when we pitched this to Paul Lee and his cohorts at ABC, last summer or fall, I described it as the show that I couldn’t make five years ago because I didn’t possess the skill set, and that I felt like the shows I had done, up to this point — with the ongoing serialization of The Shield, combined with the production value of The Chicago Code, and combined with this buddy thing that we had done in Terriers — all got me to this place where I felt I could do something this ambitious.  It’s not like I didn’t want to do something of a huge scale like this before, but this is a really difficult show, from a storytelling standpoint and a production standpoint.  We have the production in Hawaii and have to manage that.  It’s a big-budget, very huge, monstrous-scope show that I don’t think I would have been capable of doing before.  So, it’s not like my ambitions have grown, but my feelings about my capability to live up to those ambitions has grown.

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Yep, a submarine series definitely needs a big budget to do justice to all those claustrophobic little spaces. We get it. Sure. And about that title – so this isn’t a sitcom about 2 shlubs crashing an exclusive island hideaway for the 1%?

TV, we love everything about you. Especially the self-deluded writers and directors and actors and producers. We know you have to be that way because otherwise what would you do? Face the fact that there’s just no damn hope…?

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