PREY ....
ONLY THE STRONG WILL SURVIVE
The creator and executive producer of PREY, William Schmidt, reveals how the show became a victim of the American television system and what would have happened if he had been allowed to keep control.
Of the many new genre shows to emerge out of America last year, Prey was one of the interesting. It was set in a modern world where a new species of human has evolved and, in the ominous words of the opening titles 'we are the prey'. These beings with a 1.6% genetic difference may look the same as us, but they are more intelligent and determined to become the dominant form of life on earth. In the UK, the series was picked up by Channel 4 to fill a late night slot where, despite a lack of publicity, it found a fan base. When the last episode aired, viewers were so desperate to find out what was going to happen next, that they wrote to TV Zone in surprising numbers. Unfortunately Prey was cancelled in the states last year, but its creator William Schmidt doesn't think it deserved to be, and he's hoping it can come back.
Bill Schmidt had the idea back in 1992 when he jotted down in his writer's journal an interest in evolution and global warming. It led him to wonder what might happen if the next stage in human evolution were to be triggered by climate change. The result was a pitch for a television film which he called Hunting for Survival. The producers he showed it to, however, weren't keen on the idea. 'They looked at me as if I was mad!' he exclaims. 'X-files had not premiered, Science Fiction had not been on TV for a generation, no one believed in it. So frankly I got scared, I thought maybe this is just a wacky idea and just put it aside. Then three years ago Jamie Tarsis, who was then the new president of ABC, said she was looking for a 'what if ....?' scenario. I knew in my gut that this was the 'what if ....?' scenario that should work.'
A pilot followed with Adam Storke as rogue member of the new species Tom Daniels, Frankie Faison as cop Ray Peterson and Larry Drake as controller of operations Dr Walter Atwood - all of whom were later to appear in the series, which the network preferred to call Prey. But in this early version Cheryl Ann Fenn was cast as leading lady Dr Sloan Parker and her geneticist colleague, Ed, was played by Michael Stolber. 'Unfortunately, we had a real problem with the director and the star'. Bill remembers. 'She did her best, she did a nice job, but she was just not the character. So ABC, showing their commitment to the project, said 'look we're going to tinker with the script a little bit'. 'And we're going to change the two main members of the cast and also the director'. I liken television development to a complicated lock: All the tumblers have got to be in the right place, fitting together at the right time and suddenly you have a television show on the air that everyone believes in. But if one tumbler goes out of place, suddenly you're locked out'.
Things started to go wrong for Bill Schmidt when the heads of drama development at both ABC (the network) and Warner Brothers (the studio) left. As executive producer, he had hired all the cast and crew for the second pilot, including new stars Debra Messing as Sloan and Vincent Ventresca as Ed, but he had a battle with the new man at Warners. 'The since fired president Tony Jonas never liked the show'. laments Bill. 'He kept asking me questions like 'why can't it be like La Femme Nikita?' I said, 'Tony, that's not the show'. Tony and I fought like the Dickens over the plot. He wanted lots more action, he wanted it like The X-files, I said 'Tony, there is an X-Files, why should we be The X-Files?' Mere days before we started shooting the second pilot, Tony brought in a writer (executive producer Charlie Craig) who was known not for think pieces, but for B-level action things. So basically they took my plot and took out a lot of the intelligence - I felt - a lot of the smart things. For instance - this is a typical stupid thing that they did - in the original pilot, the monkey that escaped was named Cornelius, an obvious reference to Planet of the Apes, but he named it Jim or Jack or something after his assistant. What fun is that for the audience? There is no fun. So we fought with this guy and I fought over content and finally it became so frustrating that I left altogether'.
Bill Schmidt parted company with Prey after about four episodes. He retained an executive producer credit following a protest from the Writers' Guild of America because the production was still using the ideas and story lines he had sketched out in two bibles for the first season. 'The new regime took a bastardised version of those except dumbed down with a lot of action. Nothing's wrong with action, I certainly had plenty of action in the pilot, but I was aiming for ultra-realism. So by episode 13, when war literally broke out between our species and theirs, the audience would be invested in the feeling of 'oh my god, what would happen if this literally happened?' I have tremendous sadness with the direction the show took. On the other hand, I think it is indicative of how tough it is to get a new idea through the pipeline in American television.'
He believes that if he had been allowed to take the series in the direction he had intended, it would have been a much bigger success among critics and viewers. 'What the show was supposed to be was about us; who we are as humans as put up against them. So as thing devolve from being one threat in one courtroom (from new species serial killer Lynch) in the pilot, to us finding where they began and how they began and the evil they did and finally leading up to a war. We were going to see ultimately - particular in the war phrase - what a good thing it is to be a human being. On the other hand, there are some bad things and we were going to show that too. Larry Drake's character originally was going to be a much more conniving person. In the original pilot, he had stolen Doctor Coulter's research (the first proof of the new species) off her computer, so he knew that he had no business knowing. They kind of did a bastardised version of that, but he was going to be much more of a small man doing research in Germany - by small man. I mean a little guy who wants to be bigger than he is'.
The writer had done extensive research on human evolution and talked to anthropologists at a range of US universities to develop ideas about the new race, which he wanted to call Homo Superior. As a result, he created Tom Daniels, the character most viewers latched onto as being both attractive and intriguing. Tom is the member of the new species, who, despite his background, is attracted to Sloan and eventually becomes her ally. 'The question was always going to become whether he and Sloan were going to mate.' Says Bill. 'Originally what was going to happen was it was always going to be a conflict for Tom, he was never going to come down on one side or the other. Once they had a child sometime in Season Two, then he was really going to be wrestling with his human side. They made it all so easy in the way they did it (in the broadcast version of the show). He was really supposed to be a torn character. In the original pilot he had tremendous charm because all the experts I talked to thought the new species would be the most charming, the most interesting. Instead, they played him very brooding and I don't understand what Sloan saw in his in the pilot as was shot because he wasn't interesting., imagine if you will, a normal one of them who are much more intelligent than us, and an intelligent one of us who was Sloan. There's a possible line there, particularly as Tom said in the original pilot; 'I admire so much about you human beings because you have things which we don't have, which is love for music and the ability to touch each others' hearts. We don't have that, we can't, we need to survive'. He and Sloan would have become larger and larger in the show and when war broke out, he was going to be on both sides'.
As it was, the series ended badly for Tom, captured by a government squad and incarcerated in a cage not big enough for him to stand up in. Where the production team planned to take it from there - if they had a plan - is now known. But Bill Schmidt has been thinking of ways to bring it back. 'I have ideas on how to resurrect the show, even without the original cast'. he says. 'I have a meeting next week. Fortunately there's a new president at Warner Brothers - they change chairs every five minutes here - and the new president is a friend of mine and I'm a friend of his, and I'm going to see if there's any way possible, even if we could do it for the foreign market place.
'By the end of the run, I think the staff - keep in mind that I hired the entire staff except for this one guy - they finally wore down this guy and I think by the last episodes they were using the arc that I was moving towards. It wouldn't be impossible for me to write a coda or some kind of movie, or if Warner Brothers were up for it, find some foreign money and see if we could continue this thing. I don't believe in my heart that this idea is gone forever. I believe that at some point I can resurrect it. Maybe it is wishful thinking.'
And if it does turn out to be wishful thinking - if Prey is truly dead - then the writer is prepared to reveal to TV Zone exactly what he had in mind for the rest of the series. 'What eventually was going to happen was war was going to break out between the two species. It was going to be a literal war. They were going to have much more control over satellites and computers and everything else then we do. Eventually our people were going to take to the hills and fight it out. And because of humans and our capacity to bond with one another, which is the ultimate human act, we were going to win in Season Five'.
In the meantime, he certainly hasn't been idle and viewers who enjoyed Prey might to look out for the name William Schmidt on forthcoming series. 'I've been working on new television shows'. he says. 'I did a horror show that almost went on ABC last year, about a woman who guards the gates of hell. I'm developing a new show - it hasn't found a network yet, but it will - about, not dissimilarly, a man and his car who are one. Geneticists feel now that the next evolution could be silicon based and computer based humanoids, so that's the master plan for a Bill Gates type character. So you can see that this thing hasn't quite left my system. I like the idea, I still want to get those stories told about what we are and it might ignite the imagination at some point. So I'm developing shows and I'm licking my wounds and getting ready to go back into the arena'.
TV Zone ... August 1999
Jane Killick