On “The Killing,” Holder (Joel Kinnaman) searches for a killer preying on runaways. (
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Few shows have stumbled so far, so fast as AMC’s “The Killing.” After a critically acclaimed premiere in 2011, the producers angered viewers by not resolving the Rosie Larsen murder at the end of the season and drove them away by dragging it out for another. The show, which was based on a Danish series that tracked a single case over 20 episodes, was cancelled last summer. From cradle to tomb, it wasn’t that long a stay.
Then came an improbable resurrection. Nearly six months after AMC pulled the plug, “The Killing” was back on the schedule. The third season premieres tonight.
Huh?
For star Mireille Enos, who plays former Detective Sarah Linden, it was another surge on the rollercoaster ride of her show. She’d already plunged from the peaks of praise to the valley of vilification. She had TV whiplash.
“In Season 1, we could do no wrong. In Season 2, there was no way to get past people’s anger,” she says, calling from Vancouver, British Columbia, where the series films. “It was so strange.”
“This rage, I found that a bit odd. It felt like the people who didn’t like it were so loud on the Interenet,” says Joel Kinnaman, who plays Det. Stephen Holder. “People kind of got carried away.”
When the show was cancelled, Kinnaman had “mixed feelings,” having never played a character for that long before, but he was ready to move on. The series” made him and Enos two of the hottest actors in Hollywood. Kinnaman was signed to play the lead in the “Robocop” remake. Enos bagged several movies, including the forthcoming “World War Z” with Brad Pitt.
When “The Killing” was resurrected, she says she had to Enos says she had to imagine that “it’s the best thing that could have happened” and “rearrange my brain.
“I was shooting ‘The Devil’s Knot.” I was in the middle of shooting ‘Ten,’” she says. She had to imagine it was the best thing that could have happened – again.
“The Killing” found new life through some corporate synergy. Netflix made a deal with Fox Television Studios, which produces the series, to improve the show’s distribution, getting episodes into its queue more quickly after their AMC broadcast as well as exclusivity in certain territories. That deal convinced AMC a third season was viable.
Moreover, says Enos, Sud has retooled the show. A new, self-contained mystery that will be solved by the end of the season. The case centers on a serial killer who has murdered 17 girls and a man named Seward (Peter Sarsgaard) whom Linden arrested years ago for killing his wife. A piece evidence connects the crimes and suggests that Seward, who is on death row, may be innocent.
“It felt series premiere in a way,” Kinnaman says of the first episode. “It was a great format that the show was based upon. This time around, it feels like this is all new. This is from the writers.”
Retooling a show is a handy way to save it after cancelation. That and an enterprising studio. When CBS put its 2011 drama “Unforgettable” on the chopping block at the end of its first season, despite an audience of 12 million viewers, it looked like a mistake.
“CBS has high expectations and it was a tough call for them,” says executive producer Ed Redlich. “But the show did so well overseas that Sony was able to make the show financially appealing to CBS.”
And that’s how the series, which stars Poppy Montgomery as Carrie Wells, a former police detective with perfect recall of crime scenes, ended up on the summer schedule, making its debut July 28.
“When the license fee that CBS pays to Sony is reduced, the network asks itself, ‘Do we want to import a Canadian show, a create reality show or a show we know has 12 million viewers? If we get in trouble mid-season, we have “Unforgettable” to put on. It’s a win-win for us.’ The impetus for this came from Sony, which wanted the foreign sales, but they can’t just have the show run in foreign countries,” Redlich says.
“Unforgettable” is starting with a clean slate. filming 13 episodes. Redlich is not picking up the threads of the series’ first finale, in which Carrie slept with her ex, Detective Al Burns, played by Dylan Walsh. “They’re really viewing this as a relaunch of a show,” he says.”I would have liked to pick this up the morning after. The message was: Let’s not assume anybody saw the last episode.”
The series, which films in Greenpoint will relocate its case load from Queens to Manhattan, get a new set and the detectives will have a new boss played by Dallas Roberts, who has a recurring role as Julianna Margulies’ brother on “The Good Wife.”
“We won’t be doing street murders in Queens. Carrie will go undercover with a team of bank robbers,” Redlich says. “There’ll be a lot of big stories where she’s out running around. I wanted to make the show much more fun. Capture the mood of summer.”
“Drop Dead Diva” is the third series returning this summer after being pulled; in the case of the Lifetime drama, the reversal of fortune only took a month and a half.
“We were just told it was a financial decision,” says creator and executive producer Josh Berman.
The power of social media turned things around. “Within days, there were petitions with thousands of signatures on line asking to bring the show back,” Berman says. “The show had never trended on Twitter until we were cancelled. And once we were, the show trended on and off for two weeks.”
Meanwhile, Berman called the cast, some of whom had started to audition for pilot season, and told them not to panic. “Because the outcry was so strong, I felt we could save the show,” he says. He went back to the drawing board and looked at his budget, finding a way to bring to make “Drop Dead Diva” less expensive for Lifetime to license from Sony. He says the reductions will be invisible. “What’s great about a fifth-year show is that we’ve built all our sets. We’ve spent the money on the edit base and soundproofing,” he says “It’s not that hard to make a couple of changes that ultimately prolong the life of the series.”
The series, which stars Brooke Elliott as a plus-size lawyer whose body is inhabited by the soul of a vapid fashion model, will have its fifth-season premiere June 23. “Internally we are calling Season 5 the seasons of the fans. The cancellation got us more publicity than anything before,” Berman says. And the title for the first episode? “Back from the dead,” he says.
Joel Kinnaman
Tonight, 8 p.m., AMC