The Guardian of a TV Show
Can a franchise drama be thought-provoking, literary, set in Pittsburgh and a ratings winner? David Hollander proves it can.

BY MICHELLE PILECKI

What happens when you combine the scope of a Dickens novel, the sensibility of a Pinter play, the harsh reality of the child-welfare world and the cutthroat competition of a top law firm, wrap it up in the new look of Pittsburgh and put it on television?

In the hands and mind of David Hollander, you have a hit.

"The Guardian" enjoyed not only the highest ratings of any new drama on television last season, but is also getting that rarest of prizes every new show seeks but few win: a second season. The show succeeds largely on its strong characters, who have challenged actors as much as they've entertained audiences, as well as its unromanticized and highly realistic view of a territory trodden by so many TV shows before it: the law.

"People tell me that they don't watch TV, but they watch this show," says downtown attorney Tom Hollander. OK, that's not the most unbiased view, coming from a very proud papa, but it's not an uncommon judgment. "‘The Guardian' is slow-paced, low-profile and a hit," reported The New York Times earlier this year. For local audiences, it certainly helps that "The Guardian" reflects the real life of Pittsburgh today, not the "Smoky City" stereotypes of the Kinescope era.

There are many elements, and 150 people, who contribute to the success of "The Guardian." But the man credited with creating it, running it and keeping it on the edge is a TV newcomer who grew up in Mount Lebanon and keeps a little bit of Pittsburgh in his work.

Offstage
David Hollander refers to a TV monitor in his corner office a few flights above the soundstage where shooting for "The Guardian" is under way. That's what's on the monitor. Whether he's discussing an upcoming show with another writer, polishing the script for the next show or having a meeting about the show, he's on the set, always, at least virtually.

"I'm writing one or two scripts concurrently all the time. And I'm looking over my shoulder on the set. I have to worry about the budget, about hirings and firings," he says. "We shoot for 91/2 months without interruption. We started shooting July 8, and go until the middle of April. I'll go till May because I'm posting [working on postproduction]. We're shooting the third script now. There are always four scripts in my head.

"I live and breathe the show. I'm a madman at this period."

He's bragging, not complaining. "It's what I love the most. This has been a surprisingly perfect marriage of what I like to do. My job is insanely administrative and creative."

Hollander, 34, is part of that breed of TV auteurs who shape a show's concept and stamp it with their own individuality. "Created by David Hollander" is what it says as the opening credits finish. It's actually his first venture in television, though he's not exactly new to Hollywood. "I made my living being a script doctor," he explains. He polished other people's screenplays, wrote his own
and taught in the graduate screenwriting program at the University of Southern California.

His journey to this corner of a studio lot began in the theater, and his career in the theater began as a youngster growing up in an arts-filled household in Mount Lebanon. Dad Tom Hollander notes that David "was a fairly accomplished musician" on piano, mandolin and other instruments. But while his older brother and sister attended Mount Lebanon High School, David went on to Sewickley Academy, where its highly regarded theater program introduced him to the plays of Harold Pinter.

"'The Homecoming,' 'The Birthday Party' -- those were the things in Pittsburgh I was reading as a kid. My scripts read like Pinter. I use pauses and beats, but they're not meant to be 'Pinter pauses,'" Hollander says. "Dialogue is overrated. I'm far more verbose than my characters. I want people on this show to speak with clarity and simplicity, actors who aren't afraid to use pauses and subtext. It's not jam-packed with language."

Although "The Guardian" reflects much of the sensibility of the theater, it's not
theater nor is it meant to be theater, and one key difference is that attitude toward language.

"The form is different," he explains. "The theater is so much about language and cadence of language. I take an audience, visually, so much closer to my actors than I ever have in the theater. I can emulate life more in television than in theater.

"The theater experience is so much different. The audience comes to hear language, to explore thoughts that are complicated and take intellectual risks. TV wants to tell a story." The serialization approach of television drama he likens to a novel by Charles Dickens, with its many plotlines interweaving many stories into a larger one. "I don't go to the theater to hear a great story."

But Hollander will concede some similarities. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1990 with a degree in theater, he moved to Seattle, founded a theater company, and wrote and directed plays. His plays, including "The Sun Dialogues" and "The Things You Don't Know," have been produced off-Broadway as well as in Southern California.

"I did run a theater, and [this job] is not that different," he says. "It's like having your own basic repertory theater and doing a different show every eight days. What you see at home we shoot in eight days, I write in eight days.

"If I write a play and 10,000 people want to see that play, it's a hit," he says. "My job is to entertain 15 million people for an hour a week."

Real People
"The main character does not want to be in my show," Hollander says. "He wants to be in ‘Nick Fallin: Corporate Attorney.' He does not want to be in ‘Nick Fallin: Child Advocate.' He's going to try to get out of everything that I throw in his way."

Nick, played by Simon Baker, is a hotshot young attorney at his father's law firm, Fallin & Associates, who is sentenced to perform community service at Children's Legal Services. It's either pro bono work at a scrappy low-budget nonprofit or disbarment and prison. Nick is not a do-gooder or even a particularly pleasant person. He clashes with his father/boss (played by Dabney Coleman), his CLS boss/father-figure (Alan Rosenberg) and his colleagues at both places. The tensions between the characters, and the chemistry of the players, are among the things that have set "The Guardian" apart.

"Everything we do, it needs to shed light on characters, not on the guest star of the week," Hollander explains. That's one difference between "The Guardian" and so much else of what's on the air, where "the stories aren't built on the layers of characters."

It's as much fun for the actors as it is for the audience. "It's thrilling to have characters who are complicated, not one-dimensional stick figures," says Raphael Sbarge, who plays fellow corporate-attorney Jake Straka. "Actors always look to be challenged by dangerous material. HBO has raised the bar for all of us on what can be allowed on network television."

Take his character. "Jake is a guy who's very ambitious, who comes from a blue-collar family and has worked extremely hard to get where he is. He's lived by his wits and his tenacity, and has gotten himself into one of the top law firms in town. He's a lawyer who knows how to work the system." Jake smiles. Nick (famously) never does. But both cheerfully stab each other in the back, then join forces again when it works to their advantage. "Jake is not a lawyer who's out there to save the world, a goody-two-shoes kind of guy," Sbarge says. "He's more like real lawyers. The intent is to create people who seem more like real people."

And complex people. "He's not a one-color, one-dimensional character. He has flaws, too, and Nick knows that," says screen veteran Coleman of Burton Fallin. "I always wanted to play a part that shows an American businessman in a positive way instead of a cliched, right-wing, self-serving way." Burton Fallin is a respected community leader who worked his way through Pitt Law School and, by the end of the first season, had won a seat on the bench. But success seems limited to Judge Fallin's professional, not personal, life.

"The first year is an exploration of how a young man needed his dad, instead of hating his dad," Hollander explains. "Part of what the story was saying was how Nick didn't really have a sense of how crucial his father was to him. He wasn't aware of what his father had done for him as a good father. He just perceived him as a bad father." Consider the show's pilot, he continues. In his first CLS case, Nick is representing the interests of a child whose father has been arrested for killing his wife, the child's mother. "Nick is this kid," Hollander notes. "He's a child who thinks his father has killed his mother. Nick is a motherless child.

"Imagine missing your mother so much that you hate your dad."

"I'm in the same position: How do I connect with my son?" Coleman says. "He's constantly in trouble. He's an overachiever. He has all the makings of a champion and yet, like many champions, he's a little bit difficult to deal with, in society in general and in particular with me, because I'm his father."

The father-son theme has parallels not only with Nick's relationship with his CLS boss, but also with one CLS colleague's getting guardianship of his nephew, another of her grandmother.

"If anything is thematic, this is really a story about a lot of childless people,"
notes Hollander.

"The irony of a show like ‘The Guardian' -- there is no one in this story, save for Burton, who has the responsibilities, the real responsibilities of raising a child. Part of the interesting thing for me right now is giving these characters a sense of a true familial obligation. They're all involved in some way of caring for the city's young, and yet none of them has a child. They're all isolated people."

Real Situations
TV shows set in the legal world aren't new. Dramas about victimized children aren't new. "There's an idea that I had to write a franchise show: a legal franchise story. It's how television is sold," Hollander says, referring to the niches that shows are usually defined by. "I wanted to take a franchise and turn it inside out."

For material, he could plumb not only the legal atmosphere he grew up with but also the world of his brother, Scott, a real-life children's legal advocate and now executive director of KidsVoice in Pittsburgh (see Reality Check, below). But this is not to say that "The Guardian" is based on KidsVoice. For one thing, Scott was working at a child-advocacy agency in Denver when the idea started to percolate. It was there in 1994 that David, then running his Seattle company, came to visit.

"Every Wednesday, I'd spend a couple of hours at a shelter for runaways," Scott recalls. "It was one-on-one. David sat with me, and these teen-agers would talk about what had happened to them. They were trying to get me to help them and would tell me anything if they thought that would convince me. These were kids who had lived on the street. Tough kids. My job was to sort through the contradictions. David was interested by these stories. Their stories. A lot of them had been abused and neglected, and now they were perpetuating that. They were both helpless and hurting other people. That's how they coped with their helplessness.

"David said they'd make great stories. I didn't think so. Even my best friends didn't want to hear these stories, especially those with kids. David took what was probably bad advice and, wisely, ignored it."

A Parallel Pittsburgh
At heart, "The Guardian" is a show about Pittsburgh. "It is almost another character," agrees Hollander. "It's a particular place. When you leave it, you begin to see it from another perspective.

"I have memories of it: my childhood, my mom, my family, my friends there. It's a powerful place to grow up."

Why is the show set here and not in Generic Town, U.S.A.? The easy explanation is that it's easier for Hollander to write about. "Pittsburgh is a really great way to fuel my imagination. If I say this happened in Crafton, I know Crafton," he says. "I can create a world that's more believable to me and thus more real to the audience. Using Pittsburgh, a real Pittsburgh, lets me jump into the stories more easily."

Helping to create that meticulously real Pittsburgh is a lot of researching and digging by Matthew Cavaliero. "Please tell my friends at Nicholas Coffee, Mineo's Pizza, Iron City -- there's a bunch of them," laughs the show's property master. "We use their stuff all the time. You may not see it on the network, but it's here on the set."

Starting with the Pittsburgh Film Office, Cavaliero called a lot of local agencies, stores and offices. "I've talked to the Allegheny Court House, Pittsburgh police department, the Allegheny County Jail -- the people in Pittsburgh, every call I've made, everyone has been unbelievably friendly and helpful and open. People in L.A. are jaded about those things."

He has a collection of pizza boxes, coffee bags, newspapers (and, coming soon to a TV near you, a Pittsburgh magazine cover). The show's hangout bar, The Incline, sports an Iron City tap and bottles of Penn Brewery beer. This verisimilitude helps the actors to get the same insider's feeling for Pittsburgh that Hollander has. Though the show's exterior shots feature the real three rivers, the interiors are of a Southern California soundstage.

"Everybody tries to be as authentic as possible," Cavaliero says. "When you're here, you want to feel like you're in Pittsburgh, not Los Angeles."

The character of Pittsburgh itself is "another part of it," Hollander says. "It's such a geographically compressed place. The stories that I'm telling, you can get so much happening in one character. You can be working downtown in the Frick Building, and pop across the bridge, or walk three blocks away and be in a totally different economic structure. It's believable in a smaller world. Here, you'd get stuck in traffic."

And the characters themselves are very much of Pittsburgh, rising from working-class, immigrant roots, much like the Hollanders themselves. David's grandparents and great-grandparents came from Hungary and Czechoslovakia to Monessen and Rostraver, and worked in the mills and mines. His father and uncle went to Penn State and wore white collars. Tom talks about his late brother as his best friend, and notes that David was close to his Uncle Bud -- short for Burton.

"I imagine a [character] that grew from work in the mills, went to Pitt Law School, did the things that a lot of Pittsburghers tend to do: Had a kid like Nick [and] created the opportunities that his father and grandfather did not have," Hollander says. "He could easily have ended up working in the mills. He made very strong, hard choices.

"Nick's character is someone unique to his father, and his father's is somebody unique to Pittsburgh."

The Rules
"I have a lot of rules for the show," Hollander says. "Some are philosophical. Some are quite literal. Part of the creation of any script for the show is that this guy can't sit down." Nick rarely smiles and is always on the move, never relaxed. "I rarely take him home or give him time to have a social life," Hollander says.

Philosophical rules? "Don't spoon-feed the audience," he continues. "Assume that your audience is smarter than you are. Don't believe that just because you're a writer, that I'm a writer, that I know more than the people I'm writing about.

"And if it can happen, let it happen now. You don't need to tie it up in a neat little bow every week." He likes the show to be ambiguous, to leave a lot of room for interpretation by the cast, the crew and the audience.

"You can't squeeze these things," he continues. "You have to allow people to do their jobs on the set. The things that make a show really good are the things you can't predict. You just put the things into motion."

It's worked so far. "The actors in the show universally feel that we have all -- I don't know, hit the lottery, basically landed in clover, whatever cliche you want to put in there," Sbarge says. "It's like being on an all-star team. All the elements have come together. You can't force it, you can't punt it, you can't buy it. It's that ineffable kind of magic that happens when something comes together.

"And the fact that the show is as big a hit as it is -- you can have good acting and good writing, but maybe nobody wants to watch it. The thing about TV is that it's the expression of collective consciousness. No amount of hype can make people watch a show. People watch or they don't."

So what comes next?

"I wanted the year to end with all of the answers that the audience didn't know and Nick didn't know," says Hollander. "To me, it was a purging: Here it all is. This is life. This is how it comes to bear at this moment: the mess you created for yourself. I have the good fortune and the bad fortune to have written myself into a corner last year. The franchise was busted, and Nick was going to jail.

"I just finished the first draft of the third script yesterday," says Hollander in mid-July. "The first three episodes are basically a trilogy. The franchise comes back into play, yet redefined."

So we get to another rule: Never decide what the end is before you get to the end. "I had a vision for -- I didn't know exactly how it was going to play out. The remarkable thing about trying to make a show half-decent," he looks for words. "[Where] I got to was close to that vague idea."

Does he have a vague idea of how this year is going to go? He smiles. "Vaguely."

Executive editor Michelle Pilecki also covers theater for this magazine and reviews local theater for "The Bayer Sunday Arts Magazine" on WQED-FM.

Reality Check
Children's Legal Services is a fictitious legal-advocacy organization for children in Pittsburgh. Fallin & Associates is a fictitious Pittsburgh law firm with a rather notable family tie to CLS.

These are imaginary constructs of David Hollander, creator of "The Guardian." But there is a real legal-advocacy organization for children here, and a real law firm with a notable family tie to it, and in both cases the name to note is Hollander.
It's very tempting to look for similarities -- and there is no shortage of them -- but make no mistake: Scott and Tom Hollander are not Nick and Burton Fallin. For one thing, they both smile a lot more.

Scott Hollander is happy about the tremendous growth of the child legal-advocacy nonprofit he heads, KidsVoice (412-391-3100) which moved in March from its cramped former space in the South Side (a la CLS) to more spacious and conveniently located digs in downtown's Frick Building (yes, where Fallin & Associates is). Tom Hollander, a sole legal practitioner, is as elated as any father can be with three successful children and four beautiful grandchildren. Competing with the spectacular view of PNC Park and the Ohio Valley from his 18th-floor Centre City Tower office is a collection of family photos: David and Courtney with sons Nathaniel and Clayton, Scott and Teofila with daughter Delilah, and Leslie and Mark Smith with son Benjamin. (Leslie Hollander is a Virginia-based actress who just completed a long run in Shear Madness at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.)

But his joy subsides when he picks up another photo. His wife. Barbara Hollander died of cancer at age 52, nine years ago, "at the peak of her career," Tom says. "It was the saddest day of my life." It was she, the Thornburg resident explains, who "was the real impetus for instilling a love of the arts into the children." She was active in children's theater in Mount Lebanon, where the Hollanders raised their family. And once the children were all in school, Barbara earned her Ph.D., then `started her own family-business consulting firm, Barbara Hollander Associates, and in 1986 co-founded the Family Firm Institute, an interdisciplinary membership organization based in Boston.

"It's rough to lose a spouse, a life partner," muses Tom. And rough to lose a mother at any age. Scott returned to Pittsburgh, temporarily at first, taking a three-month family leave from his Seattle law practice during his mother's illness. The Tufts (B.A.) and University of Michigan Law School (J.D.) graduate worked with
his father at his former firm, Evans Ivory (then in the Frick Building; it has since dissolved).

"After Barbara died," Tom recalls, "Scott said he didn't want to be a lawyer who moved funds from one corporate pocket to another." Tom has a long history of public service himself, starting in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, and, more recently, in leadership positions in the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, Consumer Health Coalition, the Allegheny County Bar Association Foundation and the City Theatre.

Scott liked working with children, so he left the Armani-suit corporate world of Nick Fallin and went to Denver, were he was senior staff attorney at the Rocky Mountain Children's Law Center.

"I didn't think I'd come back to Pittsburgh," admits Scott, 38. But he wanted to head his own legal-advocacy agency, and his New York-born wife was unhappy with Denver, preferring the variety of cultural attractions in the town where her Chicago roommate -- Leslie Hollander -- introduced her to her future husband. Then in 1999, Legal Aid for Children (founded in 1908 as the Legal Aid Society of Pittsburgh), in as much debt as doldrums, asked Scott to become its new executive director.

"When I started, I wore every hat: director of development, coordinator of special events, press, marketing. Now I have a legal director, a program director, a financial manager. I rarely do court work now, though I miss it.

"I'm more involved with the organization, working on the infrastructure."

The changes he wrought go beyond, yet illustrate, the name change (in 2001) to KidsVoice. Hollander, now a South Sider himself, has about quadrupled both the budget (to $2.7 million) and the staff( to more than 40), taking a more multidisciplinary approach to the problems of his young clients. "People are generally sickened to hear that we represent more than 5,000 kids," he says. That number includes "probably 1,200-1,400 new cases" per year.

The specific cases that refer KidsVoice's child-clients are legal, but the problems go beyond that. "We know the law, but we also needed people in social work, counseling, drug and alcohol treatment, domestic abuse" and other fields. "We can get more individualized services for the children."

Hollander has also been creative in pursuing alternative funding streams. "We don't want to have to ask CY&F to pay for everything we do," he explains. All of the neglected, abused and at-risk children that KidsVoice represents are referred by the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, Office of Children, Youth and Families (CY&F, formerly CYS, Children and Youth Services). CY&F handles about 8,000 cases per year, of which 3,000 families are seeking help, not only the 5,000 children referred by the court, Hollander explains.

In building what observers have termed a model for child-advocacy agencies, Hollander has attracted national as well as local philanthropy. The former is exemplified by its winning of a Skadden Foundation Fellowship earlier this year, one of 25 nationwide. The two-year award will help develop a specialized medical-advocacy program to help children with critical health needs. Closer to home is, well, what made the new KidsVoice home possible.

In March, KidsVoice moved into the former McGuireWoods LLP offices on the seventh floor of the Frick Building. The law firm, which moved into the Dominion Tower after merging with Sable Pusateri Rosen Gordon & Adams LLC, is also underwriting much of the rent and has donated more than $200,000 in office furniture and equipment. That the offices just happen to be where Scott and David as children visited their father at work, and that Fallin & Associates, however mythically, were also resident here, did sweeten the inspiration for the gift.
Scott sings the praises of McGuireWoods and his many other "angels" in his new office, lined with the photographs he's taken of children around the world, in India, Thailand, Transylvania and elsewhere -- "just children being children, in the joy of day to day."

No longer crammed two or three in tiny offices, the growing KidsVoice staff (many of them newcomers to Pittsburgh), representing many child-advocacy disciplines, does not resemble the purely fictitious Children's Legal Services. Except, perhaps, in one major way.

"We feel passionate about what we do," Scott says. "We do form close bonds. It can be difficult to set boundaries.

"It's great to connect with a child, when he grabs you. That's why you do it, even though you may get burned. It can be hard to maintain yourself so that you don't get burned out, that you don't get jaded and don't lose that passion."

-- M.P.