Venue
Cat & Fiddle Pub6530 Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, California
————————–
The Tab
(4) draft beers(2) dinner salads
————————–
$53.42 + tip
The novel may be Stephen King’s, but Under the Dome is the perfect conceit for Neal Baer. If you caught Monday night’s pilot episode of the new buzzy show on CBS that Baer is showrunning and producing (alongside King and the other Steve, Spielberg) you saw an entire town closed off from the rest of civilization by a mysterious, impenetrable shield. No one can leave, no one can enter. It’s Baer’s dream come true.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to suggest that Baer is claustrophobic or that the Denver native is eager to be stuck in a New England village. But a small town cut off indefinitely (or at least long enough to serve as fodder for 13 first-season episodes) is as enticing a laboratory for a public health wonk as it is for a storyteller—of which Baer is equal parts.
“The meme of being stuck under the dome allows us to explore in stark ways how we relate to finite space and resources,” Baer says over a beer at Hollywood’s Cat & Fiddle Pub.
We sit outside by the courtyard fountain, on a chilly June evening that has me wondering if there’ll be heat lamps under the dome. The pleasant Cat & Fiddle compound, more Mediterranean than English in feel, was built in 1929 as a movie studio wardrobe, then went on to be a commissary for nearby studios. Its website boasts that scenes of the “original Casablanca” were filmed here, which begs the question of whether there was more than one Casablanca.
It’s a bit of a fluke that Baer—an Emmy-nominated executive producer and showrunner of NBC’s ER and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and CBS’ A Gifted Man—is a Hollywood star. A Harvard M.D. (with two other Harvard master’s degrees under his belt, in sociology and education), Baer claims that the plan was to be a pediatrician in Boston and that he’d probably be doing that now if “John” hadn’t called.
The John in question was Baer’s buddy John Wells, ER’s executive producer, who asked Baer to help him write a medical drama that would be authentic, medically and scientifically. “John was the first one to invite doctors into the writing room,” Baer says, a practice that is now standard.
Baer spent seven years on ER, followed by 11 producing Law & Order: SVU. For him, the challenge and opportunity was always to deploy storytelling on behalf of public health or pressing societal problems. He talks about episodes almost like editorials, with a takeaway message delivered in a compelling storyline. ER was an unparalleled vehicle for educating the public about breast cancer, organ transplants, emergency contraception, and any number of other medical issues—often in conjunction with local NBC newscasts following each episode.
I ask Baer if this is the golden age of TV, and his answer is an emphatic no. The days when a show like ER could regularly bring together 30 or 40 million viewers are a distant memory, and Baer doesn’t buy into the conventional wisdom that the proliferation of niche outlets has resulted in more sophisticated content across the board. He says network shows like ER, Hill Street Blues, and NYPD Blue were as edgy and groundbreaking in their day as the cable fare being obsessed over today by far fewer people.
“Yes, there may be more violence and nudity,” Baer acknowledges, “but I don’t necessarily see more wrestling with tough issues.” Corporate malfeasance is one broad subject Baer finds all too absent on television.
SVU tackled gun control and rape kits; ER portrayed a Mormon woman with seven kids getting an abortion and was the “first and last” show to feature an HIV-positive character. Homeland gets deserved kudos for depicting a bipolar character with a great deal of nuance, but, as Baer points out, “we did that on ER with Sally Field.”
Baer does tip his hat to The Wire. “The Wire had operatic quality,” he says. “It managed to be both larger than life and ring true. And it provided an eye into worlds we hadn’t seen before.”
The fact that Under the Dome has debuted in late June is itself a testament to how much TV viewing has changed. When Baer’s SVU first went on the air in 2002, it had an unglamorous 10 p.m. Friday slot yet still commanded a bigger audience than any TV drama today.
“Maybe when there were only three networks, there was a better chance you’d watch a hard-hitting report on struggling farm workers.” That might ring hollow coming from most Hollywood big shots, but in the case of this policy-oriented storyteller, you get the feeling he may actually stay up late at night worrying about such questions.
Baer’s preoccupation with affecting change through storytelling inspires a second parallel career that blends social entrepreneurship, digital activism, and media. Baer lectures frequently at medical schools and public policy institutes, serves on a number of boards, and works with a dizzying array of cutting-edge groups trying to empower storytellers in the name of action and problem-solving. When it comes to confronting many of the most serious challenges facing humanity, Baer believes what’s needed isn’t necessarily for us to learn that much more, but to take what we know and act on it.
As a senior fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, for instance, Baer co-founded the Institute for Photographic Empowerment. His 2010 documentary, Mozambique, looked at how a video camera empowered HIV-positive teenage girls to tell their story. This year, Baer produced a documentary entitled If You Build It about an effort to train teenagers in an economically challenged North Carolina community to make and design things. It’s about the “return of shop class,” as Baer puts it, albeit a shop class invested with a missionary zeal to advance sustainability and design. Baer is developing a project called “Action Lab” to help audiences take action upon being inspired by his documentary or other powerful stories. The number of partner organizations he cites as being involved in his various projects—the Gates Foundation, Sundance, the California Endowment, Hewlett-Packard, Ashoka, Stanford’s design school, UCLA, and so on—is inspiring and daunting.
I want to press on. But the last rays of sunlight have gone, it’s chilly out, and my second beer is encouraging me to give Baer a break from describing so many projects linked to so many problems seeking so many solutions.
“So what do you do for fun?” I ask.
“Write novels,” he replies. He’s between his first (Kill Switch) and second (Kill Again). “When you write a novel, you get to control everything. You don’t have to worry about other writers, or make-up artists, or studio execs, or whether a certain set can or can’t be made, or whether you have permits to film …”
“It’s relaxing,” he says with conviction, as if to underscore that it’s the kind of thing you’d want to consider if a dome came down on your town and you were stuck and had to make the most of it.