Episode 36 - "The Agency"

The cycle of every long-running institution is the same. It is a bit of a boom and bust, with highs and lows and transitions. I'll talk about the early episodes (31-35) later. For right now it's episode 36, “The Agency”. I guess we call it the “agency reboot” now, but basically it was a new series that we just kept calling Shadows. And it works. Written in 2004, Jay Fuller and I (with a lot of input and planning from Sam Rosenthal, who worked with us to plan the format and style), set out to build a brand new beast. Sam and I established our template after experiencing the problems that the original series format presented to us. But we didn't know how to make establish the new thing in 30 minutes. The obvious choice was to start with an outsider.

Notice that we didn't have an Agency perspective in the episode. We follow Lauren, the FBI agent, who gets fired because she insists her husband was killed by a werewolf. There's a plot hole there, as you can probably see. Was he buried? He's supposed to appear at the end as (surprise!) the werewolf in question. Anyways, the FBI thinks she's nuts but she's too square to back down. She writes a tell-all report and gets canned. A mysterious fellow FBI agent sends her off for an interview with The Agency and thus we gain entrance to the supernatural world of Shadows.

Things don't work out right. The first thing to know is that we thought we had a CGI werewolf. We had shots where it would plug in, with the idea that we could use practical werewolf arms. We just never figured it out, and by the time I edited the episode Sam had moved on and there was no time and not enough footage to make it work. But that's why the scenes with the monster are so thin – we literally had nothing and no way to shoot new material at that point. The result is an attempt at Val Lewton's Cat People. If you haven't seen any Val Lewton films, by the way, I highly recommend them. They're probably the single most useful reference for how to operate Shadows on such a shoestring budget.

Despite the flaws, the story does achieve it's objective, to pull us into this other world. It would have been even better, I think, to have a few more minutes of Lauren's existence pre-Agency. We have two status-quos to disrupt. One is her domestic situation. The other is her work situation. Rightly, the work situation takes the bulk of the episode, but what is the inciting incident of the story? Is it the death of the husband or being fired from her job? Her willingness to go along with the Agency is a change from her more stubborn nature, it's part of her arc, but I'm not sure we fleshed that out properly. And in the end, she shoots and kills the monster, which is supposed to be her husband. The dialog remains, but without a setup in the teaser, it doesn't pay off.

Dave Rogers was our cast member from Apocalypse, here reprising his role as Jack Flynn. The hard man of action comes out of our conception of having Jakob be Bosley to the Angels. With the Board of Directors as an invisible Charlie. We needed Agent Flynn to do the work, and also to establish that the Agency is poorly funded and resourced. They are frayed, desperate people, fighting a losing battle. It ups the stakes. Dave had to move on after only a few episodes, but that was ok – indeed, that was the point. Agents can come and go. The structure remains.

Marcela (Lauren Clay) was not an actress, though she's a very talented woman, who worked for McKinsey last I checked. She was also one of the founders of the BU Editorial Society which published the Back Bay Review, so I knew her from that as well. I don't know that she was completely comfortable with acting on-camera, and I regret that I don't think we offered any of our actors as much support as they needed.

Joe Maddens, who plays Jay, was a good friend of mine from Liquid Fun, the BU improv troupe. He gives a great performance here, as he always does. His energy is always infectious, especially here as the doomed asshole on what I merely point out is an unusual job interview. And frankly the conceit doesn't quite make sense but again, it gets us a tour of the Agency.

The shoot was particularly challenging, we were doing a lot of stuff late at night in the cold, and our most intense shoot consisted of a grueling night in the sub-basement of Marcus and Sam's apartment in Kenmore Square, a dingy place that was locked of course, but could be reached by climbing through an unlit crawl space beneath the floor and unlocking the door from the inside. It served as a perfect location for the werewolf lair, and I think the texture and the lighting worked well for that. You can see at that point, we're beginning to get a handle on the iris, which is one of the things that TV students consistently overlook. The film program is more precise in terms of using and calibrating the f-stop correctly.

We chose the BU castle as the external shot of the Agency for obvious reasons – it looked cool and it was always available. I was never completely happy with it, because everyone knows it so well. It would have been better to find a cool old building in the North End somewhere, that was the urban aesthetic I wanted, but logistically that would have been difficult. During our first shoot at the castle, the camera malfunctioned, so when I captured the footage to the hard drive the images were corrupt, staccato frames, a mess. I ran out of time and, a year later, ran out of Marcela time as well, so I had to use that footage and couldn't reshoot. What's onscreen are stills picked out of the faulty footage assembled like a slideshow. A makeshift solution that I try to imagine evokes surveillance. Another example of a consistent problem the show has always had, which is the editing backlog. In fact, the three biggest problems, chronically forever seem to be:

1. completing episodes
2. keeping up with the editing backlog
3. cast turnover
   
   

As a first effort, Episode 36 could have been a lot worse. And it certainly did its job. Some things got dropped, like Wilbur, the Agency secretary etc. But we got the harshness down, the crazy weird world. That's what makes the show flexible. It can and should accommodate a wide range of storytelling, once the core Agency structure is set down. The idea was to do a string of “Agency” based episodes and then break the format in the next few after that, to establish a precedent as to what does and does not constitute a Shadows episode. I think perhaps we should have been more aggressive in breaking our own format, because the subsequent runs hew fairly close to the Agency itself. I always thought that the series should be set in the world the Agency inhabits, using the rules of that universe. And that the Agency should be the main story of that world, but not the exclusive one. There's still opportunity to do it. 

- Justin K. Rivers