Free e-book - East Coast

After working on The Bridge I began to develop a TV show I called East Coast. I decided to adapt the pilot episode into a short story and make it available for free download (or online reading).

Click here.

The Kindle edition will be available soon.

I've been calling East Coast, The Wire in a rural setting because it's also about cops fighting the seemingly unwinnable war on drugs. I'm not sure if I'm going to write more episodes of this series, but I do like the format and the length. This e-book is about the same length as a one-hour TV show.


All feedback is appreciated.

This Week's Bridge - April 23

The episode is called Painted Ladies. We used song titles for episode titles and as this one is about cops running an escort service it was either Painted Ladies or Roxanne and I like the shout out to Ian Thomas.

CTV describe the episode as:

Answering a call for "officer down," Frank (Aaron Douglas) discovers the victim is not a cop but a prostitute dressed as a cop. Investigating further, Frank uncovers an escort ring run by a ruthless vice cop.



Like many storylines on The Bridge, this one was inspired by events in Toronto.

There's more info on the true story here.

The Bridge - March 5th - 9:00

CTV announced yesterday that the two-hour premiere of The Bridge will air Friday, March 5th at 9:00 and the show will then run Fridays at 10:00.




From the CTV website:

The Bridge peels away the veneer of a big-city police force to reveal the political machinations underneath. After the rank and file unanimously vote street cop Frank Leo (Battlestar Galactica's Aaron Douglas) into office as union head, he begins his quest to put street cops first and clean up the force from the ground up. But the old boys' network running the police force and the city's self-serving politicians are not about to sit idly by while a former street cop makes up his own rules. Frank walks a thin blue line as he battles wiretaps and a concerted campaign to bring him down, letting nothing stop him from fulfilling his unwavering vow that when cops are in trouble, he will be there.


The show looks great. I think the episode that I co-wrote with Dannis Koromilas will be episode number 4 or 5 and the episode I wrote (crooked cops running hookers - it was ripped from the headlines, or like my stuff usually is, ripped from the weird news on page six) will be number eight or nine.

Still no news on USA air dates. Maybe this summer.

The Bridge in the paper

This morning I woke up to see my boss on the front page of the Toronto Star. That can be a good thing or a bad thing. In this case it was very good.

Craig Bromell is the Executive Producer and Creative Consultant on the TV show, The Bridge. It's really his show, based on his experiences as a Toronto cop and then as head of the police union.

The article is straitforward enough, but then the comments start. Right away you can see how polarizing a guy Craig was in Toronto. Great fodder for a TV show.

In the pilot episode the character based on Craig, Frank Leo, says, "All I ever wanted to be was a cop." When he sees the way cops are treated by the brass and the politicians, the way cops are always guilty until proven innocent and the way their own bosses will sell out the cop on the street - the ones in the line of fire - for cheap political gain, it becomes too much for him and he gets elected pesident of the union.

At that point the brass go after him hard, one deputy chief telling him, "Whenever the public sees a corrupt, out of control cop, they'll see your face."

So now the guy who only ever wanted to be a good cop becomes the poster boy for bad cops.

Quite the internal conflict for a main character. Lots of emotional stuff to deal with. It's the kind of show that may take a few episodes to really find its footing so it's great that CTV and CBS are fully committed.

The Toronto Star article is here.

Half the writing team of The Bridge - Dannis Koromilas, me and Peter Mohan.

Clearly craft services is doing a top notch job on this show.

More from The Bridge

Publicity is starting to heat up for The Bridge. Here's an interview with the star, Aaron Douglas:

http://watch.ctv.ca/etalk/tv/extended---the-bridge/#clip169797

I particularly like the part around 2:08 when he talks about how good the scripts are ;)

Of course, the credit for that really has to go to showrunner Alan Difiore and co-exec producer/writer Peter Mohan (as well as the other writers Tracey Forbes, Graeme Manson and Dannis Koromilas). I'm learning an awful lot from all of them.

Also, exec producer Craig Brommell keeps us honest and never lets us take the easy way out. We've only started to scratch the surface of his experiences as both a cop and the president of the union, but maybe more important is the attitude he brings.

It's very exciting as the show comes together. The cast really is good, Aaron Douglas is terrific as the beat cop-turned union president and the rest of the cast is excellent as well.

Aaron is right, I think, there's a lot of stuff here that hasn't been in previous cop shows. There are a lot of conscessions to the limitations of the real world - people can't do everything they want. Budgets are tight, manpower is limited, priorities have to be set - which all means some very tough decisions have to be made - usually on the fly.

July 9th, 10:00 pm.

The Bridge - trailer

Here's the promo trailer for the TV show I'm working on, The Bridge.



This is what they give for the show synopsis:

It is the role of the police to protect society - but who is there to protect them? The police union has become powerless against the politically-motivated police department and street cop Frank Leo (Aaron Douglas) is sick of it. By popular vote Frank becomes president of the 8000 strong police union but makes many powerful enemies in the department along the way.

Inspired by the insights of a former police union head, The Bridge lays bare Frank's struggles - he not only battles criminals on the street but sometimes his own bosses and police force corruption, in order to protect his fellow officers and ultimately society.


That pretty much says it. It really looks like it's going to be a great show.

Writing episodic TV is like writing Haiku

Two weeks into my new job as the most junior story editor on the TV show The Bridge (premiering July 9th on CTV and CBS at 10:00 pm), one of the more experienced writers said, "Writing TV is like writing Haiku, you have to fit everything into the structure," and I thought, yeah, that's right, people don't complain that Haiku is too formulaic.

Then he said you could also use dirty limericks as the example, but that's not as classy.

The writers' room is a very funny place and a fun place to be.

It's quite different than writing novels. When I write a novel I start with a couple of characters I think would be interesting to follow and I follow them. I have a vague idea where they might take me, but most of the story emerges from the writing. I'm never sure exactly how the novel will end or even who will emerge as the main character. In Dirty Sweet there's an unnamed, low-level biker in one scene and he doesn't say anything, he's background. In Everybody Knows This is Nowhere he gets named J.T. and has some lines and some scenes. He's pretty much a main character in Swap. This was certainly no clever plan I had worked out in advance.

But the whole season of The Bridge (11 episodes actually, the pilot has already been filmed and is going to run as the first two episodes) is getting worked out in note form on a big whiteboard across an entire wall of the writers' room. All six story editors contribute to the outlines of every episode and the head writer (the Showrunner, in TV-speak) is the final word. Then each writer is assigned one or two of these detailed outlines and writes them up as scripts.

The speed at which all this happens is also making my head spin. I'd fallen into a schedule that worked around my kids' school schedule. They start school in September and I start writing a book. For the past couple of years I've been able to finish by June when they finished school.

We started outlining this TV show two weeks ago and the first episode we're working on will air July 23rd. When the producer told us this, I said, "July 23rd, 2010, right?" I was only half kidding. Filming starts in April.

So, everything has to fit. It has to be like Haiku.

Looks good so far.