SEAQUEST MISSION: FIND SAFE HARBOR
Catherine Hinman of The Sentinel StaffTHE ORLANDO SENTINEL
The voyage of seaQuest DSV has been a stormy one from launch.
Expectations alone were as dangerous as a riptide. The high-minded, high-tech Steven Spielberg television series evoking Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was much scrutinized and eagerly anticipated.
Then the creative machine faltered. Critics panned the premiere last fall. Ratings fell.
But NBC wasn't ready to give up hope. SeaQuest resurfaced this year in Orlando. Its Sunday premiere brings a fresh-air look, fresh faces to the submarine's crew, and fantasy to the story's plots.
SeaQuest, however, has found no safe harbor yet. On Monday, less than a week before the second season premiere, the series star, veteran film actor Roy Scheider, candidly admitted his bitter disappointment that the family adventure show had drifted so far from its original ambitions. He said he is particularly unhappy with the change from fact-based stories to science fantasy. He called it junk. He said he was ashamed of it.
In Scheider's mind, the show he signed up to do, the show that would set people thinking about the planet, has gone terribly off course.
Roy Scheider (left), Kim Faze, William Devry, Spike Alexander in Sunday's episode.
Executive says new formula is working well
"They proceeded to let it all turn to mush and go back to the old tried and true stuff we've seen before, underwater SWAT team stuff," Scheider said.
Production executives, not surprisingly, don't agree. Patrick Hasburgh, one of three executive producers along with Spielberg, says the show is far more entertaining for its fantasy adventures. He believes his team has found a formula that works. In fact, a late-season episode involving space aliens was both critically well-received and one of the series' highest rated shows.
As all television series do, he said, the show is evolving. Evolution or not, Scheider's complaints have pulled the curtain back on a rarely seen side of film and television production, one where artistry and ideals clash with what producers believe will sell.
From the outset, a lot was riding on seaQuest. Based on Spielberg's clout, NBC ordered 22 episodes before seeing a single frame. The ambitious series was costing a whopping $1.2 million to $1.5 million per episode to produce, and it was airing on Sunday night, when more Americans are watching television than at any other time of the week.
David Burke became one of the show's executive producers after three episodes. Responding to Scheider's comments this week, Burke conceded there still were creative tensions on the show. Sunday's premiere, for example, was almost entirely rewritten at the request of NBC. Burke says some of the new season's shows are better than last year's.
So what is seaQuest about? The basic premise hasn't changed much. In the series, set in the year 2021, the wundervessel seaQuest travels the colonized ocean depths on a simultaneous peacekeeping and research mission. The maverick captain Nathan Bridger, played by Scheider, commands a crew of often sparring scientific and military personnel.
Execs: Sci-fi saved us
Scheider, an Oscar nominee for his roles in All That Jazz and The French Connection, was wooed to this series by Spielberg. Although past his prime for movie leads, Scheider, 62, was wary. Ultimately, he believed the role of Bridger - a naval officer turned scientist with the eccentricities of Verne's Capt. Nemo - was the perfect reason for him to do his first TV series.
The show's credentials seemed impeccable. Robert Ballard, one of the world's pre-eminent underwater explorers, was a consultant. The show was to expose the wonders of the ocean as a frontier and attempt to reveal a not-so-distant future.
It wasn't to be. Although TV critics hated the ponderous slow-moving pilot, the public seemed to embrace the concept. The premiere was the only new show of the 1993 season to make the top 10 of the week. But ratings steadily declined. It finished the season 74th among 112 shows.
What helped was the series' strong performance - finishing 29th - among the lucrative demographic group of adults ages 18 to 49.
Executive producer Hasburgh, who joined the show midway through the first season, said the first season's biggest problem was potentially lethal: it was boring.
"Once we could go from science fact, reality-based shows to science fiction and the supernatural, we found that we could do all kinds of interesting shows," Hasburgh said. "We had to fix something that was badly broken, and I think we've turned it into a terrific show."
Tony Thomopoulos, president of Spielberg's Amblin Television, echoes Hasburgh.
Scheider's "opinion is not shared by anyone else I know," he said. "The direction the show is going in is absolutely the right direction."
To the hardware-heavy, science-driven show that sometimes featured sea phenomena captured by Ballard's own underwater cameras, the producers have brought comic-book adventure. There will be close encounters with space aliens, time travel into a troubled world 200 years in the future, and - in the season premiere - intrigue at a camp of GELFs, genetically engineered life forms.
The premiere also finds Capt. Bridger calling his crew to duty on a redesigned, rebuilt submarine. The original was destroyed in the final episode last season. The new submarine, occupying three soundstages at Universal Studios Florida, is more open and incorporates warmer design motifs like wood and brass.
Particularly significant to the show's new look will be Florida locations.
"If you turn the sound off and just
Ted Raimi, who returns this season as communications officer Lt. j.g. Tim O'Neill, is looking forward, he says, to being more than a "talking head." This season he will even have a romance. During the first season, seaQuest was desperately trying to find its voice, he said. Now perhaps it has.
"This season is more classical television, as far as I'm concerned," said Raimi, 28. "There is more action, there is more romance, there are more special effects. So it's bigger, like television likes to be."
Deluise's son, Michael, is a a misfit altered in a scientific experiment who becomes an unlikely friend to Brandis' character. Darwin, the talking bottle-nose dolphin who was the critics' favorite crew member, also is returning.
Captain finds romance
Scheider's character finds romance, too, with the ship's doctor. Rosalind Allen plays Dr. Wendy Smith, a biophysicist with ESP.
Scheider has no problem with character development. He says he wishes there were more of it. He has no problems with Florida. He says he was thrilled the show was coming here. But, he says he was betrayed.
"I don't do this kind of stuff," Scheider said. "I said (to the production executives), 'If I wanted to do the fourth generation of Star Trek, I would have signed up for it. I wouldn't have done seaQuest. You guys have changed it from hardball into field hockey and never even bothered to talk to me.' "
Although he's committed to finishing the season, Scheider sees an underuse of talent and the trivialization of the series.
"The other day I was in a scene getting off a bus," he said. "Before me, coming off the bus, is a girl in a bikini; waiting to come on the bus is another girl in a bikini. I said, 'Wait a minute, this is a little overkill, don't you think?' "
Women in sexy clothing, big explosions, space aliens. Is this what plays in Peoria?
Could be, but Scheider wanted to play Capt. Nemo not Capt. Kirk.