"Special" and "heartbreaking."
Those are the two words that the cast and crew of FX's Terriers use to describe working on the underrated 2010 detective drama that premiered 15 years ago on September 8, 2010. Despite a passionate fanbase and equally passionate critical acclaim, Terriers was cancelled after one season due to less-than-stellar ratings. Despite lacking a sustainable viewership while it was on the air, the show has spent the last 15 years gathering a cultish following that doesn't surprise coshowrunner and executive producer Shawn Ryan.
"[Terriers] felt very ahead of its time," Ryan tells the Television Academy in an exclusive interview celebrating the show's 15th anniversary. (Check back later this fall for an oral history pegged to the show's legacy.) "It was a special show and, when it ended, it was a heartbreaking kind of time. There were no creative concerns from FX. The show was what we wanted it to be, just not what the audience was looking for [at the time], at least not a big enough audience. But over the years I kind of made peace with the fact that the show has slowly found its fans. More fans than detractors."
Those fans that did tune in during its original run found a show that could best be elevator-pitched as "Rockford Files meets The Big Lebowski."
Shawn Ryan / Photo Credit: Invision/AP
Set in the seedier parts of San Diego, Terriers centered on Hank Dolworth (Donal Logue), an alcoholic ex-cop-turned-dogged private eye struggling to establish himself as a credible investigator. He's struggling so much with life post-divorce from his kind wife, Gretchen (Kimberly Quinn), that he has purchased their old home despite not being able to afford it. Hank and his partner — the charming and likable former thief, Britt (Michael Raymond-James) — struggle to make ends meet and serve justice to those on the raggedy edge of the legal system, while occasionally crossing paths and overlapping cases with Hank's former partner, Detective Mark Gustafson (9-1-1's Rockmond Dunbar).
The money isn't great — and neither are the punches Hank and Britt occasionally take to the face — but, hey, that's the job. And, in the pilot, we see that business is booming when Hank and Britt must unravel a Chinatown-esque conspiracy involving a murderous cabal of wealthy men and their shady land grab with ties to the local airport.
Ryan boarded the project as coshowrunner and executive producer when, in 2008, series creator and fellow showrunner Ted Griffin (Ocean's Eleven) brought the idea to him.
"Ted was a fan of The Shield, and at one point he reached out to me and I met with him. He ended up cowriting a freelance episode of The Shield [season five's "Rap Payback"]. I was a real admirer of Ocean's Eleven and Matchstick Men, which he had written. I became friends with him."
When The Shield ended, Ryan and his development executive, Marney Hochman, set up a meeting with Griffin to discuss their future working together. "We said to Ted: 'Hey, if you ever have a TV idea, come to us," Ryan recalls. "We told him that we'd love to hear it and maybe work with him on it. And after a certain amount of time, he said he did have an idea. It was very loose at the time, but he talked about classic '70s buddy movies. He also talked about The Rockford Files."
"I don't think he used this word, but I did — 'vibe.' He kept talking about a vibe, and he kept trying to explain [the show's] tone and how the tone was more important than the story in some ways, although the story had to be good. So I think I just said, 'Why don't you just write some pages?' And he did. A lot of the magic that was in the show was in those early pages. I just loved the writing from the beginning."
From there, the two creatives pitched the project to several networks and cable outlets. (This was before streaming was a thing.) After making the rounds, two serious buyers emerged: HBO and FX.
Given Ryan's previous relationship with FX via the success of his gritty cop show, The Shield, Ryan and Griffin set up their show with network head John Landgraf. Along the way, the writers met with some interesting feature film talent who were interested in working on their cable TV show: David Fincher and the late Val Kilmer.
"I don't know if many people know that," Ryan says of his one and only meeting with the late Top Gun and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang star. "This was before the time when actors predominantly known for feature film work could and would do television."
The role Ryan and Griffin met with Kilmer to discuss was the lead, Hank. At the time, Ryan felt surprised that an actor of Kilmer's caliber would even consider headlining their series. "I guess we had enough juice from my work on The Shield — and Ted's work as a screenwriter in features — that we got a meeting.
Ultimately, the chances of Kilmer signing on faded not long after the meeting concluded.
"Val wasn't really ready to do TV, I think, at that point," Ryan explains. "I think there was still a perception that that was a step you took down because your career had sort of dissipated. So I wasn't surprised by that. I don't want this to come across as any sort of slight toward Donal Logue, who was the perfect Hank, but we were encouraged to take a few swings."
One of those swings that came this close to connecting was bringing David Fincher onboard to direct what would have been the filmmaker's first TV pilot.
"Again, I don't want this to come across as any sort of slight toward Craig Brewer, who was our pilot director, but we did have a meeting with Fincher. I don't think I've told many people this, either."
Ryan recalls that the meeting with the Seven and Zodiac director came soon after the release of 2008 awards contender The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Fincher was, and is, well-known to be a massive fan of Chinatown — he recently considered doing a Netflix prequel series to the film with its late screenwriter, Robert Towne — so Terriers' tone and storyline proved appealing to the filmmaker.
"I never met him before," Ryan recalls. "Ted knew him a little bit prior, and we went to [Fincher's] office. He showed us some stuff about what he had done with the VFX. He was very into how using computers helped them pull off some complicated sequences. It was really impressive."
Equally impressive was Fincher's enthusiasm for the material.
"He was really, really impressed with Ted's [pilot] script, and he was really interested in doing it. I would say, for the first 45 minutes of the meeting, I was like, 'Holy shit, he's going to do this. Like, he really is into this.' And he was like, 'Listen, the key with this is you can't let an actor change a single word of the script. They’ve just got to say it as written, because the words are just...' and I was like, in my mind, ‘Oh my God, he's going to direct this.’”
But, according to Ryan, another project would derail Fincher officially signing on to Terriers. A very famous (and Oscar-winning) one.
"Then, right near the end of the meeting, he goes, 'Listen, the only hangup is I have this movie script that Aaron Sorkin has written that I'm thinking about doing.' That turned out to be The Social Network — which, along with Inglourious Basterds, may be my two favorite films of the last 20 years. So, I'm ultimately glad that he made that."
Ryan is also glad that Brewer — who at the time had directed an episode of The Shield and the features Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan — signed on to bring Hank and Britt to life. "He really got the tone. He just knew what the story needed, who those characters were, and he delivered it effortlessly."
In the 15 years since Terriers came to an end, Ryan's experience on the short-lived program also delivered a key takeaway that the prolific writer has applied to other projects since — especially his Netflix hit, The Night Agent.
"One of the things that I took after that show was to be at peace with the idea that I controlled what I controlled. That was the lesson I learned and, in some ways, I think it was really good for me. I would have felt tremendous guilt if I felt like [Terriers] wasn't as good as it could have been, and perhaps that was the reason why it failed. So, when I had a hit show like The Night Agent, it's very easy to not let it go to my head, because all I did was — I controlled what I controlled. I gave my all to each show. The results may have been different, but in many ways you're just rolling the dice."
Terriers is streaming now on Hulu.
