The television world was shocked back in 1995 when American Gothic premiered on CBS. This was a dark show set in a small South Carolina town called Trinity where murder, black magic and the devil were common occurrences. The town was basically controlled by an evil sheriff named Lucas Buck [played by Gary Cole]. The show was an even bigger surprise because it was created by former teen idol Shaun Cassidy who was an up and coming TV producer. Now that Cassidy has a hot show on ABC, Invasion, Universal saw the chance to release the entire set of American Gothic on DVD.
Buy the DVD set of American Gothic The Complete Series
Daniel Robert Epstein: It must be very satisfying that American Gothic is coming out on DVD because it was your first series.
Shaun Cassidy: Its awesome. Im thrilled that theyre doing it because when the show came to an end we knew it was coming to an end so it gave us an opportunity to actually give it an ending. So the fact that it exists in a box set is fitting because its more like a miniseries.
DRE: Did it end because of normal reasons like low ratings?
SC: Well, low ratings are subjective. I think it was cancelled with a 28 share, which now would be the biggest show on television. CBS at the time had nothing remotely resembling American Gothic and I dont know that any other network did either. I think it really was a question of where do you program a show like this? Where do you find the lead-in for it? Where do you find the companion for it? Im grateful that CBS took a shot, but the only reason they put us on in the first place is because they were in the ratings cellar at the time.
DRE: I cant believe that the ratings were so high.
SC: It was just not good enough in the climate at the time. Now the climates changed.
DRE: How was it watching the episodes again for the DVD?
SC: I confess that I did not watch all these shows before they made it to DVD, but I did watch the pilot again with my buddy David Eick whos one of the producers on the show and we did a little commentary. I watched the finale, which is a two-part episode that I remember writing feverishly in a four-day period. I was really sick, locked in my house on a terrible deadline, as always, and I just poured those shows out. I think [Syriana writer/director] Steve Gaghan may have shared credit. I thought the finale was really fitting. A lot of stuff came out that I actually didnt plan on but it just gave the whole thing a beautiful symmetry. We had really good writers on the show, Steve Gaghan was one of our writers who later went on to write Traffic. He and his partner Michael Perry wrote an episode called Damned If You Dont, which is the third or fourth show where we really found our footing.
DRE: You had done a couple of things as a producer before American Gothic but when you started bringing around this weird show, were people surprised that this thing was coming from you?
SC: Yeah, they were stunned. I think it gave it a kind of perverse twist. I think they enjoyed that it came from a guy whom they perceived to be mom and apple pie and now he was suddenly delivering this very dark, serialized drama. The network sold it that way.
DRE: How did you like being marketed in that fashion?
SC: I only talk about stuff when I have a show on. I never do any personal publicity and I hadnt done much in a long time in the public eye. Id done a Broadway show a few years earlier and even that I had to be dragged into doing. I was happily ensconced at Universal at the time, I was writing movies, television and Id had some pilot ideas. Right on the heels of this Broadway show, I came back to LA and started work on Gothic. When it came on and it was so critically acclaimed, they wanted to push me out there to talk about it and I did and it was fun, but it was all in the name was selling the show. Once I thought the actors could carry the ball, I happily disappeared again.
DRE: How did it end up at Sam Raimis company?
SC: I think Hercules was just starting. Sam and I both had deals at Universal. They were going to do Midnight Run as a series and I wrote a Midnight Run movie. Sam and I met around that time and David Eick was his development guy. David and I had lunch and we talked about maybe doing something together. I had this notion of a small town that was perversely perfect from the outside but with a very dark Southern underbelly. Id recently seen this Frontline documentary on a town in South Carolina called Edenton, which had a big child abuse scandal. There was this preschool, where there were all these kids who were coming forth saying they were abused by the teachers and parents. It was really an awful story, but the way it was presented on Frontline, all of these parents and teachers were just smiling and telling these horrible stories about people with smiles and you could just tell that they were hanging their neighbor. That terrified me. So that sensibility is what infused American Gothic. American Gothic is very dark and it has a lot of dark humor, too. But it really is an allegory of good and evil. Whereas the show Im working on now, Invasion, is really about survival. Its about more primal issues. Im fascinated with family, I guess, because I come from a complicated one.
DRE: Was that how Gothic was personal for you?
SC: Maybe it's because I was an actor, but I always put myself in the shoes of the characters. The protagonist in American Gothic is the boy and there's a Dickensian aspect to that. I grew up in a very turbulent household; I come from a circus family basically. The idea that your world can be turned on a dime in a day is not always bad. Some days it was very exciting and fun, but it was definitely unpredictable. Now it is in my DNA. I've written to that in a show called Cover Me. I wrote to it in a show called Roar. I'm writing to it now. The unpredictability of the world and the inability to control your environment is really disturbing to a lot of people. For me, it's the norm. I just embrace that and work through it in the writing. I might be bored if the world were any different for me.
DRE: What made you cast Gary Cole in American Gothic?
SC: Gary was on a list but he would not audition. He was a television star from Midnight Caller and he had done a movie called Fatal Vision, where he played a killer. Frankly I was concerned that Gary wouldnt have the humor and the charm because I had seen him play these very dark guys and I wanted someone that would be charismatic. Hes also a guy who you love to hate. This is a guy whos doing very dark things yet you want the audience to root for him. Thats a tall order. I didnt know if Gary had those kinds of chops, but we basically looked at everyone and said, Well, you know what, Garys a good actor, hes a name, CBS likes him, lets hire him. We didnt know if he was going to deliver. He was magnificent, he came in the first day, we did a read-through, David and Sam and I just went to the corner and counted our lucky stars because he was awesome. Garys really a character actor, he just comes in, swallows up the part and disappears in it.
On the set of Gothic when he was out of costume, people would come on the set and wouldnt know where he was. But then when he put on the coat and got into character, he was like whoa.
DRE: Was Southern crime fiction like Jim Thompson an influence on the show?
SC: Absolutely. So was Truman Capote. To Kill a Mockingbird was an influence as well.
DRE: So you were a fan of noir?
SC: Id read a lot of Raymond Chandler and grew up in Los Angeles so I was. I love Chinatown and that kind of thing. I wouldnt say that Im a horror fan per se. I love psychological thriller; I love Rosemarys Baby because it seems so normal and real. Thats a movie that opens like a romantic comedy. For the first half hour you got these two young kids in New York and theres bright sun and no scary music. It gets slowly, insidiously darker and darker. That is the most frightening to me because it feels the most plausible.
DRE: You said you guys knew about the cancellation. Was it a friendly one?
SC: When we sold our show, we went out and pitched our show to Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS and they all wanted it. But there was a feeling amongst the studio, Universal, that people would buy it and not put it on because it was a campaign year. Bob Dole was running for president on an anti-violence campaign specific to television. The opening to our show is a little girl being hit over the head with a shovel and the girl breaks her neck. Its about as dark as you can go. But theres a logic to it and it all pays off; if you stick with the show, it doesnt feel gratuitous. But in 1996 Dole was saying, Turn off your television sets. The studio was afraid someone might buy it as a preemptive strike and then just not do it. So we went to the place that needed to take a risk the most and that year it was CBS. They were in terrible shape, all of their shows were dying, their demo was incredibly old, and they bought the show, put the show on, it got incredible reviews and good ratings. Halfway through the season, the president was fired and Les Moonves came in. It was the beginning of this turnaround in the network and Les immediately basically said, No, CBS, youve gone too far, too fast, the only way youre going to turn this network around is by building on the constituents you already have, and were going to do Touched by an Angel, not Touched by Satan. He didnt use those words, but that was the message loud and clear. To his credit, he really liked the show, but he also said, On CBS, you cannot do a show where your protagonist is the villain. You need a good guy. We argued that any good guy was going to pale next to Lucas Buck. So we had the doctor, Matt Crower [played by Jake Weber] who is a flawed hero. But Les wanted a square-jawed, good guy in there so in the classic spirit of shark jumping, we brought in another guy named Billy Peale, another doctor, who was supposed to go up against Buck. As predicted, he basically vanished in Bucks wake. Gary and Lucas were just too strong and charismatic. We realized that CBS plan for a good guy was not going to work so the show was probably not going to work on their network. Then just four or five episodes before the end of the season, we pretty much knew it was going to be it. So since we had beginning, middle and an end from the beginning, we decided to write the ending.
DRE: How much did the fans on the internet have to do with the DVD release?
SC: Its been a cult favorite for a long time so there are a lot of websites dedicated to it. Maybe the audience has grown via the web, I dont know. Unfortunately I would say commerce has driven the release of the DVD more than fan support. So many old television shows are being released on DVD and seeing if they can make a couple of nickels off it. In the case of Gothic, I think they know they have something maybe bigger on their hands because there's been a groundswell of support for it. I have a show this year that's treading similar territory and that's gotten a lot of positive attention as well. Gothic may benefit because of Invasion.
DRE: I have to go off on a tangent here. Did you write that Midnight Run sequel with Christopher McDonald?
SC: Yeah, I did.
DRE: I always wanted to see it. Is it any good?
SC: I honestly dont know if its any good. The script was well received at the time; I think I may have seen the movie once or just half of it. Chris is really good. Its a dark story. Its about a girl whos trying to kill herself and he is trying to stop her through the whole movie. Hes basically running in front of the bullet every time.
DRE: I love the first film.
SC: I dont know if it lived up to George Gallos movie, but it was one of my favorite movies and when they asked me to write it, I was thrilled. It was darkly funny.
DRE: Invasion just got picked up for a full season. There's also some backlash with critics saying, "Oh it's not doing as well this and that." What do you think of all that stuff?
SC: Well, it's not doing as well as Lost. That is a bar that's insanely high and I certainly never expected it to. My job, as far as I was concerned, was to make a good show and a show that would be competitive in the timeslot. We are doing that. We are winning in the demo every week and beating Law and Order. It's 40 to 50 percent better than they've ever done in the time slot and by that standard we're a complete homerun. Lost is a juggernaut. In some ways, being a companion to Lost is beneficial, because theoretically a lot of people are delivered. We're also not Lost 2, we're a whole other thing. Our pace is different, it's closer to Gothic in that its sort of a novel that has a beginning, middle and end. I do know where we're going so people will be rewarded if they pay attention.
DRE: Even though it has an end, could it go on for ten years?
SC: Ten might be a reach, but I could certainly go five. I plotted it through in a very broad way, but in year three or year four, there's no way we'll be making the same show, that I know for sure. It is an evolving thing. It's not like Law and Order where you're basically doing the same thing year after year. There's something to be said to that but as far as holding my interest, I need to keep moving.
DRE: Are you just concentrating on Invasion right now or do you have other things you're working on?
SC: I have many other things, but they're all on hold while I work on Invasion, which I'm exclusive to this year and next year. If Invasion's on a good footing, I may do some other stuff.
DRE: You were able to reinvent yourself from a teen idol to a TV writer/producer. What kept you from going off in a bad way?
SC: I was a teen idol and that has a short shelf life. Having seen my brother David go through it, I knew this was a sort of win the lotto kind of thing. Then it's over and you have to figure out what you want to do. I've been lucky in that I've been able to evolve and continue doing new stuff. I have other things I want to do as well. The singing into acting into writing was just a natural creative outgrowth. I like creative stuff, I like building stuff, I like houses and gardens. I like drawing pictures. I'm an entrepreneurial guy and I am lucky in that I was able to write. I always wanted to be a producer because that's the idea person. I think my music background helped in that. I have a sense of rhythm with dialogue that's musical. I didn't go to college, so it was from reading scripts, reading books and watching other writers.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy the DVD set of American Gothic The Complete Series
Daniel Robert Epstein: It must be very satisfying that American Gothic is coming out on DVD because it was your first series.
Shaun Cassidy: Its awesome. Im thrilled that theyre doing it because when the show came to an end we knew it was coming to an end so it gave us an opportunity to actually give it an ending. So the fact that it exists in a box set is fitting because its more like a miniseries.
DRE: Did it end because of normal reasons like low ratings?
SC: Well, low ratings are subjective. I think it was cancelled with a 28 share, which now would be the biggest show on television. CBS at the time had nothing remotely resembling American Gothic and I dont know that any other network did either. I think it really was a question of where do you program a show like this? Where do you find the lead-in for it? Where do you find the companion for it? Im grateful that CBS took a shot, but the only reason they put us on in the first place is because they were in the ratings cellar at the time.
DRE: I cant believe that the ratings were so high.
SC: It was just not good enough in the climate at the time. Now the climates changed.
DRE: How was it watching the episodes again for the DVD?
SC: I confess that I did not watch all these shows before they made it to DVD, but I did watch the pilot again with my buddy David Eick whos one of the producers on the show and we did a little commentary. I watched the finale, which is a two-part episode that I remember writing feverishly in a four-day period. I was really sick, locked in my house on a terrible deadline, as always, and I just poured those shows out. I think [Syriana writer/director] Steve Gaghan may have shared credit. I thought the finale was really fitting. A lot of stuff came out that I actually didnt plan on but it just gave the whole thing a beautiful symmetry. We had really good writers on the show, Steve Gaghan was one of our writers who later went on to write Traffic. He and his partner Michael Perry wrote an episode called Damned If You Dont, which is the third or fourth show where we really found our footing.
DRE: You had done a couple of things as a producer before American Gothic but when you started bringing around this weird show, were people surprised that this thing was coming from you?
SC: Yeah, they were stunned. I think it gave it a kind of perverse twist. I think they enjoyed that it came from a guy whom they perceived to be mom and apple pie and now he was suddenly delivering this very dark, serialized drama. The network sold it that way.
DRE: How did you like being marketed in that fashion?
SC: I only talk about stuff when I have a show on. I never do any personal publicity and I hadnt done much in a long time in the public eye. Id done a Broadway show a few years earlier and even that I had to be dragged into doing. I was happily ensconced at Universal at the time, I was writing movies, television and Id had some pilot ideas. Right on the heels of this Broadway show, I came back to LA and started work on Gothic. When it came on and it was so critically acclaimed, they wanted to push me out there to talk about it and I did and it was fun, but it was all in the name was selling the show. Once I thought the actors could carry the ball, I happily disappeared again.
DRE: How did it end up at Sam Raimis company?
SC: I think Hercules was just starting. Sam and I both had deals at Universal. They were going to do Midnight Run as a series and I wrote a Midnight Run movie. Sam and I met around that time and David Eick was his development guy. David and I had lunch and we talked about maybe doing something together. I had this notion of a small town that was perversely perfect from the outside but with a very dark Southern underbelly. Id recently seen this Frontline documentary on a town in South Carolina called Edenton, which had a big child abuse scandal. There was this preschool, where there were all these kids who were coming forth saying they were abused by the teachers and parents. It was really an awful story, but the way it was presented on Frontline, all of these parents and teachers were just smiling and telling these horrible stories about people with smiles and you could just tell that they were hanging their neighbor. That terrified me. So that sensibility is what infused American Gothic. American Gothic is very dark and it has a lot of dark humor, too. But it really is an allegory of good and evil. Whereas the show Im working on now, Invasion, is really about survival. Its about more primal issues. Im fascinated with family, I guess, because I come from a complicated one.
DRE: Was that how Gothic was personal for you?
SC: Maybe it's because I was an actor, but I always put myself in the shoes of the characters. The protagonist in American Gothic is the boy and there's a Dickensian aspect to that. I grew up in a very turbulent household; I come from a circus family basically. The idea that your world can be turned on a dime in a day is not always bad. Some days it was very exciting and fun, but it was definitely unpredictable. Now it is in my DNA. I've written to that in a show called Cover Me. I wrote to it in a show called Roar. I'm writing to it now. The unpredictability of the world and the inability to control your environment is really disturbing to a lot of people. For me, it's the norm. I just embrace that and work through it in the writing. I might be bored if the world were any different for me.
DRE: What made you cast Gary Cole in American Gothic?
SC: Gary was on a list but he would not audition. He was a television star from Midnight Caller and he had done a movie called Fatal Vision, where he played a killer. Frankly I was concerned that Gary wouldnt have the humor and the charm because I had seen him play these very dark guys and I wanted someone that would be charismatic. Hes also a guy who you love to hate. This is a guy whos doing very dark things yet you want the audience to root for him. Thats a tall order. I didnt know if Gary had those kinds of chops, but we basically looked at everyone and said, Well, you know what, Garys a good actor, hes a name, CBS likes him, lets hire him. We didnt know if he was going to deliver. He was magnificent, he came in the first day, we did a read-through, David and Sam and I just went to the corner and counted our lucky stars because he was awesome. Garys really a character actor, he just comes in, swallows up the part and disappears in it.
On the set of Gothic when he was out of costume, people would come on the set and wouldnt know where he was. But then when he put on the coat and got into character, he was like whoa.
DRE: Was Southern crime fiction like Jim Thompson an influence on the show?
SC: Absolutely. So was Truman Capote. To Kill a Mockingbird was an influence as well.
DRE: So you were a fan of noir?
SC: Id read a lot of Raymond Chandler and grew up in Los Angeles so I was. I love Chinatown and that kind of thing. I wouldnt say that Im a horror fan per se. I love psychological thriller; I love Rosemarys Baby because it seems so normal and real. Thats a movie that opens like a romantic comedy. For the first half hour you got these two young kids in New York and theres bright sun and no scary music. It gets slowly, insidiously darker and darker. That is the most frightening to me because it feels the most plausible.
DRE: You said you guys knew about the cancellation. Was it a friendly one?
SC: When we sold our show, we went out and pitched our show to Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS and they all wanted it. But there was a feeling amongst the studio, Universal, that people would buy it and not put it on because it was a campaign year. Bob Dole was running for president on an anti-violence campaign specific to television. The opening to our show is a little girl being hit over the head with a shovel and the girl breaks her neck. Its about as dark as you can go. But theres a logic to it and it all pays off; if you stick with the show, it doesnt feel gratuitous. But in 1996 Dole was saying, Turn off your television sets. The studio was afraid someone might buy it as a preemptive strike and then just not do it. So we went to the place that needed to take a risk the most and that year it was CBS. They were in terrible shape, all of their shows were dying, their demo was incredibly old, and they bought the show, put the show on, it got incredible reviews and good ratings. Halfway through the season, the president was fired and Les Moonves came in. It was the beginning of this turnaround in the network and Les immediately basically said, No, CBS, youve gone too far, too fast, the only way youre going to turn this network around is by building on the constituents you already have, and were going to do Touched by an Angel, not Touched by Satan. He didnt use those words, but that was the message loud and clear. To his credit, he really liked the show, but he also said, On CBS, you cannot do a show where your protagonist is the villain. You need a good guy. We argued that any good guy was going to pale next to Lucas Buck. So we had the doctor, Matt Crower [played by Jake Weber] who is a flawed hero. But Les wanted a square-jawed, good guy in there so in the classic spirit of shark jumping, we brought in another guy named Billy Peale, another doctor, who was supposed to go up against Buck. As predicted, he basically vanished in Bucks wake. Gary and Lucas were just too strong and charismatic. We realized that CBS plan for a good guy was not going to work so the show was probably not going to work on their network. Then just four or five episodes before the end of the season, we pretty much knew it was going to be it. So since we had beginning, middle and an end from the beginning, we decided to write the ending.
DRE: How much did the fans on the internet have to do with the DVD release?
SC: Its been a cult favorite for a long time so there are a lot of websites dedicated to it. Maybe the audience has grown via the web, I dont know. Unfortunately I would say commerce has driven the release of the DVD more than fan support. So many old television shows are being released on DVD and seeing if they can make a couple of nickels off it. In the case of Gothic, I think they know they have something maybe bigger on their hands because there's been a groundswell of support for it. I have a show this year that's treading similar territory and that's gotten a lot of positive attention as well. Gothic may benefit because of Invasion.
DRE: I have to go off on a tangent here. Did you write that Midnight Run sequel with Christopher McDonald?
SC: Yeah, I did.
DRE: I always wanted to see it. Is it any good?
SC: I honestly dont know if its any good. The script was well received at the time; I think I may have seen the movie once or just half of it. Chris is really good. Its a dark story. Its about a girl whos trying to kill herself and he is trying to stop her through the whole movie. Hes basically running in front of the bullet every time.
DRE: I love the first film.
SC: I dont know if it lived up to George Gallos movie, but it was one of my favorite movies and when they asked me to write it, I was thrilled. It was darkly funny.
DRE: Invasion just got picked up for a full season. There's also some backlash with critics saying, "Oh it's not doing as well this and that." What do you think of all that stuff?
SC: Well, it's not doing as well as Lost. That is a bar that's insanely high and I certainly never expected it to. My job, as far as I was concerned, was to make a good show and a show that would be competitive in the timeslot. We are doing that. We are winning in the demo every week and beating Law and Order. It's 40 to 50 percent better than they've ever done in the time slot and by that standard we're a complete homerun. Lost is a juggernaut. In some ways, being a companion to Lost is beneficial, because theoretically a lot of people are delivered. We're also not Lost 2, we're a whole other thing. Our pace is different, it's closer to Gothic in that its sort of a novel that has a beginning, middle and end. I do know where we're going so people will be rewarded if they pay attention.
DRE: Even though it has an end, could it go on for ten years?
SC: Ten might be a reach, but I could certainly go five. I plotted it through in a very broad way, but in year three or year four, there's no way we'll be making the same show, that I know for sure. It is an evolving thing. It's not like Law and Order where you're basically doing the same thing year after year. There's something to be said to that but as far as holding my interest, I need to keep moving.
DRE: Are you just concentrating on Invasion right now or do you have other things you're working on?
SC: I have many other things, but they're all on hold while I work on Invasion, which I'm exclusive to this year and next year. If Invasion's on a good footing, I may do some other stuff.
DRE: You were able to reinvent yourself from a teen idol to a TV writer/producer. What kept you from going off in a bad way?
SC: I was a teen idol and that has a short shelf life. Having seen my brother David go through it, I knew this was a sort of win the lotto kind of thing. Then it's over and you have to figure out what you want to do. I've been lucky in that I've been able to evolve and continue doing new stuff. I have other things I want to do as well. The singing into acting into writing was just a natural creative outgrowth. I like creative stuff, I like building stuff, I like houses and gardens. I like drawing pictures. I'm an entrepreneurial guy and I am lucky in that I was able to write. I always wanted to be a producer because that's the idea person. I think my music background helped in that. I have a sense of rhythm with dialogue that's musical. I didn't go to college, so it was from reading scripts, reading books and watching other writers.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 9 of 9 COMMENTS
googused:
I won a Shaum Cassidy album for selling the most candy bars in 6th grade. I was pissed. I wanted the Bay City Rollers, which was 2nd prize. 
ainur:
Wow. Nice interview.