At Humanitas Event, Producer Defends TV Portrayals of Evil

Does a defense of explicit violence in television dramas make sense at an event shepherded by a Catholic priest and devoted to rewarding creative, enriching TV scripts?

Producer Tom Fontana outlined an apologia for brutal portrayals in his keynote talk Thursday at the 24th annual Humanitas Prize ceremonies that didn’t cause many ripples. In fact, the message bore some resemblance to the Humanitas goal of encouraging writing honestly about life with stories that illuminate the search for meaning and dignity.

“We owe it to our audience not to flinch when we try to portray evil,” said Fontana, executive producer of NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street” and the creator of the HBO series “Oz,” a stark depiction of prison violence.

Besides showing how violence affects victims and their families, “we also have to understand what the effect is on the perpetrator,” Fontana said. “A man kills another man: How does he--how can he--become a human being again?

“We have to figure out why [evil] exists and where it exists, so that we can come underneath it and find some kind of hope,” Fontana told those attending a luncheon audience at the Sheraton Universal Hotel. “We deal with the sacred and the profane--the human personality in all its diversity.”

In his invocation / homily following jokes by emcee Charlie Hauck and before Fontana’s talk, Humanitas Prize founder Ellwood Kieser, a Paulist priest, reflected on what he called the “two complementary sides of the human equation”--laughter and tragedy.

“We need to laugh because sometimes it seems laughter is the only way we can bear the pain, disappointment and death that often characterizes our lives,” said Kieser, a television and film producer whose Pacific Palisades-based operation also runs television writing workshops attended by 1,000 writers last year.

“We also love tragic stories,” he said in his prayer, “because they tell us that we are not alone in our suffering, that our pain has meaning, that we can use it to grow into the deeply loving beings You made us to be.”

Disagreeing with Fontana’s defense of strong TV violence, Ted Baehr, who publishes the conservative evangelical Movieguide magazine, said after the awards show that instead of going below the violence to find values, “I think all you find is more degradation and evil.” Baehr contended that stories of emotional suffering can highlight values but that “you can’t plumb the depths of violence and expect to get good out of it.”

Fontana acknowledged that every week someone dies on “Homicide,” and that “on ‘Oz’ we do things I don’t want to talk about.”

One year ago, the HBO program was termed “flat-out the most violent and graphically sexual series on TV” by The Times’ television critic, Howard Rosenberg. “By contrast, it makes ABC’s ‘NYPD Blue’ look and sound like dancing Barney,” Rosenberg wrote.

Steven Bochco, whose “NYPD Blue” was nominated for a Humanitas Prize in the 90-minute category but did not win, said he was delighted that his program is seen as relatively tame five years after it opened to criticism for violent themes and rough language. “I’m glad we opened doors for people and that everybody understands today that it’s OK,” he said.

Bochco said that Fontana “rather eloquently said what all of us say”--that “morals of any given story will ultimately emerge if you tell your story properly” without concern for a balanced point of view “but with every concern for the logic and consequences of behavior.”

Fontana, a past Humanitas Prize winner, said that when he and a partner were writing “St. Elsewhere” scripts years ago, they would annually try to write at least one episode that would win, or at least get nominated for, a Humanitas award.

Yet, “every time I had a script with an agenda or some kind of moral prerogative I wanted to preach about, the drama always seemed to flatten out,” he said. “Eventually, we finally realized we shouldn’t be writing ‘about human values’ or issues; we should be writing about human beings and the struggle of living.”

Television writers do it on a weekly basis, Fontana said. “This year, we watched Murphy Brown struggle with breast cancer, we watched Father Ray struggle with God, and we watched the Frasier family, well, struggle with each other,” he said.

Coincidentally, writer Marilyn Suzanne Miller, a breast cancer survivor herself, won the $10,000 Humanitas Prize for an episode of CBS’ “Murphy Brown.” And priest-writer Bill Cain won the $15,000 prize for an episode of ABC’s controversy-stirring “Nothing Sacred,” which beat out nominated shows from “Homicide” and “ER.”