Boston Public Doesn’t Add Up

Teachers vs. students in  Boston Public

David E. Kelley’s latest television drama might do for teachers what ER did for doctors: catapult them to fame without worrying about reality

By Paul Noble

I’m a teacher. But when I heard that the Fox Television Network was set to premiere Boston Public, a drama about a high school, I was a little leery. I found myself thinking about TV cops, doctors and lawyers. Those professions, after all, have long been the obsession of our small screen culture. And for all its efforts to entertain, the industry has rarely painted a realistic picture of any of them. Flattering perhaps, but hardly satisfying to their real world counterparts.

I wondered, for example, how many times a real cop was inclined to spit in the general direction of his television after witnessing an episode of Starsky & Hutch, or some equally absurd representation of law enforcement. Of course, there are consultants on most of these ‘reality” shows today. The former lawman who now advises the folks on NYPD Blue, for example, is said to keep them fairly honest. But in the 60’s and 70’s?

My father is an attorney, and I can still remember his invective every time Perry Mason mishandled a case. “You can’t do that!” my dad would say. We pretended to be indignant, too. “It’s ridiculous! No judge would allow that,” he’d go on, “you just can’t.”

A friend who works in a Chicago emergency room loves ER. But not because it’s realistic. “Are you kidding?” she says, “If I had to work that hard, the IV would be in my arm. The worst Saturday night of my career is just a typical Tuesday on ER.”

You understand my concern. If a dismal few, among the myriad Hollywood offerings, had approached reality in those three fields, how badly might we teachers be disgraced by Fox? Television has had far fewer opportunities to capture the world of school. You can’t even really count Welcome Back, Kotter, can you? Saved by the Bell wasn’t even good enough for primetime. I think you might have to go all the way back to Room 222 to find Boston Public’s creative antecedent. Karen Valentine. Eek.

The only teaser I’d seen for Boston Public was the end of a commercial in which a student journalist approaches two young female teachers in the school’s corridor. She tells one that she’s been voted The Teacher Boys Most Want to Sleep With. Much to the other teacher’s chagrin, she is seventh on the list. Nice. So, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, I sat down in front of my set with a notebook, a pen, and more than a few qualms.

(OK. Dramatically speaking, now would be the time to tell you that I was wrong. Dead wrong. I had condescendingly underestimated David E. Kelley’s ability to recreate the intensity of The Practice, or the whimsy of Ally McBeal. Yup ” now would be the perfect time. Alas, this review is only about drama.)

On Boston Public, reality quickly becomes a moot point. As I watch, I begin to feel silly for holding Kelley to such a standard. The first hint that my hopes were unfounded is the lack of a single Boston accent in the bunch. Am I nit-picking? More to the point, almost nothing that happens on the show is cousin to anything I’ve seen in a dozen years of teaching. But let’s face it, Kelley isn’t interested in moving real teachers to empathetic tears. He wants people to watch.

And they may. Boston Public is as sensational and ” uh ” titillating as any Fox Family (Read: Fox Kids) could want. Early in the pilot, Fyvush Finkel, who plays old guard history teacher Harvey Lipschutz, sends student vixen Dana Poole (Sarah Thompson) out of class for not wearing a brassiere. Next week, the ads promise, all the girls will be shedding their bras in protest. Swell. Is it sweeps week already?

The plot is algebraically convoluted, meshing every character in some significant way with at least two others. Harry Senate (Nicky Katt), a young, hunky teacher who bestows the “F” that makes the star running back ineligible for the big game, is blackmailed into changing the grade when Dana, the unhaltered vixen, threatens to reveal their own extracurricular activities. Clearly, this is not your mother’s Room 222.

Several plot points, however, are hackneyed enough to have been taken directly from those 30-year-old scripts: the football coach who thinks winning is everything, the bully who inexplicably stuffs a smaller boy in a locker, and the administrator who pressures an attractive teacher for a date. Even the closing montage intersperses slow-motion scenes from the football game with images of each faculty member in varying states of introspection and distress.

Despite the banality of the plot, a few of the characters here are complex enough to bear fruit down the line, if Kelley can think of anything interesting for them to do. A clinically depressed teacher (if she lasts until next week), the conflicted principal (Chi McBride), and the socially inept disciplinarian (Anthony Heald, disciplinarian to Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs) - all show promise for breaking the mold of TV high schools past. Quirky characters are, after all, supposed to be Kelley’s forte.

But we had best be wary of where Kelley’s imagination may lead. In addition to the shameless bra fiasco, the pilot’s most improbable scene sends Senate into his classroom of reprobates - the ‘dungeon”- with a gun on his hip. Fed up with their incessant disrespect, he lauds the simplicity of the word “gun,” demanding they chant it, until he fires off four rounds, sending students diving under their desks. After the commercial break, we learn they were only blanks, and hear the principal excuse his actions as “overzealous.” Columbine not withstanding, Senate remains in his position without so much as a suspension. Next week, however, we can be sure that his students, if not their breasts, will be at attention.

Mr. Kelley is sliced bread in Hollywood these days. The Practice and Ally McBeal won the Best Drama and Best Comedy Emmys respectively last year. Thomas Schlamme, the director he hired to shoot the pilot, is a veteran of both ER and The West Wing, both critically acclaimed shows which rely heavily on the Steadicam, as will this show, naturally tracking students and teachers through hallways, down stairs and into classrooms and offices.

Despite the pedigree, Boston Public’s pilot doesn’t pass muster. When it comes to a test of TV veracity, the difference between courtrooms and classrooms is that nearly every viewer has spent a lot of time in a real classroom; it doesn’t take a teacher to sniff out a phony one. Nonetheless, David E. Kelley might do well to hire on an experienced teacher as a six-figure consultant. I bet I could find him one.

Paul Noble teaches English and acting at Oak Park and River Forest High School, outside Chicago.

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