Stephen J. Cannell

Well, this is a really depressing piece of news: TV writer and producer Stephen J. Cannell has died of complications associated with melanoma. He was only 69.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEPf9BIf_hM

Cannell wore two hats: as a TV writer and a TV mogul. Somewhat unusually, he didn’t give up the former after he took on the second job. Usually when a writer moves into producing a lot of shows, he’ll mostly give up writing individual scripts – Aaron Spelling, Dick Wolf, and so on. But Cannell continued to write scripts for most of his own shows, and he’d continue writing individual episodes for shows into their fourth and fifth seasons sometimes. The reason he picked the famous “typewriter” logo for his company was that he wanted to make it clear that he was still primarily a writer. Just look at the list of individual episodes he wrote, and this list isn’t exactly complete.

And writing was what he was best at. If you watch almost any of his shows except mid-period Rockford Files and some Wiseguy arcs, you’ll find a lot of unevenness. But if you watch an episode written by Stephen J. Cannell, you’re probably in for a good time. Some writers know how to make the most limiting forms seem fresh, and Cannell was one of those writers with an exceptional ability to put a fresh twist on the most basic conventions of episodic network drama. His dialogue was something I always noticed from an early age: it was perfect TV dialogue, never too verbose but not dripping with clichés either, and injecting humor at unexpected times without killing the mood. It’s stylized dialogue in the best sense, punchier and pithier than the way real people talk, but not too “writerly” to make us think of the person typing it out, rather than the character saying it. (One example I always like is from the pilot of Stingray: “You do that on purpose, don’t you? You love these broken-field conversations. I make these diving grabs and come up with grass on my chin and you love it.”) Even if the show wasn’t very good – and, as showrunner, he has to be faulted for that – the actual scripting could be solid coming from him. I remember watching Hunter in syndication, and the first season was generally pretty awful but there was one episode which had much smarter dialogue, a somewhat unusual structural idea (the murderer turns out to be the guy everyone assumes is the murderer) and a genuine sense of humour about itself (Hunter getting his purse stolen and so on). It turned out to be the only episode of the series that Cannell wrote himself. He was just better than most of his staff writers.

The other Stephen J. Cannell trademark is that most of his shows, good and bad, were re-examinations of their own genre; he was one of the first creators of “meta” TV. The Rockford Files was about him trying to create a private detective who did the opposite of what most TV P.I.s did – and to back up the point, he wrote two episodes with Tom Selleck as Lance White, the ultimate spoof of the conventional TV PI. Rockford was a guy who had genuine money problems and wanted to get paid if possible; hurt his hand when he punched somebody; needed a lawyer to get him off when he did something illegal; and couldn’t count on his underworld friend to back him up in a crisis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6PO14J_pW4

(From “Chicken Little Is a Little Chicken,” written by Cannell)