Shawn Ryan, the creator of The Shield, has brought us a lot of excellent television through the years. But speaking at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour yesterday, he said it was only now that he was ready for something on the scale of Last Resort , the exciting new series he's created alongside Dead Like Me's Karl Gajdusek - Which just so happens to be my personal favorite among all the new fall dramas.

Loading

Ryan remarked, “When we pitched this to [network president] Paul Lee and his cohorts at ABC last summer or fall, I described it as the show that I couldn't make five years ago because I didn't possess the skill set and that I felt like the shows I had done up to this point, the ongoing serialization of The Shield, combined with the production value of Chicago Code, combined with this buddy thing that we had done in Terriers, that all this stuff sort of got me to this place where I felt I could do something this ambitious.”Last Resort tells the story of what happens when the commander of a nuclear submarine refuses orders to fire – in the midst of very suspicious and suspect circumstances – ultimately bringing the sub and its crew to a small island, where they maintain a very uneasy relationship with the locals, while trying to decide what their next move is – all while in a standoff with their own country.Said Ryan, “It's not like I didn't want to do something of a huge scale like this before. But this is a really difficult show from a storytelling standpoint, from a production standpoint, to have the production in Hawaii and to manage that. It's a big budget, very huge, monstrous scope show that I don't think I would have been capable of doing before. So it's not like my ambitions have grown, but my feelings about my capability to live up to those ambitions has grown, I think.”As for what to expect from Last Resort week to week, Ryan noted, “We go in a lot of different directions. You know, there's going to be a Tom Clancy aspect to this show, the way there was in the pilot, every episode. But TV is about relationships.”Ryan elaborated, “TV is about character and so it will come characters first. We've described this, Karl and I, not as a show about war, but it's a show about people in a time of crisis. So in the same way that Casablanca and Gone with the Wind and Reds and Doctor Zhivago were personal character stories about people in the middle of crisis, that's what we're hoping to do in a weekly series.”The sub’s commander, Marcus (Andre Braugher) is supported in his decision by second in command Sam (Scott Speedman), and Ryan revealed, “We're going to delve into what happens between Sam and Marcus. They're in lockstep at the beginning of this pilot. Will they stay in lockstep? Will they become opposed to each other?”Then there’s the ship’s third in command, Grace (Daisy Betts), the daughter of an Admiral (Bruce Davison). Said Ryan, “Grace is a trailblazer. You know, only recently has the U.S. government allowed women on submarines, so her character is a trailblazer. Can she live up to that? Will she be viewed as a creature of nepotism, or will she prove herself amongst her crew? I could go on in eight, ten more of these storylines between these characters. So it will be a character piece.”Ryan, who worked on series like Nash Bridges and Angel before creating The Shield stressed, “There's not going to be a ‘monster of the week’ kind of situation, but there will be high stakes. They find themselves in a very precarious situation. There will be three kinds of threat that we deal with, first from the outside world. America's not happy that the submarine is sitting parked with nuclear weapons aimed at it. Other countries are going to want to get involved in some way. So there will be external threats. There's threats on the island, as represented by Julian Serrat, our character who was the local strongman, who's not thrilled at the arrival of these people. And then probably most interesting to me is the internal threats.” When it comes to the crew of the sub, Ryan said, “They're not all going to think alike. Some of them are going to be solidly with Marcus and Sam. Some are not. What do they want to do? What threats will emerge from within that group? So we feel like we have lots of stories to tell, and any one episode is not going to be like another. This isn't going to be the kind of show where every episode feels the same.”Speaking to the motivations of the main characters, co-creator Karl Gajdusk remarked, “We believe that our crew and our captain and XO are patriots, and are patriots to the end of the pilot. And they get this very questionable order and… You know, we talked to several commanders of submarines in preparing for this, and they do what should be done, which is question an order. Before you know it, they're on the run. This is only to say that it's not the United States as a whole that has chased them out. It is a portrait of an executive gone wrong, of what could happen if the checks and balances in our system went off the rails.”