Costco Connection - September 2012

arts & entertainment TV on DVD

Left, Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin in Homeland; below, some of the cast of Parks and Recreation; lower, a very Modern Family.

Great shows ripe for keeping

SEPTEMBER IS TRADITIONALLY a time for new shows to premiere on television, as well as for veteran hits to return with new episodes. At Costco, it’s time to celebrate pre-aired programming worth keeping. Here, we take you behind the scenes with the creators of three great award-winning shows: Modern Family, Homeland and Parks and Recreation.

come from the personal lives of the writers and cast. “It’s a known thing,” Lloyd says. “You come to be a writer on Modern Family, you’re going to be expected to tell us your most humiliating personal family anecdotes, and they will probably be presented for the amusement of millions.

“We’ve got a lot to explore yet.”

—Steve Fisher

Modern Family

“We have this lucky thing, which is a show that works—for what reason we’re not completely sure because there is no one reason,” says Costco member Christopher Lloyd, co-creator, with Steven Levitan, of the ABC series Modern Family. On the day The Connection spoke with Lloyd, the third season had just earned 14 Emmy nominations, the most for any single comedy in the 2012 awards.

“When we finally decided to do a family
show … we thought, well, there really isn’t
one typical American family anymore,” recalls
Lloyd. “So then we thought maybe we could
make a triangle and catch it that way. So we
have one sort of traditional stay-at-home
mom, working Dad, three kids; then we have
another kind of family, which is the divorcé
on his second wife; and then we have a third
kind, which is the gay couple.”
They made them all part of the same fam-
ily to make “an interesting family tree.”
“You’re dead in the water if you don’t have
a good cast,” says Lloyd. “But that was the area
where we were most under a lucky star.... I
mean, that’s just one of those lucky things that
has to happen to have a hit show.... Great peo-
ple being available to us and then having won-
derful chemistry amongst them.”
It’s no secret that the show’s storylines

50 ;e Costco Connection SEPTEMBER 2012 The Costco Connection Find these and other memorable TV series on DVD at your local warehouse.

Homeland

In its thrilling first season on Showtime, Homeland, which explores the tension-fraught relationship between a mentally unstable government agent and a recently returned war hero who may actually be a terrorist, earned 11 Emmy nominations. But the show’s greatest praise, at least in the estimation of series producer Alex Gansa, comes from the Oval Office itself, where President Barack Obama has counted himself the show’s biggest—and certainly most powerful—fan.

“We have the president’s
Rolling Stone cover on the wall of our writers’
room, where he talks so generously about our
show,” Gansa says, incredulously. “Every time
I leave the office, I just shake my head and
think, ‘We cannot disappoint the commander
in chief.’ ”
With season one now available on DVD
and season two set to premiere next month,
the white-knuckle thriller is unlikely to let
down POTUS, thanks to its riveting charac-
ters and its storytelling rich with corkscrew
plot twists and breathtaking showdowns.
Gansa, who cut his teeth as a writer/pro-
ducer on The X-Files and the similarly themed
24, knows from generating relentless sus-
pense. Still, he cautions that Homeland is
anything but the continuing adventures of
24’s Jack Bauer.