CHICAGO (AP) — Kelsey Grammer makes it clear from
the start: He's not playing Mayor Richard M. Daley in the new dramatic series
"Boss" that debuts Friday night.
Sure, his mayor of Chicago talks about being in
charge for 22 years — the exact time Daley spent in office. For both men the
job is also the family business, with Grammer's Tom Kane following his
father-in-law and Daley his father. And if Grammer's character really wanted a
disguise that nobody would have recognized, he would have put on a Cubs hat and
not one bearing the logo of Daley's beloved White Sox.
"We were writing a show that is a derivative
of Shakespeare (and) he's got 400 years on the Daleys," Grammer said this
summer during filming in Chicago for the Starz drama (10 p.m. EDT).
Grammer told Daley as much, when the two met and he
"tried to reassure him that we had absolutely no intention of taking pot
shots at him and his father." And it is certainly true there is nothing
about Kane's mannerisms, eloquent manner of speaking or look that even hint at
Da Mayor.
At the same time, Daley and the hardball political
world in which he grew up and then came to dominate are such an integral part
of this story that Shakespeare's "Richard II" would have worked as a
title instead of "Boss," which, just happens to be the name of the
late Chicago columnist Mike Royko's famous biography of Daley's father.
Viewers around the country may not know the ins and
outs of Chicago politics, but they understand this is a city where power, clout
as they call it around here, is held in the hands of a few, from the days when
Al Capone ran his bootlegging empire here with the help of judges and
politicians he kept in his pocket to the better part of the last half century
when the mayor's last name was always Daley.
Tom Kane's power is helped, for example, by the
stories, legends, really, of how Daley's father had enough clout (not to
mention the dead people he supposedly got to the polls) to put John Kennedy in
the White House in 1960 and prompt Robert F. Kennedy eight years later to say
the endorsement of Daley, a mayor of a single city in the middle of the country
"means the ballgame" to his own chances at the presidency.
It is the same with the son who, though not the
national force as his father, could flex his own political muscles, as he did
when he got tired of talking about turning a lakefront airport into a nature
preserve and simply dispatched bulldozers in the dead of night to carve huge Xs
into the runway.
Even former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is
about to be sentenced for trying to sell or trade President Barack Obama's old
Senate seat, helps tell the story.
"The conceit of ours is to think of politics
as cleaner now," said Farhad Safinia, the show's creator and executive
producer. "Chicago shows it isn't."
"There's such a colorful backdrop to tell this
story that just exists in Chicago, so the city itself becomes kind of a
character," agreed Grammer. "We're borrowing Chicago as a kind of
magic kingdom (in which) you can believe is full of intrigue, betrayal, plot
twists, secret documents and all kinds of things."
Chicago's history, both that of recent years and
the distant past, are all thrown into the story. Grammer's character Tom Kane,
for example, in talking about digging up a cemetery to accommodate the
expansion of O'Hare International Airport — a real event — brings up Abraham
Lincoln and the Underground Railroad. Kane talks about how the city was built,
telling of figures such as the Rev. Jeremiah Porter, one of the city's first
reformers in the 1800s and Anton Cermak, a mayor in the 1930s.
"We have something occurring at night with
bulldozers (after) an edict from the mayor," said Safinia, who would not
elaborate. "I keep finding stuff like the Xs in the runway."
The filmmakers use many parts of the city, from the
most violent and struggling neighborhoods to the sparkling lakefront and the
jewel of that lakefront, Millennium Park.
"We went into neighborhoods that only people
in Chicago know about," said Dan Clancy, the show's production designer
who came up with some of the locations after talking to his father, a retired
Chicago firefighter.
If the first two episodes are any indication, the
show takes great pains to get the pronunciation of various names correct and
when they talk about neighborhoods, they put them where they should be and use
the shorthand that is commonly used, referring to the University of Illinois at
Chicago as UIC, for example. And unlike other Chicago-based shows that put
imagined addresses out in Lake Michigan, "Boss" was careful not to in
the early episodes.
The crucial opening scene when viewers learn the
meaning of the show's tag line — "Betrayal Starts From Within" —
takes place in a building that represents the city's gritty and sometimes
brutal past, complete with the hooks where slaughtered animals once hung that
can be seen over Grammer's shoulder. That scene in which Kane learns he has a
degenerative brain disease sets the tone for a story that is dark, certainly
darker than the norm for Grammer, who is best known playing Frasier Crane in
the comedies "Cheers" and "Frasier."
Grammer said he did not study Daley or any other
mayor, explaining that what he needed to know about Kane he already knew after
nearly three decades as a TV star.
"The requirement for this guy really is a
person who understands what it's like to be famous and I think in some ways
that made me perfectly suited to play this guy," said Grammer, whose
marriages, divorces and personal problems have long been the stuff of gossip
columns. "You need to understand a lifetime spent in the public
consciousness, much of it negative, a lot of it positive. That sort of came
along for the ride with me as an actor playing a mayor who is a very well-known
guy."
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
(AP Photo/Starz, Chuck Hodes)
