Sooth Sears
Former Xena writer and co-executive producer Steven Sears discusses his contribution to the show and reveals what other projects he's turned his hand to in recent years. Interview by Paul Simpson and Ruth Thomas.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 24
Steven L. Sears was brought on board Xena: Warrior Princess by Babs Greyhosky, Supervising Producer on the first six episodes of the show, as a freelance writer, and by the fifth year had risen to the heights of co-executive producer.
Despite his experience and notoriety as a writer/producer of series television. Sears never had any intention of pursuing that career path. “When I got out of college and came out to Los Angeles, I was an actor,” Sears admits. “I kind of fell into writing. I’ve never taken a course on writing; I’ve never read a book on writing - maybe my scripts reflect that! I regard myself as a storyteller, an entertainer.
“My storytelling comes from the improvisation that I used to do in college,” he explains. “I started writing audition scenes that I could do for casting directors, and after a while, people started borrowing my scenes and using them in showcases. One day a casting director said that I ought to try writing a script. I’d never tried that, and at first I said no. Then I figured, ‘Who was going to know?’ And over two nights I wrote a really horrible script.
“However, I enjoyed doing it because I could act all the characters while I was writing it. So I thought I’d write another one, and a little over a year later I was on the Riptide set as a writer! I didn’t think I was a writer - I thought they would figure that out and I would get thrown out of the company! So that was about 16 or 17 years ago.”
After that, Sears contributed scripts to a wide variety of shows, including The A-Team, The Father Dowling Mysteries and Swamp Thing, before finding a niche in the fantasy world of Xena. He worked on the show for five-and-a-half seasons, contributing some of the series’ most highly regarded scripts. His first episode was the pivotal Dreamworker, which laid down much of the dynamic for the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle, and each of his episodes has been central to Xena and Gabrielle’s ongoing journey.
Sears believes that it is vital that the characters in his scripts deal with problems that are not simply related to their own lives, but ones to which the audience can relate. “One of the things I’ve noticed on almost every show that I’ve done is that it is important to have the latitude of going across the spectrum,” he says. “It was most noticeable on Xena - the show could have been tossed aside as merely 'swords and sorcery’, while Sheena could easily have just been regarded as ‘Tarzan with breasts’! But if you deal with real characters and have them deal with real issues, and don’t always have an easy answer for the issue, you can do just about anything. Think about our ordinary lives - we run into these kinds of issues every day. Are we superheroes? No. But we still have to deal with these issues.”
The writer relishes the compliment paid to him by one Xena fan who told him that “no one can fake left and go right better than I can. The audience has to be challenged a bit,” he maintains. “They can’t be handed things on a silver platter. If you do, they start changing channels. I like to fool people. I like to play a bit of psychology with the audience. I feed them just enough information, sometimes in just the way they expect to be fed, take them along a certain road, and then turn in a different direction.”
Not that that approach is always popular with the ‘Powers That Be’. “Studios are afraid of that,” Sears notes. “They don’t like it because they think the audience will get confused. I disagree with that one hundred per cent. I think the audience loves that. Think about the plot of The Sixth Sense. I love that kind of twist, and it’s really hard to fool me because I’m so good at doing it myself! I got to that part of the movie and jumped up off my couch and went, ‘Yes, you got me! That was so good!' I like that kind of feeling, and I think the audience loves that too. It’s not enough to make them feel like idiots, but they do think, ‘Wow!’
“The reason I think audiences like that kind of trickery is that if they go back and look at it again, they realise that every clue was there for them, but they were misled. It.was just a magic trick. I’m doing everything with this hand, but really I’m doing it with that hand. It was all there. I love writing a script and getting to what I call the, 'Ooh, ya’ moment, when the audience goes, ‘Ooh, ya’. I want to lead them in a certain way so that they think they know what’s coming. They’re still finding it interesting, they know what’s around the corner, but then ‘Boom!’ That’s not what happens. And when they look back they realise that I gave them all the information all along, but they simply weren’t looking for it.”
Sears also feels it’s a mistake in television to overcomplicate a plot with too many references to previous episodes, as this can confuse the casual viewer. “You have to give the audience enough information that they come back because they care about these people,” he explains. “But at the same time when someone new tunes in, and one character makes a reference to another, you have to make sure that it is in context so that the audience can understand where that other character fits into the story. They don’t necessarily have to have seen the episode about that character. So it’s a little bit of flavour that hearkens back, but it doesn't stop the show and beg a question.”
Sears feels that this is a trap Xena fell into in later episodes. “The characters and the shows became so serialised that you couldn't watch one episode without knowing what had happened through the entire season, and it was really difficult for the casual viewer to just tune in,” he remarks. “About three or four months ago I was having dinner with Ted Raimi, who plays Joxer, and I hadn’t seen an episode of Xena for about a year. I’d just been way too busy. I asked Ted, ‘How’s Joxer doing?’ And he said, ‘He’s dead!’ I said, ‘Oh, he’s dead.’ ‘No,’ Ted replied very seriously, ‘He’s dead dead!’”
Sears eventually realised that Raimi meant Joxer really was permanently deceased. “So I said, 'How did that happen?’ ‘Oh, Xena’s daughter killed me,’ he said. ‘Xena’s daughter killed you? She’s just a little girl!’ ‘No, that was 25 years later - they’re in suspended animation...’ So he was telling me what had been going on, and I was just sitting there dumbstruck…”
Having been on the outside of the series, Sears can therefore now sympathise with viewers who were confused by some of his episodes. “I know there were people who tuned in to see the last part of Sacrifice at the end of the third season who were just totally lost. It had become very complicated.”
Sears admits that this is an area in which he and colleagues Rob Tapert and R.J. Stewart often disagreed, although he agrees that it was one way of avoiding the ‘third season block’. When a show has been running for three years, there’s a danger that audiences will believe they have seen every possible permutation of the plot, and switch over - unless something drastic is done. “I have to give credit to Rob Tapert for this,” he says of Xena. “We got to our third season, and he said, ‘Let’s not fall into a slump - let’s change it!’ And boy did we change it! We changed it big time, but we certainly didn’t end up in a slump.”
Both Xena and Sheena feature strong female leads who develop plausible relationships with the people around them. Sears is well aware of the ways in which these scenes are best sold to the public - and, more importantly, the network. “In general, especially in syndication, a character does not sell the series,” he says. “When you’ve got 100 channels and people are flipping through them, one character scene is not going to stop someone switching over. But an explosion or a half-naked woman will stop someone from switching over. What I try to point out to the executives is in order to get the audience to programme the VCR to come back next week, you need the characters.
“Universal were very good about that - as long as we gave them the eye candy, we could go ahead and flesh out the characters. You can have two characters talking about their problems in front of a fireplace; you can have two characters talking about the same issues in a hot tub. Which one do you think the studio will go for? It’s the situation you put them in. I can have the same two people talking about the same issues on a raging rapid river - there’s your eye candy, with the character development in the middle of it.”
Sears still finds he gets caught up in online Xena fandom. “Even now, someone will jog my memory and I’ll give them part of the background story we never told,” he says. A recent example relates to the character of Amarice, played by Jennifer Sky. “There was a whole background to Amarice that I wanted to use in an episode, but when I left the series, Bob [Kurtzman] and Alex [Orci] came in and changed it completely. In fact, I don’t even know if they were aware of it, although I’m sure that R.J. and Rob told them what my plan was. They made it completely different.
“Amarice kept referring back to when she was, ‘With her tribe’,” he explains. “In their version, Bob and Alex had her confess that she was never an Amazon; she only wanted to be one, and therefore because she had always wanted to be one, she always pretended to be one. There’s an interesting dynamic to that, but my version was completely different. My background for Amarice was that she belonged to a tribe that was very Spartan in outlook. They believed in discipline - that from the moment you were born, you were trained to use weapons. You were taught discipline. You weren’t allowed to be a child, and you weren’t allowed to show emotion.
“Through some kind of miscommunication, her tribe got into a war with the Horde, and in a scene that I actually wrote of her telling the tale, she and her mother were the last two Amazons in the tribe fighting on a cliff overlooking a river. Under their code, if you did not die fighting, you were dishonoured. If you lived through a fight, or if you ran away, you were dishonoured. Amarice said that at a certain moment she turned, somebody hit her in the back, and she fell into the water. As she was going downstream, she looked back and saw her mother smile at her - and then her mother was killed. So she lived with the guilt that her mother pushed her into the water to save her, and she therefore couldn’t die with honour. That was my whole background for her, and I wanted to play on that.”
Sears’ experience with Xena fans stood him in good stead when it came to working on Sheena. “Before we started shooting, I went to talk to the publicity department at Columbia, and they said, ‘Tell us about Sheena’,” he recalls. “About two hours later they stopped me and said I was the most prepared producer they had ever run into! I said, ‘I’ve just finished doing five years of Xena conventions. I have to answer all of these questions from the fans all the time! I have to know my characters and my people, and know their faults.’”
Sears also admires the way in which the fans have made the characters of Xena and Gabrielle live on in new ways. “One of the interesting things about Xena has been the ‘uber’ fiction - taking characterisations of Xena and Gabrielle and putting them in totally different situations,” he notes. “They’re not the same characters, but their personality dynamics are.” Sears believes that this is one way in which the show could continue. “Rob Tapert and I did have lunch a while back, and we mulled around how we could possibly do a spin-off on a series with those characters, without it being the exact same series. I have no idea what the result of that would be!”
For the moment, Sears is firmly focused on the adventures of Gena Lee Nolin as Sheena. That doesn’t mean that the Xena universe isn’t regularly present in his thoughts, however - Babs Greyhosky is his co-executive producer on Sheena, while Alexandra (Aphrodite) Tydings has made an appearance in the second season of the show, and Sears hopes she will return if the series is picked up for a third year.
“I talked to Karl [Caesar/Cupid] Urban about possibly getting him in an episode, and Kevin [Ares] Smith as well,” he reveals. “But transporting them from New Zealand is a pretty expensive venture. I’ve also talked to Bruce [Autolycus] Campbell about the possibility of directing some episodes, and he's certainly open to doing some. I wanted to get him in the first 22, but the scheduling didn't work out correctly. Plus I talked to Ted [Joxer] Raimi about the possibility of him doing an episode - that would be a lot of fun. Bob [Salmoneus] Trebor’s another one that I’m keeping in mind...”
While Xena is never far from his thoughts, Sears is currently very much enjoying working on Sheena. “The interesting thing about the show is that there’s a wealth of stories to tell,” he says. “Everything has happened and is happening in Africa. It’s not a country - it’s an entire continent. It’s the birthplace of civilisation; it’s the birthplace of Mankind. They’ve had civil wars, revolution, world wars, human conflict, racial strife... That's not even touching ecological aspects. We can take small stories and turn them into Sheena stories which have impact.”
But if he were to have the opportunity to turn his creative talents back to the Xenaverse, Sears would be happy to devise further adventures set in the Ancient World. “Xena offered an opportunity to create a completely new world,” he points out.
“If that world ever continued in another venue, I could come up with so many more stories for it.”