John McNamara, an Executive Producer for USA’s In Plain Sight, recently took the time to answer some questions for the media. This is one of my favorite shows, so this was a thrill, as it has been to talk to several people from the show recently. 🙂
Can you tell us how you started to work on In Plain Sight?
J. McNamara – Slowly, with a lot of humility, because it’s a show that I really, really liked a lot. And so I want to be very careful not to come in and change things that were working and things that I was a fan of and I wanted to make sure that that was not the mandate. Because I would have had no interest in coming in and just like making them into like super spies or talking gorillas, or the future, whatever kind of changes one makes in a show that can be really dismantling to the show, I just wanted to make sure that USA didn’t want to make those changes and they did not. They really loved the show the way it was. They just wanted everything to be as good as it had been. If there were areas where it could be better, make it better. That was kind of how I started to work, if that’s an answer to your question, was to really look at what worked, which was most of the show.
The main reason I joined the show was Mary McCormack. I really love her as an actress. I think the character is like a handmade suit fit for her. So a lot of my work initially was to get to know her character, drill down deep into that character and the other characters to try and make this as character based a show as possible, given the fact that it’s also sort of a procedural, sort of a comedy, sort of a drama and then to figure out how, with the other writers, to balance all of those various elements. So the work began carefully and is now, of course, proceeding in a breakneck pace since we’re shooting.
More of the interview after the jump! Continue reading
