Ann Biderman writes about crime and the men who cannot stop themselves. Put her in a patrol car in hard Los Angeles daylight and she is worth anyone's evening; put her in a detectives' office and she writes the cop show you already know.
Fi1m perspective
Every episode of Southland opens the same way: a freeze-frame, a dry voice telling us what the man in the picture is about to learn, and then a patrol car pulling out into hard Los Angeles daylight. That is Ann Biderman's method in miniature. She tells you the lesson, then makes you ride along while it is learned, and the riding is where she is good. Nine regulars, seven episodes in its first season, produced by John Wells, and for long stretches it looked like nothing else on American network television.
She came to it late. For most of the 1990s she wrote screenplays, and the films that carry her name are thrillers with a damaged man near the centre: Copycat (1995), Primal Fear (1996), Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997). Public Enemies (2009) is the last of them. In between she wrote episodes of NYPD Blue (1994), a programme we rate higher than anything she has made herself, though our review does not single out her contribution. What it does note is a rough style laid over conventional plotting, and that description follows her.
Southland is two programmes stitched together. One is a patrol car with Michael Cudlitz and Ben McKenzie in it, handheld, almost unscored, shot in hard daylight; Biderman spent months riding with LAPD officers before writing it, and it shows. The other is a detectives' office, and there she writes the cop show you have seen. Regina King's Lydia Adams is the exception. In the interview rooms the programme finally stops moving and lets her listen, and her stillness moved us more than any of the shootings did, because everyone else in it is in a hurry and she has decided not to be.
Ray Donovan (2013) took the same instincts to a Hollywood fixer. She created it and ran it for two seasons, then stepped down, and we have not reviewed it, so we will say only that the subject is squarely hers. She once said, "I seem to love writing about crime and tortured men," and there is no reason to doubt her. The men have been well served. It is the women, on the evidence of Lydia Adams, who get her best scenes, which is worth remembering the next time she announces a tortured man.
Biography
Ann Biderman is an American film and television writer and producer. She attended the University of Southern California film school and worked as a screenplay reader at United Artists before beginning her writing career.
Biderman wrote episodes of the series NYPD Blue (1994), for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Her feature screenplays include Copycat (1995), Primal Fear (1996), Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997) and Public Enemies (2009). She created the series Southland (2009–2013), serving as executive producer and writer, and created Ray Donovan (2013), for which she also wrote and produced.
