- Ken Olin, Patricia Wettig, ME, Peter Horton
I was preparing for my interview with Ken Olin to talk about the first season DVD release of thirtysomething, which wasn’t a difficult thing to do since I had been an avid fan of the show when it aired on ABC from 1987-1991. I also had met Olin years ago when I worked at Sony Pictures Television and he did the L.A. Doctors series for CBS and he was always a very friendly and generous guy. While the thirtysomething DVD release had been held up for years primarily due to the clearances on the music used in the show, who knew back in the 80s that television shows would live on beside the occasional rerun on late night TV! So to get the chance to talk about a show I used to religiously watch with my college buddies every Tuesday night was very surreal, to say the least.
As another journalist wrapped up his interview here in New York City, I waited in the hall when I heard more voices than Olin’s. I thought I heard Patricia Wettig’s unmistakable voice (she played Nancy on the show and is Olin’s wife in real-life, as if you didn’t know) and yet another male voice. It was then my turn and I was called into the room and there were Olin, Wettig and Peter Horton, who played Gary, the hip college English professor on the show. Olin remembered me, we caught up for a few minutes and then launched into the interview. While I like to think I maintained my composure, there was a a lot of dancing around and screaming going on inside of me as I asked the three actors how it felt for this iconic show to come back to life on DVD.
Jim Halterman: Are you surprised at how people are responding to thirtysomething now after all these years?
Patricia Wettig: It’s interesting…
Ken Olin: The New York Times is doing exactly what they did twenty years ago where they refuse to use the lower-case ‘t,’ which I love. The New York Times is the only one that was pretentious enough to not actually publish the title the way that the title was aired, which I find bizarre. Do they capitalize e e cummings? What do they do? But the New York Times writes about it as embracing it…
PW: …and yet not…
KO: …as something that’s worthy of being talked about.
Peter Horton: Part of the response to this, and I do sense a response to it, but I think there is a logistic reality because it’s probably the last of its kind. The fact that it took so long for the DVD to come out. This is one of the last times this will be an event because every series, as soon as they’re done, they’re on DVD.
KO: Maybe because it’s taken our generation this long to learn how to use them. [laughs] It’s perfect timing.
- The cast of thirtysomething
PH: There was this sort of national thought in the back – way back – of people’s minds as to why hasn’t this show come out on DVD and all of a sudden here we are.
KO: It did rerun so it wasn’t that it hasn’t been at all available. It was so odd that it took so long and there is a group of people that really are interested, I think. There’s also a group of people in the business that are interested because a lot of the young writers that I’ve worked with that are in their late 30s to mid 40s [and] they grew up as writers watchingthirtysomething and that was very eye opening to them as young writers as a possibility that you could write for television in a way that felt personal and literary and so that’s meaningful and has probably sustained a certain amount of interest. Michael Morris, somebody I work with, found this thing online that said the reason that the DVDs didn’t come out is because I bought all the episodes of thirtysomething and I was refusing to release them on DVD.
PW: That’s how powerful he is!
KO: I couldn’t believe it. ‘I didn’t want anyone to see it!’ [laughs]
PW: Our kids can watch it for the first time. Our kids were too little…our son [Cliff Olin] is a staff writer on Brothers & Sisters and our daughter is an actress and our daughter once watched about two episodes that we had on an old…what is it called? V…
KO/PH: VHS?
PW: Yes, one of those! [laughs] That’s all we had. So they’ve never seen them. I’m interested to see
how my son will respond to those. I don’t know if he’ll watch it or not but we’ll see. It’s interesting.
PH: My daughter is much younger but it’s way off the radar screen but they’ll see me with that haircut. They haven’t seen any episodes yet but they’ve seen pictures.
JH: Except for a few shows like Brothers and Sisters, there are so many procedural shows on now.
PW: Less and less…
JH: Could a show like thirtysomething make it if it came on the air today?
PW: I think there’s a difference now between cable and network. I think our show, Brothers & Sisters…or Grey’s Anatomy…is as close as you can get now on a major network. If you want to go more character driven and into more complexity then I think you have to go to Mad Men, you have to go to The Sopranos.
PH: Oddly, there’s fantastic television going on right now but what we were trying to do and what this show was back in the 80s was that kind of show that has migrated from network television, I think, because it’s an evolving phenomenon. Network television is losing viewership and they’re searching for an identity. They’re trying to get some sort of magic that will allow them to hold onto the audience even though they know in the back of their minds that they’re going to lose it anyway. Not for any fault of their own; it’s just inevitable for the migration of the viewership that prohibits them from allowing the subtlety of something like our show.
- THIRTYSOMETHING TV Guide cover, June 1988
PW: I think that other reason – that is towards the subtlety that you were talking about – in order to have a show, say using Mad Men as an example since that’s sort of the hit show right now, that has to come from, in my opinion, a writer’s mind and imagination and of trust of a network that this writer will bring to life something that is unique and particular but it seems to me now that most of the network shows are all involved in terms of development to scripts and everything so that doesn’t allow for the specificity of one writer with one view to bring it all the way. It’s more committee so when a project is open to committee that way you lose subtlety.
PH: There’s a phenomenon that’s evolved in network television which I don’t think ever would have happened which is the expendability of the creator of the show.
PW: Big time!
PH: For the first time since I’ve been involved in network television that seems to be a phenomenon where if you don’t like what they’re doing, you’ll fire them even though, which is the great irony, that always fails. Take a show likeCommander In Chief, which was on ABC [from 05-06 and starred Geena Davis as the first female President] and came on as a hit.
JH: Didn’t they bring different show runners in three different times?
PW: Yeah, three times.
PH: They fired the original writer and even on Brothers and Sisters there was a certain amount of that. It’s what you’re saying. There isn’t the emphasis or value on the single vision and any show that has any kind of long lasting impact, if you look at it, you’ll always find a single vision for it.
- Timothy Busfield, Wettig, Olin and Mel Harris of THIRTYSOMETHING
JH: Have you ever thought where your characters would be now?
PH: I’d be dead still. [laughs]
JH: That’s right! Gary died!
PW: I’ll give you the boring answer because both of them said it was a boring answer…
KO: We didn’t say boring.
PW: You said boring.
KO: No we didn’t.
PW: You said unsatisfying, which it is but it’s truth for me, which is when I played the character I played it by the script. I had no imagination of what my character was doing when she wasn’t on television. I didn’t watch it as a viewer so when people would imagine Nancy, let’s say, to be a real character in a real life, which is what we want them to think when you’re on a television show, but you as the player don’t look at it that way. There was no confusion. There was no Nancy other than the scripts written.
JH: When the show ended, was there a stereotype that each of you had to go up against with roles that came along after that?
KO: Peter and I both were directing right away so we kind of avoided that. For both of us, because we both were directing, we were away long enough so when people were really interested in us coming back to act they weren’t the same kind of parts. As for Patty…
PW: It was at a time when there were the movies of the week. Right then they were making 50 movies of the week. I think I was once offered 27 in a row! I mean, every movie of the week because of the cancer [storyline onthirtysomething] and mostly movies of the week are some heroine in some kind of trouble and after a certain trial she triumphs so I was offered every one of them. That was the biggest windfall that came to me.
PH: I must say, it was a surprise to me, even though Ken and I were both directing, that given the caliber of the cast that more people didn’t act more.
PW: That’s true.
PH: I think it may have had something to do with the show because people did identify so personally with the character and in a filmmakers’ minds and television series’ minds…
PW: They thought of us as the people on the show.
PH: I think that did play into it.
KO: I didn’t ever feel that frustration because for the first couple of years after it I was focusing on directing and dealing with the frustrations of that arena.
JH: Ken, are we seeing you on Brothers & Sisters again this fall?
- Wettig & Olin in BROTHERS & SISTERS
KO: Yeah, a little bit. If it helps the story or helps her stories…
PH: It’s so weird because on some level you really miss it but then you pass a couple of events…
KO: I guess I miss the hours the most. I don’t miss the work.
PW: You don’t have the whole burden of a show as an actor. You just have to show up, be really present and centered in doing your part but then when you’re driving home, it’s gone. And they’ve both been executive producers on things and you’re carrying the weight of the whole show and that is 250 people that you have to take care of and you’re editing and directing and it’s a whole other thing.
PH: As a director, you’re aware of every single tick of the clock. And as an actor, you don’t really care. You don’t have to worry about time or if you’re running out of light.
The first season of thirtysomething on the Shout Factory’s website and season two is coming out in early 2010!! Check back here for another giveaway!
Until next time…Keep Watching!
Jim Halterman spends his days interviewing the top tier of talent and creative forces in the entertainment world and then, because he's that kind of guy, he brings it all to YOU! And, because we all like free stuff, check back often for giveaways!! 
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