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Legal ease
What about Buffy's Ex Boyfriend - Scott Hope ? Read more here... |
 I'm guessing I've pressed the wrong button in the high-speed skyscraper elevator. When the doors open, I think I'm watching a scene from the new TV comedy Billable Hours, which debuts tonight at 9:30 on Showcase. It's all about amiable young slackers at a downtown Toronto law office.
From the elevator, I spot the receptionist reading a crime novel, two gorgeous creatures in miniskirts racing down the hall and a young guy staring at his image in a mirror.
Wrong floor. The doors slam shut and I go to my real destination several floors higher, to the law office where I'm going to meet the creators and star of Billable Hours. We gather in a boardroom every bit as swish as the TV re-creations for such shows as L.A. Law and Boston Legal, and Canada's very own The Associates.
The co-creator (and co-star) is a familiar face: ultra-handsome Toronto actor Fabrizio Filippo. Heck, he's been around, as Buffy's boyfriend, super-sensitive Ethan on Queer as Folk and Sophia Loren's illegitimate son, Vittorio, (his best part to date) on last year's CTV miniseries, Lives of the Saints.
Billable Hours' other creator, Adam Till, is less well known. In a previous life he was, actually, a young lawyer. After switching to writing, he wrote a couple of film shorts, including The Human Kazoo, directed by Filippo.
Filippo had started work on Billable Hours scripts almost 18 months ago when I talked to him about Lives of the Saints.
"Yeah, it's been that long," he shrugs. In the past Filippo had written idiosyncratic little plays for fringe theatre, but never for a TV series. He says developing the show has been "a very involved process, an eye-opener for me."
"A writing collaboration was new for us," adds Till. "We found we complemented each other. But there was a process of getting to know one another and understand what each of us was bringing to the table."
They teamed up after Showcase vice-president Laura Michalchyshyn suggested they pool their concepts. A short outline was created, then they went to work on a bible. About this time, Michalchyshyn defected to the U.S. cable channel Sundance and was replaced by Tara Ellis.
"We wondered what was going to happen," Till remembers. "But she (Ellis) was completely supportive, got right into it and kept us going."
Till says everybody agreed this was not going to be a standard sitcom. So there's no audience, no laugh track and no cutesy sitcom lines. The show is edgy, sometimes dark but always with the spark of recognition. Anyone who has worked in a big office environment will recognize the characters.
First big question: what is Fabrizio Filippo doing in a Toronto TV series on Showcase when he could be in L.A. appearing in yet another TV pilot for the next season?
I first noticed him, a second-generation Italian-Canadian kid from North York, in the home-grown TV series Ready or Not as the older brother. He fought back against the ethnic typecasting he'd always felt and moved to Los Angeles.
In 1996, he landed roles in not one, but two pilots for the next U.S. TV season. Lush Life was about contrary females sharing a flat with Filippo as their youthful next-door neighbour, while Dangerous Minds wanted him as a rebellious high-schooler (he was 21 playing 17). He chose Lush Life because the role was meatier but the show disappeared after only three or four episodes were aired. It was his introduction to the vicious ratings-driven side of U.S. television.
Moving on, he was Buffy's post-Angel boyfriend on a bunch of 1998 episodes and they looked cute together because they were the same height. Then he was the lovelorn gondolier on Providence (1999), followed by his favourite U.S. TV part, as a drug-addicted rehab actor in Action. This smart Hollywood-insider satire starring Jay Mohr was on Fox, the wrong network; if HBO had it, the show might still be going, judging by its later ratings success in reruns.
So when Filippo says "been there, done that" to explain his reluctance to leap back into the U.S. network wars, one can understand him. "It's a question of control," he adds. "I didn't want to be just a TV actor, I always wanted more than that."
Not that this country offers a safe haven for a young male actor. Fans expected the Calgary-made feature waydowntown (2001) would vault him to prominence but Canada lacks a star system. The story of four office drones who bet a month's salary on who can survive the longest without venturing outside Calgary's underground tunnels, it was a hit with anybody who saw it. Trouble was, not enough people saw it.
If he's famous in the U.S., it's as Ethan Gold in the Toronto-made series Queer as Folk. He was the seemingly romantic pianist who takes up with Justin (Randy Harrison) in this comical but sometimes wild look at gay life in Pittsburgh. Filippo told me previously that when the role came up, "I really had to think about it." Nudity was de rigueur, and the storylines so soapy, it's no wonder 60 per cent of viewers were female.
And Filippo learned how relentlessly U.S. TV promotes its talent. All of a sudden, Fab Filippo websites were springing up all over the place. The Ethan Gold character became so popular, Filippo was asked back for another season.
"Doing TV, there and here, became the reason I needed Lives of the Saints," he says. He'd never been stretched so much in a role, and playing the one who observed the action, he had to register depth he wasn't sure he had. Another actor might have turned Vittorio into a passive bore.
Loren was initially reluctant to okay the casting of this kid she thought was too short and inexperienced. But after one intense scene, Filippo remembers her walking past on the way to her dressing room and murmuring to him, "Bravo!" Then he knew he had her on his side. In fact, he was the best actor in an exceptional cast and the miniseries has played all over the place to strong ratings.
Lives of the Saints gave him renewed confidence to something as different as Billable Hours. And, in writing the scripts, he hasn't handed himself all the best lines. The show is pitched to the ensemble. "All the main characters are equal," he says — "it's how they interact with each other."
Till says the production company was "unbelievably lucky" in securing two vacant floors in a downtown tower after a law firm moved out, leaving sets largely ready-made. To capture the feeling of lawyers racing through corridors, the crew put down tracks so the cameras could keep up to the actors.
I was given a preview of two half-hour episodes. The first is a dead-on satire of the office turmoil when two scarce parking spots become available in the tower underground. Sam (Filippo) puts in his bid even though he lives across the street. Then he invents phoney emails in a bid to take his chief competitor Robin (Jane Baxter) out of the running. Nasty and completely unsentimental, it surely hits the comedic spot.
The other episode was funnier and more sitcom-y, centred on the unwelcome arrival of a bully (Gabriel Hogan) who used to torture Sam in high school and still wants to. Now he's a TV actor who wants to study real lawyers to prep for his new crime series; he's disappointed how many of them have never been in a courtroom.
Till says the objective is to show how utterly boring it is for a junior associate in a large partnership. "Basically you're there to make the coffee," he says.
Filippo notes the scripts are set almost completely in the law offices, with no scenes at home. And the lawyers rarely have any legal work to do, other than endlessly walking those corridors and stirring things up.
Filippo says there's room for more episodes of Billable Hours. "We're just getting started, warmed up. We're thinking about all kinds of possible stories."
It all depends on how viewers take to the first batch of six episodes.
At just 31, Filippo feels in control of his career. "But it's crazy — one of the reasons I got into acting was to steer clear of working in an office. So here I am, a lawyer, yet."
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