Howard Gordon Talks ‘Accused,’ The Hit Show He Fought To Get Made

When Accused premiered on Fox, it broke records.

The Fox show, the latest work from legendary TV writer and producer Howard Gordon, was the top-rated and most-watched debut on any network in three years. It pulled in 8.4 million viewers. New episodes continue to air on Tuesday nights.

Each week features new characters in court accused of a crime and tells the story behind how they ended up there. The anthology series is inspired by the original acclaimed and award-winning British show created by Jimmy McGovern.

I caught up with Gordon, who serves as Accused‘s executive producer and showrunner, to discuss his latest network hit and his struggle to get it made.

Simon Thompson: Accused smashed rating records when it debuted. I rarely get to talk to people after their shows have landed, so you never know whether audiences will get on board. How did it feel to see audiences responding as you hoped they would?

Howard Gordon: There’s a line of Broadcast News where I think it’s William Hurt who said, ‘What do you do when everything you always dreamed of comes true?’ and I think it was Albert Brooks who replied, ‘Keep it to yourself. You don’t want to confess your secret desire.’ It’s not even about breaking records and stuff like that so much as, at this particular age and time in my life, I felt very deeply about this show. I love it, but as you say, you never know. Nobody wanted to do an anthology. It wasn’t like they were beating down my door to do this. I said, ‘How do we get adjacent to this crazy complicated, challenging reality we’re all occupying and then, without telling a true story, recognize the essential truth of the world and see ourselves.’ I’ll call it an empathy engine or a compassion bridge, I think the hope is that at the end of one of these episodes, you’ve been entertained, but I hope that there’s a deeper conversation that gets sparked with what we put on the table here.

Thompson: Even when you make a great show that does these things, it still doesn’t guarantee that people will watch it.

Gordon: Right. I’m still going to keep my powder dry because I seem like an optimist, but I’m actually not. However, it was great that we had the wind in our sails from the NFL game. To be honest, as we got closer to the starting gate, everyone got a little scared. They were like, ‘Oh, my God, we can’t air that Chiklis episode. People have watched a football game, had some pizzas and some beers and were not going to want to do that,’ but it was the opposite. 24 was my example. The show had not launched yet; we were shooting our sixth episode, 9/11 happened, and they were considering pulling in. We certainly had to revise some of it. The mandate was then blue sky shows, meaning lighter shows and comedies, but it turned out that people wanted to have this adjacent experience that spoke to them. They needed a hero at that time. People want an opportunity to look a little more deeply without hazarding the risk of their investment. There’s a voyeuristic quality to it that I think is connecting, and I hope it’s entertaining because it has to. With Accused as an anthology of stories, there’s an emotional contract that the show fulfills: people can tune in and expect to live in a space that will be familiar enough to them. They’ll come back for that instead of seeing what happened to a returning character.

Thompson: Accused is based on a British show by Jimmy McGovern, but this is its own thing and engages differently.

Gordon: Once I sold the show and looked at it, I didn’t want to make small changes like changing Nigel to Nick. There was a kind of Northern industrial sameness to the story, so I had a few ways to reconceive it, but at its core, because you have to tell the stories so quickly, I felt that for some of the characters in the original, too many things had to happen. We had less time, some of those episodes were 55 minutes, and I only had 43, so I had to have more restraint because I had less real estate. It demanded compression and an exercise in discipline. I had to ask, ‘How do I get an audience to meet a character and get involved in a situation that they only have the rough contours, but after the title sequence, they say, ‘What’s happened?’ It’s about that engagement. I’m glad you used that word; I am proud of how we decoded that. In my estimation, we spent more time getting to know the characters than in the British one, so, in a way, I felt like I got to be the beneficiary of that. You have to make it your own. The Office is the best example of a British adaptation because only when they stopped taking the UK scripts and wondered how they could do things differently did it become its own thing.

Thompson: You touched on the fact that this is an anthology show, and it was a tough sell. I would have loved to have seen some of the battles and heard some of your conversations that convinced them to run with this. Accused does not shy away from hot button topics.

Gordon: I always said, and I hope I’m not speaking at a school and they’ll yell at me, but I think that Michael Thorn, the president of entertainment at Fox, and his team were looking for excuses not to do it. We are friends and colleagues, and I’ve had some nice successes with them, but I think they were indulging me. I’d written the first three scripts, and they loved them and were like, ‘Oh, s**t. Now we have to take it to the next step and do it,’ but I think they were kicking and screaming the whole way. There was an inflection point, and I think it was with a bit of dread, but maybe they were like, ‘What have we done?’ I don’t know what those conversations were. But I got the sense that there were cold feet, so there were a lot of stops and starts internally. Even leading with the Michael Chiklis episode, it was like, ‘We can’t possibly lead with this one. We’ll put it somewhere in the middle.’ There was a lot of second-guessing. Michael called me two weeks before, and it made my post-production people crazy because I had to prepare the episodes in some order, and he finally goes, ‘I can’t get this episode out of my head. Let’s not lead with fear because nothing comes out of it,’ and I thanked him for that. That fearlessness defines it, and we really didn’t pull any punches. What I am going to be curious about in a time when it takes just one person who is discontent and a couple of bots to start a campaign that calls you racist or sexist or whatever, but so far, I’m pleased by people’s response.

Thompson: As the showrunner, you ensured that you’d got the right people to tell the stories. You allowed Billy Porter to helm the story of a drag queen, Marlee Matlin to direct the episode involving a deaf child, and so on. That matters.

Gordon: For most of my life and career, I’ve thought of myself as an open-minded, progressive, empathetic person, but I never knew how much I didn’t know so this has been a great experience. I tell people that I really learned how to shut up and listen for the first time. Billy Porter was not an experienced director, but he is an incredible artist, and when you watch that episode, nobody else could have done it. In the Marlee Matlin episode, she’s a first-time director who happens to be deaf. There are the technical challenges of that alone, and then doing it in eight and a half days, which is a short time, even for the most seasoned director, is challenging. They brought something unique, and even what they may have missed on one or two technical moments, the energy they brought to bear with the actors, the engagement, and the storytelling is incredible. It was up to me to be the midwife of those experiences. Everyone had a great time, and that’s a good referendum. This was important to people. I got some wonderful letters from the actors who said, ‘This is like one of the best experiences I’ve ever had, and I love it.’ To me, that enthusiasm, that energy, is translated to many of the performances, and I hope it is reflected back to the audience in their experience.

Thompson: I did want to ask you about the actors because there are a lot of familiar faces across the episodes, but there’s no stunt casting.

Gordon: That’s a great point. It’s always that perilous line. There’s a conundrum because someone who’s a great actor and who is 50 years old, you’ve probably seen them before because they’re good, so how do you find people who can lose themselves? I think the one thing we always insisted on is that we needed a certain level of actor to pull some of these episodes off because, in lesser hands, I just don’t think it would work. Sometimes do that exercise in my head. When you think about Homeland, I can’t imagine what great luck we had to get Claire Danes. She’s excellent and really well known but got to redefine her career at that moment. There are recognizable like Michael Chiklis, who is a fixture in the industry but never in this kind of part. He’s usually the tough guy, but he’s an actor’s actor.

Thompson: When you take something like this into a room to get people on board, how often do you get people saying things like, ‘That’s great but a hard sell, so would you be interested in a 24 reboot?’

Gordon: (Laughs) It does happen and is certainly happening. Again, this one thing about being in this time of life is that, and I am impossibly nostalgic as a human being, I miss Jack Bauer. If the right story came along, I’d probably want to do it and I’m sure Kiefer would too. The fundamental condition is it has to be something really compelling and resonant with something that’s about today. You don’t want to be like Spinal Tap, the band that’s coming out with the guy wearing the spandex, and people are like, ‘Get off the stage already.’

Thompson: You still have those in your back pocket if it comes to bargaining and you’ll get a second season if you give them more 24. We never did get that movie that was talked about.

Gordon: I’ve got like six drafts of different iterations of it. I so miss it. I miss Jack purely as a fan, and I would love to see him again. As Kiefer has said, we’d better hurry up because he’ll be in a walker very soon.

Thompson: Finally, the ultimate demise of networks due to cord-cutting and the rise of streaming is often a topic of conversation. Did you always intend for Accused to be a network show, or did you look at streaming? Things can change so fast in this industry.

Gordon: Michael at Fox was the most enthusiastic out of the gate in terms of buying this. Like I said earlier, it wasn’t like people were knocking down the door to compete for this thing. I loved the idea of people watching it roughly at the same time. I miss those days. You might be on episode three of The White Lotus and I’ve finished season two. We’re having different experiences simultaneously, but network TV is still where most people watch stuff together. Honestly, I like being contrarian. I really like people going, ‘You’re doing a network show?’ I enjoy that. It’s not that subversive, but I loved it. The world is changing, and who knows what linear TV will look like if I can keep the ship sailing a little bit longer because there’s something culturally important about having these shared experiences, and that’s great. I’m enjoying the real-time element of it, but it ain’t 24 if you remember those days.

Accused airs on Fox on Tuesday night