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New York Times
Sunday, November 17, 2002

Splintered Truth
In Boomtown, The Truth Depends on Who's Telling It.

By: HUGH HART | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

In a couple of hours a truck will crash into the living room of the mansion where Donnie Wahlberg now sits. Mr. Wahlberg is on a nighttime location shoot in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles for NBC's Sunday-night crime series ``Boomtown.'' As sound technicians slip a body mike down his pants leg, Mr. Wahlberg fishes two stale cookies out of the leather jacket he's just been handed by the show's wardrobe wrangler. ``Dude! These are cookies from when I did the pilot in March,'' he says.

Cradling a cappuccino in a corner booth of a West L.A. cafe, Del In a few minutes, Detective Joel Stevens (played by Mr. Wahlberg) will join his partner, ``Fearless'' Bobby Smith (Mykelti Williamson), in a stakeout outside the house of a white-collar crook whose insurance scams have earned him the wrath of an amphetamine-addicted truck driver. In the episode, shown tonight, the detectives quietly share some confidences. Then the big rig collides into the home.

Seem a bit outlandish?

``You've got to remember, Graham wrote `Speed,''' says the soft-spoken Mr. Wahlberg, referring to Graham Yost, ``Boomtown's'' creator. ``So he's got a lot of weird concepts - bodies flying through the air, dropping in someone's swimming pool; cars crashing into houses; people being hijacked.''

Quirky crimes aside, ``Boomtown'' offers a fresh take on cop shows by slicing, dicing and skewing each week's story line in half a dozen different directions. With a nod to ``Pulp Fiction'' and ``Memento'' by way of ``Rashomon,'' the splintered truth, ``Boomtown'' style, depends on who's telling the tale. ``Each crime affects a bunch of people in a different way,'' Mr. Yost explains. ``The victim, a suspect, a perpetrator - as well as our regular characters - they all see a different side of the story.''

Vying to tell their sides of the ``Boomtown'' saga are an ambitious deputy district attorney (played by Neal McDonough), who's having an affair with a cynical reporter (Nina Garbiras); two L.A.P.D. officers (Jason Gedrick and Gary Basaraba); one paramedic (Lana Parrilla); and the detectives (Mr. Wahlberg and Mr. Williamson).

Factoring in flashbacks, guest villains and dysfunctional relatives, ``Boomtown'' winds up with an awful lot of narrative threads to keep track of. ``Our mantra is clarity above all,'' says Mr. Yost, an executive producer of the show with Jon Avnet, whose directing credits include ``Fried Green Tomatoes'' and ``Red Corner.'' ``I think people get the trick pretty quickly. By the time we make the second switch, they go, `Now I get it: I'm going to see the stuff again and get new information, and it's going to take us forward, and by the end of the hour there won't be many unanswered questions.' We're not trying to do anything groundbreaking. We're just trying to tell neat stories about neat characters in a neat way.''

Mr. Yost happened onto his multiple-viewpoint concept two years ago while interviewing World War II veterans for a ``Band of Brothers'' episode he wrote about the Battle of the Bulge. ``The stories these vets told were about what was happening 12 feet around them, and that's it,'' he recalled. ``If a tank blew up somewhere else, one would tell me, `Oh yeah, I heard something go off over there.' But he wasn't worried about that; he was concerned about the mortar fire right in front of him. That's when it hit me, that we go through lives with these multiple subjective realities that we all put together in terms of the larger reality of what the world is.''

Besides inspiring him with the hook for ``Boomtown,'' ``Band of Brothers'' also introduced Mr. Yost to Mr. Wahlberg, who played C. Carwood Lipton in the HBO miniseries. Mr. Wahlberg had befriended the real Mr. Lipton, who died last December, and urged Mr. Yost to incorporate some of the soldier's stories into his script. ``I was struck by Donnie's earnestness and loved the look in his eyes,'' Mr. Yost recalls. ``I felt, `Here's a dedicated guy who wants to make this story as truthful and real and dramatic as possible.'''

Mr. Wahlberg, 33, is the older brother of the actor Mark Wahlberg; he grew up in a working-class Boston neighborhood before breaking into show business as a member of New Kids on the Block. Before ``Boomtown'' came along, he says, he tended to micro-manage his characters. Adjusting to the series' kaleidoscopic story structure, he's learned to lighten up. ``This show actually encourages you to do a little less preparation,'' he said with a sly smile. ``In my prior work, I'd know everyone's dialogue. I knew everything that happened. I'd keep track of my character's emotional state every single second. Here, it's so out of whack sometimes that I can let go of all the baggage my character's carrying and just play the moment.'' And so, like his character, Mr. Wahlberg concentrates on the task at hand and leaves the big ``Boomtown'' picture to his bosses. ``It is in a weird way life imitating art,'' he says. ``Sometimes I'll come to work, and Neal McDonough is just finishing a scene with Nina. You say, `How'd your day go? ... Good ... Okay, see ya.' Then I go off to do some cop stuff after they've been doing their romantic D.A.-reporter stuff. We all get along great, but I don't always know what everyone's up to.''

Neither do viewers. While each ``Boomtown'' episode offers a self-contained crime story, the characters' personal histories unfold in bits and pieces that tend to raise more questions than they answer. Why, for example, does Tom Turcotte (Mr. Gedrick's cop character) so resent Joel's success? Will the romance rekindle between the assistant D.A. and his ex-mistress? And what's the explanation for Joel's severely depressed wife? ``That's all I hear from people,'' says Mr. Wahlberg. ```What's up with the wife?'''

Well?

``It's coming,'' he promises. ``Real slow, but it's coming.'' In the stakeout scene he's about to shoot, Mr. Wahlberg says, ``they dance around the edges.''

``I'm about to spill my guts to my partner,'' he explains, ``and really share with him because he doesn't really know exactly what happened. But I don't do it. We get interrupted.''

First by a phone call, then by the truck, of course.

``Boomtown's'' jagged mesh of urban action and personal angst apparently works for NBC, which has extended the series for a full season (although it will be pre-empted next week by 1999 romantic comedy ``Runaway Bride'' and by holiday programming in mid-December). ``I think Graham is really finding the groove,'' Mr. Wahlberg says. ``We're still going to get the big, wild and crazy episodes that could only happen in L.A., but I think the characters are going to really start to flesh out more, because what's happened is, the audience also wants the personal stories.''