Highway To Hell’s Kitchen: Ed Burns & Public Morals

There was once a time when it was considered below the station of feature film directors to marshal their talents towards working on television projects given that TV was considered to be an inferior medium. But in the past couple of decades, that hasn’t been the case thanks to pay channels HBO and Showtime and basic cable outlets like AMC, FX and TNT greenlighting programs like The Sopranos, Homeland, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy and Falling Skies. With this kind of creative atmosphere currently in vogue, renowned independent film producer/director/writer/actor Ed Burns is making the leap into television with the series Public Morals, his upcoming period police drama set in 1960s New York City that’s set to debut on TNT.

It’s a move that he’s seen many of his peers make due to the changing Hollywood landscape. It was while working with Walking Dead director Frank Darabont on the 2013 TNT neo-noir crime drama Mob City where Burns got to see how much greener the grass was on the television side of things.

“I’m on that set, watching Frank and he’s got all the bells and whistles—a nice sized budget, assembled a great cast and was being completely left alone by the executives at TNT,” he recalled. “I’m a huge fan of Mad Men and The Sopranos and I was aware that a certain type of storytelling was moving off of the big screen and over to television. These executives were allowing people like Matt Wiener, David Simon and David Chase to have creative freedom to tell these great epic stories. So, Mob City ends and the guys at TNT asked me if I’d be interested in creating my own show for them.”

While Burns admittedly didn’t have an idea for a show, he did have a number of what he calls passion projects. These were screenplays for feature films he couldn’t get made over the last 18 years due to a lack of studio interest. Two that stood out had to do with a multigenerational Irish-American cop saga that took place in the late ‘50s to the mid-‘70s. (“It was my attempt at doing something like The Godfather.”) There were also three scripts Burns had written about the west side of Manhattan and the Irish gangsters there, one of which one was an adaptation of William Kennedy’s novel Legs that he’d co-written with the author. It eventually jelled together for the Long Island native. (For a list of Ed Burns’ favorite movies that he’s directed, click here.)

So I’m looking at all these screenplays and trying to think about what show to do and then I remembered this other idea that I had for a movie that was going to be a blood feud between a family of Irish-American cops and a family of Irish-American gangsters and I thought that’s what the show should be,” Burns said. “I should take a look at two families, a shared history in Hell’s Kitchen and one family are cops and one family are gangsters and they’ll be connected through marriage and that’s where I started. The idea to play with the Public Morals division was that if I was going to have the cops and gangsters interconnected, what cops deal with gangsters all the time? I knew it had to be a period piece. I hadn’t yet decided on what era but back then, it was the Public Morals division. So with those three ideas in my head, I started to draw up some characters and outline a story.”

Burns has always had a fascination with Hell’s Kitchen, the Midtown West Manhattan neighborhood where his great-grandfather used to fight pitbulls and where his father walked a beat as a member of the New York City Police Department. Burns’ lead character Terry Muldoon is a part of the Public Morals Division enforcing laws created to curb all kinds of sin and vice. When a war breaks about between two factions of the Irish Mob in Muldoon’s own Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, moral gray areas emerge and characters wind up in complex story lines.

Exhaustive research of memoirs and histories of the NYPD along with books like Richard Zacks’ Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, gave Burns plenty of source material to draw from in writing the scripts for the initial 10 episodes TNT ordered. Given that the series roughly takes place in pre-1965 New York City, the former Valley Stream/Rockville Centre resident strove for authenticity be it the actual Manhattan neighborhoods he scouted out that could pass for exterior shots, an insistence in casting actors with authentic New York/New Jersey accents or brainstorming with longtime friend P.T. Walkey to compose incidental music that’ll perfectly capture this era.

‘We knew we wanted [the show] to be riff-heavy and that’s kind of where we established certain musical themes that we played throughout the series. As it went on, we started to dig deeper and deeper into the ‘50s and ‘60s sounds. P.T. started to play around with some incidental music that was pulling from Motown, or big band stuff like the Dorseys or crooner-stuff,” Burns said. “The good thing with that is he studied filmmaking and he has a really good understanding of how music works with film. A lot of times, even before he saw a cut of a scene, he would have read a sequence in the script and would have gotten to work on his ideas.”

For Cold Spring Harbor native Walkley, who was once Burns’ guitar teacher and has worked on seven films with him, Public Morals gave him a chance to indulge his love of ‘60s-era music. “Though the show takes place in a specific era, there’s still such a wide range of great music coming out then, from the big band stuff to the saccharine sweet bubble gum stuff to the soul stuff to the gritty rock ‘n’ rock stuff. Then there are all the great movie scores like Mean Streets, the original Taking of Pelham 123, etc. I went back and studied all of that stuff, to put myself in the mindset of the world,” he said” “We wound up with lots of nice variation in the score. Gritty, upbeat rock cues, more chilling murder cues, and a super fun theme song. Eddie told me off the bat that, although we have plenty of hair-raising scenes, sex, drinking and murder, this show is not a broody procedural. It’s a good time, a party.”

For Burns, this opportunity to get back to being a pure storyteller is something that any director worth his salt craves. He acknowledges how fortunate he is with how this change of scenery is working out for him as an artist.

“We’re lucky that the TNT regime wants to move the network in a different direction and they want to go after HBO and Showtime and tell tougher, character-based stories. If you’re interested in telling character-driven stories, it’s an exciting time,” he explained. “I think there’s a reason why you’re seeing so many more filmmakers who’ve spent the past two decades banging their head against the wall trying to get their movies made are realizing that the studios are only interested in making fantasy films. Forget movies. Move over to television.”

Public Morals will debut on TNT Network on Tuesday, Aug. 25. Check local listings for times and channel information.