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David James Elliott and Catherine Bell keep JAG flying high after seven seasons. They're legal eagles...
...but will they ever be lovebirds?
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By Mark Lasswell, TV Guide, July 6, 2002
Ah, The life of a television star. Catherine Bell idles a few feet from the surf pouring over California sand. The late-afternoon sun dapples the nearby dunes. Bell closes her eyes to accept a cooling mist applied to her face by a minion armed with an Evian spray can. But Bell isn't lolling at a luscious beach resort; a moment later, someone yells "Action!" and she sprints down a sandy path in olive-drab sweat clothes, her cheeks bedewed with Evianic sweat. As Bell crosses the finish line of a military obstacle course, a Marine gunnery sergeant clicks his stopwatch, checks the time and says, "Not bad for a lawyer." The colonel standing next to him adds, "Not bad for a Marine."
Thus ends one scene in a long day of filming JAG (which stands for the Navy's Judge Advocate General military-justice branch) at the Naval Air Weapons Station Point Mugu, 50 miles north-west of Los Angeles. In the script, Bell, as Lt. Col. Sarah "Mac" MacKenzie, has to prove herself on the obstacle course at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, a replica of which has been constructed on a seaside skeet-shooting range at Point Mugu. JAG itself (CBS, Tuesdays, 8 P.M.) has run an obstacle course during its seven years on the air, stumbling over cancellation by NBC after its debut in the 1995-96 season, vaulting to CBS, climbing through the Nielsen ratings from 68th to 39th to 17th place before staggering across the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire hazard (23rd and 27th) for two seasons. Thanks largely to its older, predominantly female audience, JAG rode a wave of patriotic fervor this past season to 16th-place tie with Frasier.
"It's not a time for gloating at all," says creator and executive producer Donald Bellisario. "New viewers are tuning in, and it's great. But I - and the show - didn't find patriotism on September 11."
Indeed, ex-Marine (1955-59) Bellisario has been a lonely sentry of sorts in Hollywood for the past three decades. Magnum, P.I., another of his creations, presented the novel vision of Vietnam vets as decidedly untwisted, productive members of society - at a time when Bellisario's peers were still less gung-ho. Until lately, JAG was unable to get any respect, in Bellisario's view, because the entertainment industry and media assumed "it's got to be jingoistic," he says. "But the show has by no means been rah-rah, pro military."
So far from rah-rah, in fact, that the Navy blanched when it first learned about JAG's premise - the investigation, prosecution and defense of military personnel accused of crimes - and refused to cooperate for the first two seasons. Story lines have dealt with murder, rape, espionage and a police blotter's worth of other offenses, with many of the plots inspired by actual events. In some instances, story lines provide a periscope to issues just breaking the surface. "We dealt with a dirty bomb in the final episode of the season," says Bellisario, "long before this stuff ever broke. We take from the headlines, but we also precede reality."
It gradually dawned on the Navy that no matter how bottom-of-the-brig the JAG story lines might be, in the end, justice is always served. Dropping what Bellisario says was an "actively obstructionist" stance toward the show, the Navy started offering up its hardware and expert advice, as well as making military personnel available as extras (the production pays them if they're off duty and donates money to their Morale, Welfare and Recreation Fund if they're on duty). "Obviously, there's going to be bad guys. That's the drama, that's the show," says Cmdr. Bob Anderson, the public information officer in Los Angeles who vets JAG scripts for the Navy in tandem with a Marine representative. "We're fine with that as long as the bad guys are caught and punished."
The military's also fine with having "a couple of good-looking people up there portraying naval personnel," Bellisario notes.
That live-action recruiting poster would be Ms. Bell and David James Elliott, as studly Cmdr. Harmon "Harm" Rabb Jr. They're the main players on the legal team headed by commanding officer Adm. A.J. Chegwidden (John M. Jackson) and based in Washington, D.C. Actual JAG's tend to be deskbound file jugglers, but Mac and Harm are globe-trotting detectives, never missing a chance to board an aircraft carrier or hop in a military jet in the pursuit of criminals and eye-catching cinematography. "We're super JAGs," says Bell, adding that the most common refrain from her real-life counterparts is, "Boy, you guys sure do lead exciting lives. I don't get to do any of that stuff." But at least the military lawyers have benefited from collateral TV glamour: In recent years, the papers that real-life JAGs shuffle include invitations to Washington cocktail parties.
Mac and Harm usually work independently of each other on A and B story lines, but there's plenty of opportunity for fraternization back at the office. Ratcheting up the romantic tension between the two "is something I always fought for," says Elliott, because he wanted viewers to know more about Mac's and Harm's emotional lives. "I come back to shows because I'm interested in the characters," Elliott says, recognizing that no matter how awe-inspiring an aircraft carrier might be, no one goes to bed at night wondering about the internal struggles that take place on it. In time honored series TV fashion, Mac and Harm keep pulling toward each other and veering away, rarely acting on their feelings. "There is going to be sexual tension" in the new season, Bellisario promises, "and they are going to get closer. They are going to reevaluate their personal relationship. [But] if they are ever united, it will be way down the line." It could be argued that seven years on the air constitutes way down the line, but the producer says he senses that JAG, already renewed for an eighth season, could run for nine or ten years.
When Bell and Elliott met on a JAG episode in its first season, the likelihood of a romance didn't look too promising, what with Bell's character in a body bag and all. She was a guest star on the season finale, playing Harm's murdered ex-girlfriend, and their ony scene together consisted of his unzipping the bag and finding his former true love a little blue around the edges. In between takes of the body-bag scene, she says, Elliott teased her because it was pilot-shooting season in Hollywood and Bell wasn't working on any other projects. JAG had been canceled by NBC but was quickly snatched up by CBS while the final episode was in production. Later, a call went out for new actors in several roles. Bell, whose cheerful manner and easy smile off camera is startling to anyone familiar with her only as an all-business Marine, campaigned for the female lead. Even before her guest-star gig, Bell had seen JAG and was enamored of the mix of military action and legal machination. "I'm such a tomboy," Bell says. When she won the permanent role, she ran into Elliott as the next season got under way and said, "Remember me?"
Though Elliott is the alpha male of this "Top Gun" meets "A Few Good Men" production, the role of women in the military was what inspired JAG's creation. In the early '90s, Bellisario heard that the Navy had decided to deploy women on aircraft carriers and combat aircraft. "I found that interesting," he says, and began writing a script -whether for a movie or TV pilot he didn't know- about a female pilot on a carrier who disappears, victim of an accident or murder. He had written the first act before realizing that, despite his Marine background, he didn't know how the military would investigate a possible crime at sea. That's when he learned about the Judge Advocate General's office and its one-stop-shopping legal mission of investigating crimes, then prosecuting and depending them. He thought, "What a great franchise. Unlike most law shows, I've got a detective, a prosecutor and a defender. Plus, I've got all the big-boy toys to play with: Navy jets and Marine helos."
Bellisario says he's happy to see the outpouring of patriotism across the country, particularly from Hollywood, since September 11, but he doesn't harbor any illusions about its permanence. Similarly, he was glad to field a barrage of phone calls from the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post and Time magazine in the weeks after the war on terrorism was declared but knows the hoopla will fade. "The cycle will change again, beleive me," Bellisario says. "When you need the military, suddenly everybody's very patriotic. But it's kind of like the rich uncle: When you don't need him, you put him back in the closet and don't want to see him." Then JAG will dip back into its accustomed pattern under the entertainment radar, where it had been flying happily for seven years before its overnight success.
