'The Guardian' sprang from creator's diverse background

From:Pittsburgh Post gazette
Date:Sunday, May 23, 2004
By Brian O'Neill

When David Hollander was growing up in Mt. Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, Pittsburgh was winning big with the Steelers and losing big with steel, and he was seeing every side of life daily.

His father, Tom, a lawyer who had grown up in Monessen, was sending his son to Sewickley Academy. So in the span of 24 hours, the teenage Hollander might visit family in the Mon Valley, play a soccer game in Shadyside, and then end up "partying in some ridiculous mansion in Sewickley Heights.''

All those shades of Pittsburgh were in "The Guardian," the television drama set in Pittsburgh that Hollander created and wrote. CBS announced last week that this past season, its third, also would be its last. I reached Hollander in California , but he didn't sound down. He's already working on a movie set in the South Side.

"I'm permanently stunted as a 14-year-old boy," Hollander, 36, said. "A lot of my world view was formed around that time."

That was a time of "insularity, enormous civic pride and decay," all of which inform the characters of "The Guardian." It was a show that I'd always try to watch if we could get the kids to sleep by 9 on Tuesday nights. (Full disclosure: I'm friends with David's brother, Scott, who heads KidsVoice, which provides legal aid to 5,000 children in Pittsburgh each year. That work was central to the show, to which Scott Hollander was technical consultant.)

But if his brother had written a bad show, I wouldn't have watched. As our TV critic Rob Owen said in his post-mortem on "The Guardian," Pittsburgh was not just the setting, it was a secondary character. Its quirks, wrinkles, slang, sores, warts and beauty marks were out in the open each week.

"The very, very old wealth that sort of sits so quietly in the city," Hollander said. "The toughness of the people, the toughness of those kids. If it isn't really the culture, it's the fantasy of the culture. The puffed-up chest, the big upper body, the skinny legs"

You'd see things on "The Guardian" you wouldn't see on other network shows. The main character, Nick Fallin, and his father, Burton, had as many failings as strengths. A pair of lawyers leading a high-powered firm, they punched and kicked a guy in a Downtown garage into unconsciousness one night in a moment of rage after he'd brazenly stolen their space.

Not your usual behavior for a father and son on their way to the symphony, but Burton Fallin had grown up in the Mon Valley throwing punches. The younger Fallin, Nick, the child of privilege, generally got beat up if he got into a scrape alone.

"Both my grandfathers were tough guys," Hollander said. "They had to be tough guys. If it came down to stuff, then it came down to stuff."

Hollander rarely allowed viewers to see a character do absolutely the right thing, but viewers knew why choices were made. Its goodness or badness was left up to them. And while "The Guardian" did not show much of the quiet family life generally associated with this town, the show's heroes tried to find that for children each week.

Because it was fiction, Hollander was free to create the Pittsburgh he needed. One week he might make up a record label, Keystone Records, to give a character a chance to talk about our storied jazz history. Another week he'd turn a memory of latent racism on the 41C bus into a dramatic confrontation that tears two families in half.

Burton Fallin, "conservative, tricky and emotionally inaccessible," was nothing like Hollander's real father, who is "liberal and emotional as they come, a pretty sensitive cat." Scott Hollander, 40, executive director of KidsVoice, is nothing like Nick Fallin, either.

Coincident with the run of "The Guardian," KidsVoice has about tripled in size. There are now more than 60 staff members, 23 of them lawyers. Funding from foundations and individuals has soared. The people at KidsVoice are much better able to serve 5,000 children annually, and don't have to spend so much time explaining what they do. Because people stop them in midsentence and say, "Oh, like 'The Guardian'."

From Pittsburgh Post gazette