When the first season of AMC's popular crime drama The Killing ended in June without revealing the murderer, howls of unrequited resolution were loosed upon the cable network by fans and critics. It was a big tease, a bait-and-switch, some complained—the show had marketed itself all season with the tagline, "Who killed Rosie Larsen?" but then left viewers hanging.
"The reaction honestly really surprised us," says Dawn Prestwich, '82, the show's co-executive producer. "I can understand the audience wanting to know the answer and have that good conclusion, but we're trying to tell them the story they will like most in the end."
And for that they won't have to wait much longer: At some point during Season 2, which premieres in March, viewers will learn the identity of the killer. Prestwich promises.
Based on a Danish series, The Killing is set in a perpetually gloomy Seattle and centers around the death of an ordinary high school senior who, it appears, had a secret life. Instead of a series of cases across one season, the show presents each episode as one day in the investigation, led by a laconic, driven detective and single mother played by Mirielle Enos and her combative rookie partner played by Joel Kinnaman.
KILLING FIELDS: Detectives Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Stephen Holden (Joel Kinnaman) pursue a lead. (Photo: Chris Large/AMC) Prestwich and her co-producer and longtime writing partner Nicole Yorkin are essentially the managing directors of the show, supervising the six other writers while reporting to executive producer Veena Sud. All of them regularly hunker down in a conference room in Glendale, Calif., where they imagine, construct and refine a multi-layered plot. The giant whiteboard diagram of the story, Prestwich says, "should hang in the Getty. I've reached a point where I cannot hold all this in my head."
Prestwich grew up in Dallas knowing that she loved to write. At Stanford, a course in film production taught by Ron Alexander captivated her and started her thinking about a career. She met her future husband, Brian Prestwich, '82, when both were freshmen in Branner Hall. After graduation, the couple headed to Los Angeles where he enrolled at UCLA Medical School and she got her first job in the entertainment industry working as a personal assistant to a talent manager.
Prior to The Killing Prestwich worked on such shows as Judging Amy, Brotherhood, The Riches and Flash Forward. She and Yorkin shared a Writers Guild of America Award for the pilot of the short-lived CBS series The Education of Max Bickford.
What did you do as a personal assistant?
I was basically buying her bananas, from very green to yellow, so that every day she had a perfect banana. I got very good at that because I am a Stanford graduate. After two and a half years of that I was losing my mind, and I applied to the American Film Institute and got into the screenwriting program and met Nicole there.
Where might we see your influence in The Killing?
I can never say, "This is the Dawn Prestwich part" because Nicole and I, who are very different people, together create this third writer, who tends to be a very grounded, very logical writer. We kick the tires of the plot a lot. It's got to feel real. If we bring anything to the show, it's our interest in relationships and partnerships—especially partnerships of really different people.
What's it like in the writer's room?
We're all sitting in there talking about it. Veena is the decider: She'll say, "No, I don't want to do that, it's too much like this other thing we did." Or we'll go in another direction, and someone will point out that that's exactly what Breaking Bad is doing this season, and then we go, "Damn!" We're like a big brain in the room, with all these little voices, and Veena is the Super Ego, deciding where we go and what we do.
Do you think the outcry about the murder not being solved is because viewers are so used to shows like Law & Order and CSI?
Absolutely. There are so many "procedurals" on television right now, and they always get the bad guy at the end of every episode, that nice closure. That's basically what those shows are about: getting the bad guy. That's what Nicole and I came to understand about network television. We pitched a show once about "restorative justice," where victims' families are brought together with perpetrators so that there can be a sense of restoration and closure, forgiveness. The networks said, there's not the satisfaction of getting the bad guy.
And with The Killing you're trying to do something different?
As a writer, the joy, if it is that, is not just the plot. The procedural element is critical, but the characters and their relationship to each other and their relationship to the victim, Rosie, are so important. Veena always said to us, "We're going to tell the story of what it is really like to lose a 17-year-old girl to murder and how it affects all these different human beings." That's the story we're telling.
Sometimes we're telling the story of small moments, of pain and sadness. . . . Before we wrote the first season, all the writers spent some time with a group called Compassionate Friends—parents who've lost children. It was amazing to talk to them about what it is like to lose someone like that. You never recover. . . . That matters most to us—the Larsen family story.
SCENES FROM SEASON ONE: Stan Larson (Brent Sexton) learning that his daughter has been murdered. Photo: Chris Large/AMC While some viewers vowed never to watch the show again after that last episode, the controversy can't be all bad, can it?
On the one hand we were thrilled they cared that much to be that angry. None of us have been on a show that has become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon—a little alarming, but kind of interesting that people were so interested in the characters.
When you were at Stanford did you think you would one day work in Hollywood?
I remember falling in love with editing in Ron Alexander's class. He was a sound editor. We were splicing film—16 millimeter—and I'm not artistic with my hands at all, but I'd sit there for hours putting these images together that made a story, and that was so creatively satisfying to me. I'd stay up all night editing and not feel tired. But my splices were always sticking because I'm left-handed, and one day Ron turned to me and said, "Dawn, that's OK, someday someone will be doing this for you." It was such a small thing, but it was huge to me that he thought someday I would be making movies. I hung on to that forever, that one little phrase.
Sean Riley Mitchell is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.
