Love Life (12 page)

The big man looked at Mike with the eyes of a tired, desperate swimmer accepting an outstretched arm. I didn’t know if his breakthrough would be the key we all were working to find, because he was unable to speak. But his eyes were easy to read.

Underneath the sadness, pain and receding shame was an unmistakable glimmer of hope. There is no recovery for anyone without lifting the lid on the pain of the past and letting in the light. Sometimes the pain might seem small to others, and sometimes it can be truly horrifying, like the secret Buck had been keeping. But until you reconcile it, you’re doomed.

The day I checked out of rehab, after thirty-one days, we all formed a circle. We said our good-byes and the emotion was thick; we had been to some very painful and very inspirational places together. Emotionally, we had gone into battle, the fight to literally save each other’s lives. We knew that statistically speaking, many of us would drink or use again, a significant number of us within the next ninety days. And as much as I had grown to care for and love some of them, as we said our good-byes I thought, “It might be you, ’cause it sure as fuck isn’t going to be me.”

I was taught that when dealing with addiction, you can use your more flawed characteristics as strengths. I am both super-competitive
and prone to selfishness. It’s a full-time job for me to subvert these qualities that often don’t do me any favors in life. But in sobriety, they have been my strong suit and extremely helpful. I often look around a room at people in recovery and think, “I am going to be the one who stays.” And while I know that today is the only day that matters, I hoard my string of sober days like a major-league hitting streak I’m not about to give up. With some divine help, there is no outside influence that is ever going to make me drink. Not you, not anyone. Not anything. Selfish and competitive.

In rehab I learned to love alcoholics and addicts for what we are and what we are not. We truly view things differently from others and that is our curse and blessing. We have characteristics that are uniquely our own. We are the lives of the party, the dreamers, the romantics, the storytellers, the masters of the grand gesture. We are emotional, passionate and capable of a depth of feeling that is usually the source of our problem. (It’s no accident that so many of us are drawn to the arts.)

Unfortunately, we can also be heartbreakers of the highest magnitude: frustrating, maddening, confusing and disappointing quicksilvers who flirt with tragedy on a daily basis. There is no one who can inflict unwarranted pain on the ones they love like an alcoholic/addict in full flower. But in recovery, we learn how to take our daily medicine, which is an honest admission of powerlessness, and we begin to beat back the tide. I started this on May 10, 1990, and it has made all the difference, every day since.

For many years, I kept a page of legal paper folded in my wallet. On my last night in treatment I made a list of the most inspiring things I had witnessed there. I never wanted to forget that bond I felt with those there with me. I wanted to have something to look at to remind me of their inspiration. My list lasted about seven or eight years, tucked between my driver’s license and photos of my wife and
kids. One day I took it out and it came apart at the folds, in pieces in my hands. It was time to throw it away. I still think of that paper today. I can no longer remember many specifics of the list; the memories of those connections also broke apart over the decades. But I do remember the first entry. I can still see it written in green Sharpie pen, just as I wrote it in the cafeteria, sipping that awful caffeine-free iced tea. To be inspired, to be humbled, to be reminded, I wrote in big block letters:

“#1: REMEMBER BUCK.”

U
ntreated substance abuse is
often treated as “cool” and as sort of a counterculture badge of honor, a way of proclaiming, “Look out, dullards, I’m still
dangerous
.” Likewise, sobriety is sometimes looked at as a fertile ground for the has-been and those who may have lost their edge. I was always scared of losing mine, and so, with ninety days sober, I got a tattoo to show I was still all about it. However, one of the gifts of recovery is authenticity, finding your true self. Today I know that I don’t care so much about being cool, much less edgy. I’ve seen too many good friends chase that image to the gates of prison, insanity or death. I still like my tattoo, but it means nothing to me now other than being a reminder that I’ve found my authentic self. And my authentic self is someone who wouldn’t get a tattoo.

I am still capable of admiring those who have a well-known proclivity for partying, when warranted. For example, I still love some of the writings of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Recently, he posthumously rose in my estimation when I discovered he was the one who came
up with the idea for the Don Johnson television series
Nash Bridges
. Clearly Dr. Thompson’s well-known reservations about the entertainment industry didn’t inoculate him against its charms.
Nash Bridges
brought the world six seasons of Don Johnson wearing vests (years later, in the same time slot, on the same network, another blond cutie named Simon Baker would don the same look on
The Mentalist
), and both Don and Hunter made a mint off of the show’s long, successful run.

To my understanding, Dr. Thompson never wanted to, or even attempted to, create another hit show. If there was any doubt that he was an iconoclast, look no further than that. So it makes me love his famous quote about the TV industry even more. The guy went one-for-one, hit a grand slam in the TV world in his only at-bat, and still said this:

“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”

I would only add that television is also, when it is good and people watch, probably the most fulfilling medium to work in today. With movies becoming almost exclusively about little-seen (and low-paying) passion projects or giant, simpleminded, lowest-common-denominator, theme-park-driven cartoon franchises, television is where actors can act and writers can write. Because people watch in their beds and on their couches, without total strangers surrounding them, while they check their Facebook status, the audience feels a much more personal connection to the actors of television than those of movies. I know this because I’ve been both.

This year I ended my wildly fun and tremendously fulfilling run on
Parks and Recreation
. What started out as a sort of six-episode experiment ended up as a four-year comedy master class.

I had just been told by the network that aired my then-current series
Brothers & Sisters
that they found my character’s political story lines boring and that I would now be playing mainly a diaper-changing daddy and pie-cooking partner to the ladies on the show. Which was not exactly what I had signed up for. So we agreed to part while we were in love.

Somehow the folks at NBC found out I was about to become a free agent, as did the brain trust on their critically acclaimed but struggling second-year comedy. A meeting was set up.

Mike Schur and Greg Daniels, who co-created and wrote on
The Office
(respectively), and I spitballed about my coming on board
Parks and Rec
. We hit it off at once. We made each other laugh and I loved the fresh, young, iconoclastic energy of the show. It felt like I was in the bull’s-eye of elite, contemporary American comedy.

I joined the show and it got picked up for the next season.

At the beginning, I was still finishing on
Brothers & Sisters
and appearing on
Californication
. To my understanding no one had ever starred concurrently on three different shows on three different networks at the same time (and in three different genres!). Chris Traeger became a character that people just seemed to love. He was insanely, dementedly positive and his ruination of the word “literally”
literally
led Merriam-Webster to change the official rules on how it could be properly used. My English-teacher mother would not have been happy. Or maybe very happy, come to think of it!

One of the things I try to strive for in my life is diversity with consistency. Anyone can have a couple of big years in their line of work; the real deal is being able to survive and have a very long string of good years. I’ve also learned the hard way (and there is no other way to learn) that to have longevity, you will surely have to endure your share of misfires, to go along with hits like
Parks and Rec
or my most recent,
Killing Kennedy
.

I’ve had a few of those along the way.

After the success of
The West Wing
and my departure from it, I was in the enviable position of being the guy people wanted to anchor their new shows. There was an amount of speculation about what my next career move would be, and I had no idea myself. I did know that I didn’t want to wait; I wanted to leap back into television soon, and in the best way possible. I’ve never been one to be a follower; conventional wisdom held that after a long run on a hit, you sat out at least a season before coming back on a show. But that felt arbitrary to me; I had interesting opportunities and love working. Why wait? (Sidebar: In the years since, actors routinely jump right back into the fray, some doing more than one series a year. The world moves too quickly and there is too much competition and not enough attention span in the zeitgeist to demur.)

Television is the most cyclical of businesses, and at the moment drama was king. It seemed to be the golden age of network drama.
ER
,
Law and Order
,
CSI
,
24
and
The West Wing
dominated the ratings and were creative, groundbreaking, buzzed-about hits. It’s hard to imagine today, when all the great dramas are on cable, but there was a time.

I had learned so much on
The West Wing
, from how a great show should and shouldn’t be run, to how to cast great actors, to the complications of studio–network politics. It was time for me to do my own show. I would produce it and star; I would be in the trenches from start to finish. But first I had to find the right concept.

I read every script around: shows about helicopter medics, airport security personnel, homeland security, spies and suburban family drama. Some were good, some were bad, but most, like all “pilots,” were in the middle, in that danger zone where it has equal possibilities to end up a huge hit or a huge bomb. Rarely, if ever, do you get a script where it’s a no-brainer. It’s always a gamble to be won and lost in a multitude of conscious choices and unforeseen, uncontrollable acts of fate. It’s Vegas at its worst, and with higher stakes.

One afternoon I read a script for a show about an idealistic lawyer caught up in a web of moral ambivalence and conspiracy.

My father is a lawyer and my character on
The West Wing
was recruited out of a big law firm to the White House, so I knew my way around that world. I liked it and it spoke to me. It felt authentic, which is nonnegotiable when developing a show concept. NBC was looking to find a traditional legal drama and would put the show on the air if I was interested. At the time NBC was the best network on TV and felt like home after so many years on
The West Wing
. So I read
The Lyon’s Den
and jumped on board.

The “Lyon” of the title was a play on the law firm’s name of Lyons, LaCross and Lavine. By the end of my experience working on the show, it would be less cute wordplay than a literal description of the life (and death) of this particular show.

The concept of the series was this: My character, Jack Turner, was plucked from his free law clinic and brought to the white-shoe firm of Lyons and LaCross after the mysterious death of his mentor Dan Barrington, who ran the place. Owing it to his memory, Jack leaves the world of street law and involves himself in high-stakes cases as he becomes increasingly convinced his mentor was murdered, possibly because of something or someone at the firm.

We set out to find a cast of great actors. I read with everyone we saw, culled the field down to two or three finalists for each role and selected them to bring before the studio and, if they survived the cut, the network. Studios and networks have their own mysterious matrix for choosing actors, but my criteria were clear (and remain the same today). I want actors who can actually act, I don’t want everyone to look like a model, I don’t care if they are “old” or “young,” I am not interested in skin color of any hue, I would prefer if they knew their way around a joke when needed and above all they have to have charisma. This has
nothing
to do with physical appearance and is unfortunately
and surprisingly a matter of taste. There are “stars” whom I wouldn’t watch if they took off all their clothes and self-immolated on the commissary steps, and yet many seem to love them. I wanted actors who I thought had the possibility of “breaking out,” as we say in industry-speak, meaning: I wanted people who could be stars on their own shows someday.