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Post-Gazette TV Editor

February 04, 2000

By Rob Owen

On the Tube: Supernatural 'freaks' keep the twists coming in 'The Others'

I see freaky people.

That could, understandably, be the reaction to NBC's "The Others," a supernatural series premiering tomorrow at 10 p.m. on WPXI.

Though it looks a whole lot like the summer blockbuster "The Sixth Sense" - folks with strange powers communicate with dead people - "The Others" was in development long before that movie became a hit. The series could have been ready for NBC's fall schedule if the network had wanted it then.

Like "The Sixth Sense," "The Others" is genuinely creepy, the characters involving and the plots take surprising twists. Naturally, it's bound to fail since it airs following lowest-common-denominator thrillers "The Pretender" and "Profiler."

In tomorrow's pilot, viewers get to meet the psychically gifted oddballs along with their newest recruit, Marian Kitt (Julianne Nicholson), a college junior who keeps running into the ghost of a dead woman in her dorm room bathtub.

Marian is recruited by Miles Ballard (John Billingsley), a professor of mythology and folklore who serves as cheerleader and documentarian for The Others, even though he has no psychic abilities himself.

This group of unusually gifted people, who call themselves "freaks," meet regularly to discuss their psychic investigations and help one another whenever possible.

Elmer Greentree (Bill Cobbs) serves as the group's spiritual leader, figuratively and literally. He's an elderly famed medium who can see his own upcoming death.

There's also crotchety Albert (John Aylward from "ER"), a blind man with a sixth sense; really weird Warren (Kevin J. O'Connor), who gets the 411 from the other side but can't process the information; Satori (Melissa Crider), a New Age "sensitive"; and Mark Gabriel (Carnegie Mellon University alumnus Gabriel Macht), an empathetic medical intern.

The Others help Marian solve the mystery of the dead girl in her dorm room - what the deceased wants, how she died, etc. - and then Marian joins the group, pitching in with her ability to see the past and the afterlife.

I don't want to say "The Others" moves at a slow pace, because it's not slow in the sense of boring, but it is deliberate and purposeful. A quick pace wouldn't build the kind of atmosphere this show needs.

Although some of the psychic babble is overdone and the scenes of people floating in the afterlife could have been shortened, "The Others" benefits from excellent sound effects editing. Never has a draining bathtub sounded so ominous.

A future episode features The Others investigating the death of a young father and his son while his grieving widow searches for answers. It's affecting, but rather dreary and depressing. And if you're home watching TV on Saturday night, isn't that depressing enough?

John Brancato and Michael Ferris, writers of the feature films "The Game" and "The Net," created "The Others," but the show is executive produced by Glen Morgan and James Wong, who wrote for "The X-Files" and "Millennium" and created Fox's "Space: Above and Beyond." Morgan and Wong excel in creating chilling scenes, but they're also attuned to nuanced characters.

They're aided in their efforts by two talented veteran actors, Cobbs and Aylward. The former brings dignity, while the latter adds levity to the show's frequently heavy tone.

But the character at the crux of the show is Billingsley's Ballard, a nerdy everyman who probably wishes he had supernatural powers but contents himself with hanging out with those who do.

Billingsley brings a gentleness to the role, making the character believable, decent and a surrogate for the audience. He watches The Others with amazement, and so will viewers.

June 2000

John Billingsley – Uncharted Waters

Chasing after spirits, good and evil, is on this teacher’s curriculum.  When not lecturing in class, most university professors can usually be found grading exams, tutoring students or attending school-related functions. Not Miles Ballard, the bespectacled, slightly disheveled teacher on NBC’s supernatural thriller The Others. Except for when it comes to helping his students, he prefers to spend most of his off-campus hours hunting for ghosts.

Miles is the studious facilitator of ‘the others,’ a diverse group of gifted individuals whose extraordinary abilities allow them to reach beyond this world and into other dimensions. The group assists wandering souls who are having trouble crossing over to ‘the other side’ because of unfinished business here on Earth, while also trying to protect those who are still very much alive from being threatened by otherworldly creatures. Ironically, the professor must experience these ethereal encounters vicariously through his colleagues.

"My character is the only one in the group who doesn’t have supernatural abilities." Explains John Billingsley, the affable actor who plays Miles. "Here’s a guy who is absolutely fascinated by the paranormal but has not, himself, actually been able to dip his toe in that water, much like myself. I’ve never had any kind of supernatural experience. There are so many people in the world that claim to have met a ghost. Me, I’ve never even heard a clank in the night," he laughs.

Child Playwright

 A veteran stage actor, Billingsley brings a wealth of acting experience to his work on The Others. Born in Pennsylvania, he attended Bennington College in Vermont where he chose to pursue a career as a thespian over that of a writer. "I always loved to act and I wrote plays as a child. But I’m a pretty social person and found that the discipline of sitting down at a desk for the requisite five or six hours a day was much harder to get used to than the fun of being in a rehearsal hall. In the end, I gravitated more towards acting because it offered the added advantage of allowing me to get out and have a few laughs and a beer with my friends afterwards." He beings to chuckle when recalling his feature film début in the 1988 drama Seven Hours to Judgment, directed by and starring Beau Bridges.

"I look back at it now and tell my friends, ‘Don’t see this movie!’ I was so terrible in it. I was young, in my twenties, and except for college projects I hadn’t really worked in front of a camera, so I didn’t know that small and subtle could be a good thing. Man, you could have slathered me with mustard and put me between two slices of bread, I was such a ham," jokes the actor. "Beau Bridges was sweet as pie, thought. At one point in the film, I grab a shotgun out of the closet and chase him around the room. All I can remember being told was, ‘We’ve got to do this in one take. You need to fire the gun the second you hit your mark.’ I was petrified and convinced that I was going to screw it up, but in the end I did everything right and on the first take," he says happily.

Billingsley’s other movie credits include Born to be Wild. Eat Your Heart Out and I Love You to Death. On television, he had guest-starred on such a series as NYPD Blue, The Practice, The Pretender, Profiler and Martial Law. The Others marks his first time as a series regular and, unlike most of his roles, he won the part of Miles Ballard after only one audition.

"The ladies who cast our show, Megan McConnell, Janet Gilmore and their associates, Jamie Rudoski, are just wonderful," praises the actor. "They had hired me in the past for felicity and The Practice, so they brought me in to read for The Others. I did three scenes, which I felt went very well, and a week later I got a call offering me the job. I was in my manager’s office and her assistant was talking on the phone and began writing ‘Spielberg’ over and over on her notepad. Steven Spielberg’s company, DreamWorks, produces our show and, from what I understand, he does not believe in callbacks. Apparently, they’d shown my tape to Steven, he liked what he saw and wanted to make sure I kept myself available. Naturally, I did.

Flying Near the Liquor Trolly

"A week or so after that I was up in Toronto, Canada shooting the pilot, which was an absolute delight," continues Billingsley. "so much of what happens in this profession hinges on whether or not you get along well with the people you work with. Well, things started off on the right foot even before I left Los Angeles. I was standing in line at the airport and the man in front of me was John Aylward, who plays Albert, the blind man with a ‘sixth sense’.  "I’ve known John for twenty years. He and I worked together in Seattle and I used to be his cat-sitter. I asked him, ‘John, what are you doing here? Are you going to Toronto?’ He told me, ‘Yeah, I’m doing the pilot for this new Steven Spielberg show.’ I said ‘You’re the blind guy,’ and he said ‘You’re the nerd!’ We got on the plane, they parked the liquor cart by us and we had a lot of laughs all the way to Canada."

In the show’s episode, Miles introduces himself to a student named Marian Kitt (Julianne Nicholson), who is being haunted by the ghost of a woman who died in her dorm room a few years back. Marian is a medium and has the ability to communicate with the deceased. Miles believed that he and ‘the others’ can teach her how to harness these powers so that she can help this woman’s spirit rest in peace. The professor would love for Marian to join the group, even though he knows that once she opens the door to ‘the other side’ her like will never be the same again.  "Miles has a great deal of affection for Marian and feels responsible for her," says Billingsley. "After all, he’s the one who pretty much discovers her and brings her into the group. I think that sometimes he feels guilty about doing this because Marian goes through quite a lot for someone so young and may not as yet be ready to face some of the things she’s having to experience. However, he realizes she might be the only hope for ‘the others’ to carry on when their spiritual leader Elmer Greentree [Bill Cobbs] eventually passes on. Elmer knows this too, and proceeds to make Marian his protégé fairly early on. I’ll be curious to see if this results on any quasi-paternalistic jealousy because Miles doesn’t have as much of a chance to mould Marian since she’s working so closely with Elmer."

Cruising Height

With Marian now among them, ‘the others’ take on some of their most bizarre and dangerous cases yet. In the episode Unnamed, the search for a little boy who has been missing for three years, while in the chilling tale Eyes, the group must battle another man’s demons. Thanks to Miles, their investigations even take them to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet to search for Souls Onboard a haunted aircraft.  "In this episode Miles sort of suckers his friends into investigating some psychic phenomenon without their really know that that’s what they’re being asked to do. Unfortunately, it backfires on him." Laughs the actor. "Out of all the episodes we’ve shot so far, this one features my character most prominently, so there’s a part of me that considers it my favorite because I’ve got the most to do. Honestly, though, I can’t say that we’ve done a story that I’ve disliked.  The writers are trying all sorts of plots to attract as wide an audience as possible, which is one of the things I dig about the show.

"Something else that I’m really enjoying is the chance to work with so many famous directors. Because Steven Spielberg is who he is he’s able to get these marvelous feature film directors to direct our show. For example, we’ve has Bill Condon [Gods and Monsters], Bill Malone [House on Haunted Hill] and Tobe Hooper [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre], who did Souls Onboard. It’s just so fascinating because these guys have each developed their own very unique and distinctive visual styles. So each episode of The Others not only has a different look to it but also a different tone when it comes to the writing."

Some critics are touting The Others as a cross between The X-Files and the feature film The Sixth Sense with a generous dash of Touched by an Angel thrown in for good measure. While the series does contain elements of these big and small screen hits, Billingsley believes there are a number of other aspects to it that will also appeal to viewers.

Spirituality

"As a thesis, the show says that the need for living creatures to relate to and deal with each other is so overwhelming that it transcends death. Because of this, a person may sometimes reach beyond the grave to finish what needs to be finished before they can move on," he says. "I find that to be a very moving type of theme. In a way, it’s got some of the spirituality on Touched by an Angel but in a far more supernatural sense. This is something, I hope, will allow us to have a broader audience, you know?"

"Last nut not least, it’s a program that’s driven by character acting," stresses Billingsley. "It’s not about seven people all under thirty. In our should the leader of all the pack is a 70 year old black gentleman [Bill Cobbs], John Aylward is a craggy 50 year old, I’m kind of a dumpy 40 year old and Julianne is so not your standard issue, twentysomething sex kitten. She’s absolutely lovely but in a very off-kilter sort of way. So The Others bucks today’s notion that a television show needs to be built around gorgeous hard bodies, and speaking on behalf of this body, that’s a good thing." He laughs.