Interview: David J. Burke, co-creator of UNSUB, discusses the series' origins as well as its struggles during its all-too-short lifespan

When you write a piece about a short-lived series not because you think anyone’s going to read it but simply because it’s something you want to write about, it’s always a pleasant surprise when you hear back from people who say that they’ve enjoyed your work. It’s even more pleasantly surprising when one of those people is the co-creator of the series you’ve written about, and it kicks things even one notch higher when that individual agrees to do an interview with you, too.

As such, I welcome you to read my conversation with David J. Burke, co-creator of UNSUB. I will also add that we also chatted about a pilot he did in 1997 called Automatic Avenue, but I’d like to try and find a copy of said pilot before I put together that piece…and if for some reason I can’t manage to do that, I’d at least like to try and talk to a couple of the cast members. As it happens, I’ve already talked to one of them for Just a Couple of Characters, so fingers crossed that I can convince Billy Campbell to hop onto Zoom again to chat about this endeavor, too.

But I digress. Right now, it’s time to talk UNSUB!

David Burke: Wow, you, uh... [Starts to laugh.] I haven't thought about Unsub in maybe 30 years, literally.

Well, what can I say? I love to do stuff on TV series that strike my fancy, and that's the beauty of this Substack newsletter: if it strikes my fancy, I can write about it.

Nice! Well, Marc Guggenheim sent me your screed and the interviews with the Unsub guys, and it actualy prompted me to look at a few Unsubs, and it wasn't as awful as I remember! [Laughs.] 

Good to know! Honestly, it's a little bit dated just by virtue of the technology, but I really think it holds up much better for a show from 1989 than you'd have any reason to expect.

Well, I appreciate that. It does hold up as a procedural, I guess. And, yes, the technology can be very dated, but it was a relief to look at it and go, "You know, we didn't do that badly." It was pretty good. So thank you for that!

I guess I'll start by asking the obligatory secret origin question. Did you and Stephen Kronish jointly come up with the idea, or did one of you come up with it and pitch it to the other?

No, this is what happened. Now, I had a vague awareness of the Behavioral Science Unit because of Manhunter, because I was working on a show called Crime Story with Michael Mann while he was doing Manhunter. But I didn't actually associate the Behavioral Science Unit with Manhunter because it wasn't so much about the unit as it was about the William Petersen character. But when I went over to Wiseguy, a friend of mine brought me this idea to do something with the Behavior Science Unit. He had a page of suggested characters. He hadn't done much. But it sparked my interest, and I said to Steve Kronish, "We should take a look at this and see if there's anything here."

And Steve and I did that, and we went to Stephen Cannell and we laid it out for him. We said, "You know, this is a really interesting group of people..." We didn't have a fixed set of characters, but we had the world in which it operated, and the cutting-edge-at-the-time tools that they used, and the analysis that they did, which was very new at the time. And Cannell loved that. And that was it. He said, "Well, let's think about it. Now get back to work. You're doing Wiseguy now, so go do that." [Laughs.]

A couple of months later, he has lunch with Brandon Tartikoff, and Tartikoff is in need of something...and when he was in need of something fast, he always turned to Cannell, because Cannell, hell or high water, would get a pilot out for him. And Tartikoff said, "What have you got?" And Cannell couldn't think of anything, so he suddenly just spit out this idea for Unsub. And Tartikoff ordered it at lunch! Now, as was said in your interviews, Tartikoff was expecting a variation on The A-Team...and he got a lot darker than he expected! 

And beyond Brandon not being a fan of the show at all... I mean, had it been doing gangbuster numbers, maybe it would've stayed around, but there were two events that happened at NBC while we were doing the show. One was a movie of the week called Sex Tapes Scandal. They were dragged over the coals. They were eviscerated for this. "Pandering..." "Pornographic..." The critics just hammered them to death over this. The other thing was a Geraldo Rivera thing, one of his scandalous specials about Satan worship, which I think was also mentioned in your interviews. So between those two things, they were being pilloried by the press across the board.

And while these things are going on, they start getting dailies from us, and one of the episodes - I think it was "And They Swam Right Over the Dam" - was about two orphaned pediatricians who were now going out and committing murders to orphan some of the children who were their patients, and while one of the guys committed the murders, the other masturbated into a sink. [Laughs.] So NBC's being called pornographers, and then they ask us, "Well, whaddaya got coming up next week?" "Well, uh..."

"Funny you should ask!"

Yeah, exactly! So the timing was just way off and wrong and...ugh. That's pretty much it!

Did Kent McCord ever tell you about his pitch for his similar pilot, Chief?

No, he didn't. But, you know, I was in L.A., everybody else and the crew, they were in Vancouver, so we really didn't see much of each other.

It was just this remarkable coincidence where it was almost entirely the same pitch that you guys came up with, but he came to Cannell with it right after he'd met with you guys.

That would happen with Cannell. [Laughs.] When I went to work for Wiseguy, that night I'm up late channel surfing, and an old movie comes on with Jim Garner as a detective or something [Marlowe], and the villain is a guy named Sonny Steelgrave, which was the name of the character that Ray Sharkey played in Wiseguy! I said, "Steve, that's an unusual name. How on earth did you come up with it? Because I just heard it in a movie." And he said, "I think I must've seen the same movie!"

You probably saw Richard's story about David Soul and his tendency to mark up his scripts and send over suggestions. Do you remember that?

Oh, David Soul was obsessed with his own thinking on these things, and it became... It was a problem for me! I went up to Vancouver when we were first getting started, we turned in the script, and David asked to sit down and go over the script. So I sat down with him for three or four hours, had lunch, went over every word of the script. He had ideas where I thought they were good and we used them, and where I didn't, I'd explain why and frequently come up with something that would be a compromise, and when we were done, we were done, and that was great.

The next day, he calls me and wants to go over the same script again. So I get together with him, and we start going over his things, and I say, "Look, we did this yesterday. I had four hours of that, not to mention the four weeks in writing it after spending four days breaking it. So we're doing a little much here." And he said, "Well, we've got to do this!" And I said, "But we... Oh, all right." We get through it.

The next day, he wants to go over it again. I said, "I'll meet with you, but don't bother bringing the script. I'm not going to do this again. This is good work, and it's solid." And he said to me, "But it's not as good as Wiseguy! Why can't this be as good as Wiseguy? I can't get this shit out of my mouth!" And I said, "You know, the same people who write Wiseguy write this. Now, if you think we come to this party intent on writing shit for David Soul, you're out of your mind! This works." He wasn't real happy with that. But I guess that's who he is. Or was then. But there are actors like that, and anybody who works in television, particularly during my time, encountered actors who thought they knew better.

I'm sure you also saw Richard's story about Emmet Walsh not wanting to go out to dinner with the cast and crew because if David Soul was going, he was inevitably going to hold court.

I get that. [Laughs.] There was a lot of that. But Emmet was great. And Richard was great. Everybody on the cast was great to deal with, other than David, who was just so demanding and...it was presumptuous behavior frequently by him. And I don't give a fuck if you're a star. That has nothing to me. Don't bring that to table where you're, like, "It's my face up there, so you've got to listen to me." That's not a good point to make with me. If you've got a good point to make, have it be substantive.

Yeah, Unsub was a difficult show to get going for so many reasons. Tartikoff thinking he was buying something he wasn't buying, we were at odds with the network and ourselves about casting, we were being celebrated for Wiseguy, and that was taking up more time than it should have because we found ourselves in stunt casting paradise with all the people who were showing up. But it was fun looking at Unsub again. I didn't look at all the episodes, but I watched "White Bone Demon," and I watched "Silent Stalker," and I said, "Okay, we didn't do so badly!" 

And earlier you mentioned "And They Swam Right Over the Dam," which was Richard's spotlight show. That was pretty great, too. 

Yeah, and Richard... He had a thankless task. It was an elite unit, but Richard's character was supposed to be a bit goofy, and he frequently gets a little dismissed in an affectionate way by David Soul's character, and we were always having this debate: "He can be a little awkward, but he's got to have skills, otherwise why would he be there?" But he delivered for us, no doubt about it.

As far as the directors, Joe Marozzo talked about how he clashed with Corey Allen, who got in his head so badly right before he went to do his big monologue that he couldn't do it.

Oh, yeah. I didn't know Corey. Cannell hired him...and that was another problem. He was two days behind in a fairly simple procedural show, and Cannell wanted to fire the cinematographer, and he also wanted to fire the next director up and have Corey do two episodes back to back. And we had this big debate about it, because I knew that the problems weren't the cinematographer. I knew that guy well. The problem... We were delayed because of Corey! And I finally put my foot down: "If I'm gonna run this show, you've gotta let me do it, Steve, and it's gotta be my director on the next episode, and you've gotta at least give my cinematographer a chance to redeem himself by proving that when working with another director he'll be on time." So Cannell said, "All right," and that's what happened, and we were back on schedule. And the next episode was "Silent Stalker," which directorially was much better for us than what Corey had done. 

That's actually the one where Richard was raving about getting a chance to work with William Fraker. He said he kept him out late at the bar, asking questions and getting him to tell stories.

[Laughs.] Oh, Fraker was the best, yeah. I loved any opportunity we had on any of the shows to hire people who were old hands, veterans. Bill Fraker was one of 'em, and he was a really good director. He really brought stuff to the party for us. And on Wiseguy, we were working with actors who hadn't worked in 20 years, some of 'em. And it was great having them on the show, so you'd get to hear the old stories!

Speaking of Wiseguy actors, Kevin Spacey was great in his turn as guest villain on Unsub.

That came about because he'd just finished doing Wiseguy, and he was new to town in a way. He'd certainly had a career on the east coast in the theater, but when you start in Hollywood, it can be hard to get things going, and when you guest star on TV shows, it doesn't pay you all that much. And I thought, "Well, he's playing basically two characters. Maybe I can get him paid twice." And they said they'd pay him for each character! So I called him up and said, "Kevin, if you want to do another week of TV, I can get you paid for two characters," and he said, "I'll take it!" [Laughs.] And the idea of acting with himself was pretty important to him, to give that a try and see how that actually worked.

And I feel like I've developed a pattern here when it comes to praising episodes, but the two-parter that closed out the series was also great, thanks in no small part to Jason Bernard's performance. 

He was wonderful, wasn't he? And he had also just finished a Wiseguy when he did that. That two-parter, I thought that was wonderful, and anecdotally, that story came from a guy named Tony Schembri, who was the model for the lead character in The Commish! Steve Kronish and I knew Tony pretty well, and we'd been trying to get his story up and running as a series, and we were having a hard time doing it. And we said to Tony, "We'd like to use these anecdotes of yours based on a true story, and we'll pay you for that while we're trying to get The Commish going." And that turned out really well, and a lot of the beats in that were absolutely true. When I look at that... You know, I've since seen on other shows a variation of that theme play out - the evil villain's upstate New York farm where all the horrors took place - but Jason Bernard really made that work really well. 

We did like doing the show. And there were moments...I think Mike Post was nominated for an Emmy for his music for the show! When we sat down and talked to him about music, all I could think was, "I want a pan flute and a digeridoo." And he did it! He made it work! 

I double-checked, and you're right: he was indeed nominated. 

And he was as surprised as anybody when it happened! [Laughs.] He said the digeridoo made him crazy, because it only has one note. The tonal changes are how the person blowing it manipulates their jaw, their lips. And Post could only find one guy who really knew how to play it, and if that guy wasn't available when he was going to score it, we'd be in trouble! So finally he had the guy come in and play virtually everything he could play on it, so he could sample it when it was time to do the music for the score. 

Do you have any recollection of where you wanted to go with the show if it had continued?

No. You know, we were so exhausted from the battle we were having...and it was a pitched battle that was all borne out of Brandon not realizing what the show was and the failings of a couple of programs that NBC had done that had gotten eviscerated by the press. And they sort of turned their sights on us, like, "Oh, they're gonna be the next problem, we'd better put a stop to this before it begins!" [Laughs.] So on some levels we were all relieved!