Neal Baer
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Neal Baer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's like, it's not easy.
Well, I like to engage them and then they're surprised when it doesn't go their way, but it's not jumping the shark. It's not duex machina. It's, oh, of course, that turn, of course. I didn't see that coming, but it's because... I was with that character and I believed what they were believing. I believe that person who was lying.
How many times have we been lied to in our lives by people we're close to? It happens. So in plot, I'm more interested in. So we talk a lot about procedurals and characters. So I've done procedurals. ER is a medical procedural. SVU is a detective crime procedural procedure. Under the Dome is really not a procedural. It's about fascism.
Stephen would say that, King as well, who's going to run the trains under the dome ultimately. And Designated Survivor is a procedural, political kind of procedural where every episode there's an issue he has to deal with or problem, but character drives it. So it's not so much about the plot that I'm
most interested in i'm interested in how the plot can ignite reflect and refract who our characters are so in other words when george clooney in year two i did an episode about a kid who wanted to be allowed to die who had cystic fibrosis yes he's end stage he's under 18. And George is like, I got to save this kid. I got to save this kid. And Laura Innes' character says to him, who is this about?
You or the kid? What does the kid want? It was a big turning point in the story arc of his character. And so he ultimately doesn't intubate the kid when he's dying. And the mother comes in, wonderful Veronica Cartwright from Alien and The Birds when she was a child. Leave it to Bieber as a child. She says, intubate him. And she has the authority then.
It's changed a bit now in the United States, not so much in Europe. And George is forced to do it. So the plot is pretty straightforward. I just told you the plot. But what the plot gave me, what the story gave me is, how do I find some medical story that will illustrate what Clooney is going through in year two now? Or year three, I should say. So he's always like, I'm saving the kid.
And the year two, I did where he saved a kid in the tunnel, and he was the hero. And I thought, you know, now I want to go deeper with him. And so I constructed a plot where he's forced to choose, is it about him, as Laura Innes says, or is it about the kid? But the point was, is that plot serves my characters always. So that's how I think about it.
The best example is Will and Grace and Modern Family and Gay Marriage, I think. It's like, they're just like you and me. They're just like, they have kids, they have a family. Modern Family and Will and Grace really changed, I think, the way people viewed gay marriage because
They didn't really challenge people in ways that maybe some queer activists wanted them to in the sense that they didn't go into the wide range of cultural, behavioral, social things that queer people might do that might quote, quote, quote, quote. offend, but they did really show that there's really not that much difference. They want the same thing. They want families.
They want to be left alone. They want to live a fulfilling life. And I think Modern Family did a good job at that. And Will and Grace, they normalized it. We haven't really been able to, quote, normalize trans characters. I brought trans characters on my show. I think it's normal for me as a physician and a gay man, but it's certainly not normal for a lot of people.
So I want to tell more of those stories and not in like cadre ways. So I think that's where we have to go.
The first takeaway is to listen to other people's stories, to tell them your stories. We can tell our own stories. We can tell about our own feelings, but we have to listen to other people's stories. We don't know what's best by telling people what their story should be. We should welcome people to tell their stories.
The second takeaway, I think, is to read widely and all kinds of things, novels, nonfiction, that will help develop compassion and also rage and what I call accompaniment. I think it's important. And the third takeaway is to go back and watch these movies, particularly that inspired you as a child and ask you, do they still inspire you? Do they still move you? Share them with folks.
It's not just what the latest thing is on any streamer or on YouTube or TikTok because it's so ephemeral. But there are films that speak across generations. I watch Wuthering Heights, the original, and I cry. I cry and cry because it speaks to me about love that just doesn't quite work out.
Thank you, Lynn, for having me. It's been really fun.
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