Joan Rater and Tony Phelan have been working together for decades on numerous TV series, and now marks a particularly exciting time for the duo as Fire Country has a new and well-received spinoff, Sheriff Country.
As they look to the current moment, they were delighted to hear Awards Buzz bring up one of their less-remembered and short-lived projects, Threat Matrix, which lasted less than a season back in 2003. Rater shared:
“That season, the Threat Matrix season, I think we were on three different shows that kept getting cancelled. I’ll say, my opinion is that, to be on all these shows, to be on Grey’s Anatomy, where we got to observe surgeries, we got to really dive into medical research. To be going up to Edgewater to meet firefighters and observe what they do. To meet sheriffs and get a tour of what they do, watch them do this whole tactical training. It blows your mind open, the dedication, the heroic people who sign up for these jobs. I just find it to be super fun. The question is, how do I take this job and fill it in with interesting conflict and cool characters. It’s super fun. There’s not a better job on the planet.”
About the evolution of the procedural and TV in general, Phelan added:
“I think the big difference is, if you look back at something like Threat Matrix, the network’s desire to tell more character-based stories. Even though you have a procedural element, really the characters are what keep people coming back to it. Being able to do a long arc over a season and see characters go through a lot of things that they have to go through emotionally in their jobs and in their lives, but be able to go home with them at the end of the day, that’s the kind of storytelling Joan and I are really drawn to.”
New episodes of Sheriff Country and Fire Country air back-to-back on Friday nights on CBS.
