Randy Caldwell

If you pass through Beverly Hills, with its oxymoronic vulgar flats just beside crystal palaces, and you find yourself driving through the land of dancing fountains, lean palm trees, and metallic office buildings, then you have found Century City. Years ago, Twentieth Century Fox made a little film that almost broke them (you may have heard of it? Cleopatra?), and, in order to remain solvent, they had to sell off their back lot which is now a thriving business complex.

But never fear, the Fox lot still breathes steadily: Henry Fonda still stares down from his towering mural; Shirley Temple still smiles from the commissary walls; and F. Scott Fitzgerald's office still sits, a sacred sanctuary, in the bungalow wing now home to the hit CBS television show Judging Amy.

Through rain and the grey scent of rain on dusty pavement, we sloshed toward that very wing to talk with one of Judging Amy's writers, Randy Caldwell.

As myriad intellectuals continue to denigrate television scripts as sensationalist and devoid of any redeeming humanistic value, all the while rueing the corruption of our youth, Caldwell, and his fellow writers, continues to write scripts which are about nothing but redemption.

"When I first started working on Judging Amy," he told us, "I saw a story explaining the plate movement in Los Angeles County. Every year, Pasadena moves one inch closer to downtown Los Angeles. At the same time, I saw a court case in which some boys were being tried for setting pets on fire. I took those two ideas and put them together in my first script for the show, 'The Persistence of Tectonics.' In this storyline, Amy gets frustrated because her career isn't moving anywhere; she gets turned down as an appeals court judge, and she's stuck in juvenile court trying boys for setting pets on fire. What makes matters even worse is the fact that abusing an animal will only get these boys a couple of months in jail. Amy comes to Maxine, Tyne Daly's character, in frustration, and Maxine explains the persistence of tectonics. It's a small movement. Only an inch, but it is movement. And over time, this movement will cause radical shifts and changes. Amy, inspired, throws herself back into her work and figures out that if she gets the prosecutor to charge these boys with arson, rather than animal abuse, she can sentence them for a couple of years."

This redemptive writing is becoming more and more common on prime time network television shows, and it's not going unnoticed by awards committees either. In 1999, The Ark Trust gave Caldwell the Genesis Award for the kind treatment of animals in his script. The award was presented at The Beverly Hilton and the ceremony broadcast on Animal Planet.

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor," Henry David Thoreau once told us. Writers like Caldwell consciously endeavor, word by word, inch by inch, to change the perception of the prime time television show and the prime time television show writer.

Wouldn't Thoreau be proud.

February 2001