Shawn Ryan Talks "Terriers"

In an excellent interview with Forbes in which he spoke about the difference between network and cable and the evolution of television in recent years, Shawn Ryan had this to say about Terriers:

You have said that when creator Ted Griffin initially pitched you the idea for Terriers, you envisioned it as a big, glossy network show and dollar signs danced around in your head. What would it have looked like as a network show? 

We’ll never know what Terriers would have been in a network style because Ted Griffin was immediately resistant to trying to cash in for the big bucks like I was interested in doing. [laughs] Even though he only half knew what the show was when we first started to talk about it, he knew instinctually that this was something that would go to a darker, more demented place than network TV would allow. I think it’s a very funny, character-driven series, but by the end of the 13 episodes it will feel like an FX show. Ted is a guy who watches some TV –- he was a fan of The Shield and he really likes Mad Men and he wanted this show to exist in that universe and not in the Hawaii Five-0 [CBS], Undercovers [NBC]universe. So when he decided that was the route that he wanted to take, I said, ‘Great, but we have to make it so that this show feels like it could only be on FX. We can’t make an NBC show and hope that FX picks it up.’ He really embraced that – and yet there is a genial thing about this show that kind of goes counter to many of FX’s previous shows like The Shield, Rescue Me and Sons of Anarchy in that they’re very intense. So in many ways this is actually a departure for FX and we hope that it will exist well in the FX universe.