"Southland" creator John Wells on the show's gay cop ... and his subtle reveal in the premiere

As I'm sure most readers are aware, NBC premiered Southland last night and the identity of the gay cop was subtly revealed at the end of the episode. But it turns out the reveal wasn't supposed to be quite that subtle. In a teleconference call held by NBC last week, Southland creator John Wells was asked by Rob Owen, TV critic of the Pittsburgh Gazette (and a friend of mine) about the reveal. Here is what Wells had to say, plus some more details about the character. 

 

Spoiler warning! Don't read if you haven't yet watched the episode and don't want to know which cop is gay. 

Rob Owen: Hi, I had a quick question for John about the very subtle reveal about the Cudlitz character at the end of the episode. If I hadn’t known - someone had to tip me off that that was coming - I probably would not have caught on to that. How do you sort of plan to explore that character going forward?
John Wells: Well it’s only that subtle because we were about seven minutes over in the first cut.

RO: Oh.
JW: And the thing that made it a lot less subtle was one of the ones that we ended up cutting simply because we had, you know ,we kind of cut back to what we could do to just make sure all the stories worked.

But, yeah, he is a - he is a gay police officer on the LAPD. And again, you know, I think we’re at a particularly - certainly at the LAPD where that’s not an extraordinary event. So it will simply be a fact of his life and we’ll see it and see his world from that perspective.

RO: Are you - are you sort of happy now you had to make the cuts that it ended up being that subtle or...
JW: Yeah, because we are able now to kind of tease out the theme that we had written that got cut is actually going to show up in episode three now. So it saved us about a half day shooting.

RO: Okay there you go.
JW: It was really well shot and Chris did a great job shooting it. So we’re more than willing to continue to reuse our material that didn’t make it through the first cut. ... And, you know, it’s interesting, you know, the LAPD has recruited heavily in the gay community in West Hollywood and the gay and lesbian community. So there are a number of gay police officers in the Los Angeles PD.

As soon as I get my hands on episode three, I'll let you know what I think of those seven minutes!

If you watched last night, what did you think of the episode?