These are a few of the things viewers have come to know about Michael Hayes, television's newest crusading prosecutor: He puts family and loyalty first, but his pursuit of a corruption case forced his surrogate father to commit suicide; he hates legal loopholes, but he used one to introduce in court a man's dying confession to a priest; he believes the justice system protects the innocent, but when he pressured a good-hearted doctor to testify against an HMO, her career and marriage were destroyed.
Nearly all new television shows go through a maturing process, when the characters, and the writers, find their voices, but few of the dramas introduced this fall have struggled to define a more complex personality than "Michael Hayes," which stars David Caruso in his return to television after three years of trying to build a movie career. Perhaps most interesting is that these different traits reflect not just the contradictions within an individual, but the differing viewpoints of each member of the group of strong-minded executive producers who are shaping "Michael Hayes," on CBS on Tuesday nights (8 p.m., Ch. 2).The producers had such firm views about the character that the network brought in a fifth executive producer, in part to help the others' visions coalesce.
"Michael Hayes" has been struggling so far in the ratings, but CBS officials have expressed satisfaction with the show's progress, and in an interview Monday, Leslie Moonves, president of CBS Television, said the network had just decided to order 13 more episodes for the spring season.
The complexity of the Hayes character reflects one of the more important contrasts between much of the writing for television and films: television is generally a collaborative process in which people with sharply divergent perspectives work together, melding their ideas into one thinking, breathing person. Writing for movies tends to be a more solitary process in which a final script may be the work of many hands but usually one at a time.
In "Michael Hayes," it is possible to peel the character apart and find qualities that reflect the writers wrestling to define him.
For instance, Caruso, who is himself an executive producer, explained in an interview that Hayes, who was a police officer before getting a law degree and becoming the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, is intended to affirm that the law works and that crooks do get caught. Hayes, in Caruso's view, is out to purge evil from New York City and make people feel safe, while never questioning his own razor-sharp convictions.
Nicholas Pileggi, one of the executive producers, who is well known as the author of the screenplays for "Goodfellas" and "Casino" and before that was a veteran New York reporter, said he wanted to create a character who was in touch with his blue-collar roots and filled with quiet self-confidence. Pileggi, who helped develop the show but has not been writing scripts, emphasized that he did not want Hayes to be slick or clever, as many lawyers can be, but to have a moral compass that always pointed true north.
John Romano, another executive producer and a former Dickens scholar who previously wrote for "Hill Street Blues," explained: "One of the things I wanted to do with `Michael Hayes' was dust off the Bill of Rights. His attitude is: We're going to get the guy by the rules or not at all." Romano added that he wanted to contrast this with the attitude on police shows like "NYPD Blue" (on which Caruso had once starred), which often characterize the law as a nuisance that gets in the way of bringing criminals to brook.
And there is Paul Haggis, a well-regarded Canadian-born writer whose show "EZ Streets" ultimately failed last year but was critically acclaimed for its dark vision of society.
Haggis was brought in by CBS as an executive producer after "Michael Hayes" had begun, in large measure to make Hayes more complex and less self-righteous. He was also asked to bring some order to the range of viewpoints on the show.
Haggis made clear that, in his view, even when the law works, there are innocent victims, and that there are no endings that make everyone happy. In other words, his is a far murkier moral universe.
"I just think there's a terrible price to be paid for being right," said Haggis, who was involved in writing the episode about the doctor whose testimony against a health-maintenance organization ruined her life. "I'm trying to give Hayes some flaws, and that's not an easy thing to do because of the way some of the other people here feel."
"We had a big argument over this," said Haggis. "David wanted her to win her husband back at least. But I thought there was a price to be paid, and she paid it."
The fifth executive producer, Craig Baumgarten, is Caruso's personal manager, and his role has been organizing and managing the show rather than in writing scripts, the others said.
"I'd be a lot more concerned if there wasn't disagreement in the front office," Caruso said. "I'm grateful for the different personalities here."
One of the most telling moments in the process of shaping the character came when the producers decided to use the pilot episode, which normally runs first, as the second show. For the show's premiere, Haggis quickly produced an episode that began to lay out the contradictions that have made the world of "Michael Hayes" more complex than the others had envisioned.
In the pilot, the federal prosecutor is hurt in a mob car bombing, and Michael Hayes, one of his assistants, is named acting U.S. attorney. The key moment comes when Hayes, in pursuing an investigation of public corruption, is faced with having to indict the man who raised him like a father. His sense of mission makes him stick to principle rather than loyalties, and the man kills himself rather than face disgrace.
"Here's what I think the purpose of the character is: Ultimately, he believes in the laws," said Caruso. "I think that Michael Hayes thinks life as we know it, the whole structure, including the laws, is worth preserving."
Caruso underscored his view by saying that, at his insistence, Michael Hayes has hanging in his apartment a portrait of Robert F. Kennedy. "Bobby Kennedy is Michael Hayes' hero," said Caruso. "Kennedy took the job seriously, and that's what Michael Hayes does."
In the episode that was shown first, life is trickier. A Mafia turncoat has received immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony against a mob boss. But one of the murders to which he confesses is familiar to Hayes. He had investigated the crime, the killing of a young woman, when he was still a policeman. He had promised the woman's parents that he would never give up looking for the killer.
Hayes is faced with the prospect that, if he prosecutes the turncoat for the murder, he will jeopardize the case against the mob boss. If he does not prosecute him, he has betrayed the young woman's parents. That is the kind of moral quandary that Haggis said he likes.