BYUtv’s “Granite Flats” could be watched by anyone in the family, from grandparents to children. But the show's producers never called it family friendly.
Series co-executive producer Derek Marquis said the term “family friendly” is too easily connected with anything safe for children to watch. But “Granite Flats” sought to be more than that.
“There is something in that series that across the board appeals to all demographics," Marquis said earlier this year. "And in a way, that has become lightning in a bottle for us."
What started as a student project became a scripted TV series that took some media observers by surprise. Season 3 of "Granite Flats," which has been available for streaming on Netflix since May and online at byutv.org since April, will make its broadcast premiere in October. The show "was, is and will always be a huge success," according to co-executive producer Scott Swofford. But Season 3 of "Granite Flats" will be its last after the show's cancellation was announced in June.
Here's a look back at what the ambitious show accomplished as it attempted to, as Swofford wrote, "create an innovative, purposeful scripted series to see if people would watch as families, friends and colleagues."
Humble beginnings
“Granite Flats” originated in the BYU Department of Theatre and Media Arts with a screenplay written by student James Shores for a class project.
Swofford, who is also BYU Broadcasting's director of content, saw promise in Shores' student project and suggested it extend beyond the single episode Shores had originally written. Swofford then took on the role of "Granite Flats" director.
“It originated in the mind of a brilliant BYU student, and then pairing him with a brilliant director of content and a brilliant team of television professionals, that morphed into what we now know as ‘Granite Flats,’” Marquis said.
The show is set in the small, fictitious town of Granite Flats, Colorado, in the 1960s, and chronicles the lives of people navigating the Cold War era. It’s certainly family centered as it follows the relationships between and within families.
After three seasons, the “Granite Flats” cast had featured recognizable actors such as Cary Elwes (Westley from "The Princess Bride"), Christopher Lloyd (Doc Brown from the Back to the Future trilogy), TV and film veteran Parker Posey, and George Newbern from the Father of the Bride films.
Swofford announced June 25 on the BYUtv blog that the show would end after its third season.
"As marvelous as the last three years have been for all of us, it’s time for the Granite Flats chapter to come to a close," Swofford wrote. "We look forward to what is on the horizon in the form of additional scripted content at BYUtv and have chosen to concentrate resources on these ideas and forego producing a fourth season of Granite Flats."
Making an impression
Despite the show's home being BYUtv, a network owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Granite Flats" is not a “Mormon program,” said John Plummer, the third season's head writer and a practicing Buddhist from New York. It was meant to interest people across all faiths. According to Plummer, the show’s seemingly broad appeal was evidenced by the contract with Netflix.
“We went from being this little idea of a pilot based on a 20-minute student film to Netflix in less than three years,” Plummer said. “For BYUtv to be on Netflix, it’s extraordinary.”
It was a step Marquis said fit perfectly with BYUtv’s commitment to getting its content to audiences in innovative ways. The network was first in the United States to stream its channel live online.
“When the opportunity for us to work with Netflix came along, it really made perfect sense for BYU Broadcasting, and BYUtv in particular, because that really was one of the areas that we had not yet dipped our toe into," Marquis said.
A Business Insider story at the time of the Netflix release detailed the unlikelihood of a series out of Provo premiering on Netflix.
"The news here isn’t that the streaming service acquired an existing show to make available for its subscribers," the Business Insider article read. "It’s where it (the show) came from."
"Granite Flats" was also featured in a 2014 New York Times article that described it as having "found the sweet spot where popular culture combines with a religious sensibility."
According to Swofford, the series was in a league of its own.
“I think we’re filling a niche that absolutely nobody is filling,” Swofford said. “I hope people copy us.”
Seeing the good
"Granite Flats" was BYUtv’s first venture into scripted drama. And though it's family friendly in the sense that it's free of objectionable language and sexual content, the series doesn’t shy away from the suspicious mood of its Cold War-era setting.
While "Granite Flats" is different from anything BYUtv has done in the past, both Plummer and Swofford said it meets the network’s mission to “see the good.”
“That’s the slogan,” Plummer said. “And that’s really the mission. How can we see good even in a world that’s dark?”
The show's creators worked to strike a balance and depict suspenseful, emotional situations in a meaningful way without what many other shows use for “hooks,” as Scott Christopher, who plays military hospital patient Frank Quincy, called them.
“Every show has to have a hook, and this show doesn’t rely on the basic Hollywood hooks of violence and gratuitous imagery,” Christopher said. “It has to rely on a well-written and well-acted show.”
The show also tried to avoid shallow characters and to represent what Swofford referred to as the “gray area” that all real people live in. Swofford and Plummer tried to avoid polarized, black-and-white characters who are all good or all bad.
“We’re all heroes, and at some moment or other we all fall short of heroic status,” Swofford said. “That’s where it gets interesting.
"Not that we want people who are ambiguous or don’t know right from wrong. No, that’s not the point at all. We’re trying to see the good in the world. So we want characters who know what they want to accomplish but don’t always get to do it quite so easily as sometimes our scriptural or cultural heroes do.”
A family project
The objective of “Granite Flats” was embraced by the tightly knit, unified crew that produced it, according to Marquis. Also, being part of an independent network afforded the autonomy to do things differently from other TV networks.
“We’ve had a very small creative team that has worked really, really well together, that trusts one another, and we just really have had something that you wouldn’t get in a typical network environment,” Marquis said. “That’s the freedom to experiment and the freedom to test ideas.”
Plummer said the project gave him “truly unprecedented creative freedom” without constant progress checks that would be mandated on a normal network show.
Swofford said the crew had a shared vision of what the show and characters needed to be, which allowed Plummer to exercise creative freedom.
“The good news is that John (Plummer) is so incredibly talented that all his ideas were good ones, and so they were no-brainers to say, ‘Yeah, let’s do that,’” he said.
"Granite Flats" certainly became a family affair for Plummer, whose wife, Maia Guest, and son Charlie both auditioned and landed roles on the show.
“I can’t believe this one family in New York that has that kind of concentrated talent, but it was an easy decision to make when I saw their audition,” Swofford said.
Plummer said working on the show with members of his family was one of the most rewarding things of all.
“We have this project together,” he said. “No matter what happens next for all of us, we have this body of work that we’ve created together, and that’s pretty special.”
Email: jjohnson@deseretnews.com