Los Angeles — Are school shootings becoming that commonplace?
Monday morning a San Diego high school student shot 15 of his classmates, killing two. That night, at the Paley Festival in Los Angeles, an upcoming episode of "Boston Public" centering on a student with a hit list of students and teachers was screened. However, the first questions directed to the cast and creators at the ensuing panel were not about the topical nature of the show.
It seemed vaguely eerie that the episode which just wrapped production and is scheduled to air March 26 foretold the day's events. After all, the writers had plenty of past school shootings on which to model the plot, in which Vice Principal Guber discovers a disturbing journal in the locker of the school's resident runt. Still, it wasn't until several breezy questions about the characters, casting and David E. Kelley's past shows that the subject even came up.
Anthony Heald, who plays lovelorn disciplinarian Guber, was the first to address the episode's timeliness.
"We were very mindful of the violence that's been going on at schools," Heald said. "(Events like the San Diego shooting) bring back the responsibility to be faithful to these life and death issues, be it violence or sexuality."
The upcoming epi-sode, "Chapter 16," tackles both the free speech and safety issues at stake when the journal containing the hit list is discovered during a locker search for something unrelated.
Guber threatens, "When you live in the age of Columbine, the first thing to go is students' civil rights."
To that, the student (John Francis Daley) responds, "Is there a rule that people can't be dark or strange?"
The "ER"-esque plotlines drew fire from critics early on, a charge that in the fall prompted Kelley to defensively tell them to read the headlines.
Maybe he was right.
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