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    Damon Lindelhof and Soo Hugh on Encouraging ‘Creative Short Circuits’

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    For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.Years ago, the television writer Soo Hugh had a meeting with Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of the groundbreaking ABC drama “Lost.” Lindelof was looking for writers to work on his next series, “The Leftovers,” for HBO, and Hugh was an admirer. She didn’t get the job.The next time the two met, in March 2022, it was at the premiere party for “Pachinko,” Hugh’s own critically acclaimed series, on Apple TV+, based on the National Book Award finalist of the same name. Lindelof took his place among a long line of well-wishers.“Clearly I made a mistake,” he said, in a recent conversation with Hugh via video.It’s easy to imagine a parallel universe in which Lindelof, 50, and Hugh, 45, were collaborators. Both writers are known for sweeping, large-cast, character-driven narratives that center on questions of fate and the search for meaning. On “Lost,” the castaways of the island are haunted by the unfinished business of their previous lives. On “Pachinko,” multiple generations of a Korean family are buffeted by the forces of war and globalization.As a showrunner in the mid 2000s, Lindelof ran a writers’ room that looked and functioned much differently than is common today. On “Lost,” he said, he mostly hired other “white Jewish guys who wore glasses and loved ‘Star Wars’” to generate the 24-episodes in a season of network television. His latest show, “Mrs. Davis,” an eight-episode limited series for the streaming service Peacock, was made in partnership with its co-creator Tara Hernandez, a former writer and producer on “The Big Bang Theory,” and a team of writers from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds.Hugh who previously wrote for network and cable television, now sits at the helm of a show that would have been nearly impossible to imagine 15 years ago: a fully international production — with an all-Asian lead cast and dialogue in subtitled Korean and Japanese — financed and distributed by an American tech company that now also functions as a studio.But some things in Hollywood never change. At the time of this conversation, members of the Writers’ Guild of America — Hugh and Lindelof among them — were one week into a labor strike, in which they are demanding changes to pay and employment practices that they say are exploitative, including issues involving compensation for streaming shows. Lindelof was preparing to join other members in a picket line — just as he had when the last writers strike, in 2007, disrupted production of the fourth season of “Lost.”Lindelof, in Los Angeles, and Hugh, in New York, discussed the challenges of working as a television writer today, learning from their staffs and remaining true to their creative vision in a collaborative medium. This conversation has been condensed and edited.Adriana BelletDAMON LINDELOF Soo, I’m just curious — you guys are in production right now, right? You’re shooting?SOO HUGH We are. We have a month left. We just finished in Toronto as the strike was being called. The Korea portion starts next week and will go for five weeks.LINDELOF Are you going?HUGH I am going, but I felt conflicted. [Many studios have warned writers who are also producers to continue producing or risk losing their contracts.] I have done all of my writing services. I would say “Pachinko” is a producer’s show in some ways just because of the gargantuan production. It’s a headache. I don’t know how long I will stay. It makes me very uncomfortable figuring out those boundaries — they’re so gray. It’s very strange times.LINDELOF Yeah, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable, I guess. I think that everybody is looking for the right thing to do. I don’t have a show that’s in production right now. With “Mrs. Davis,” we finished everything — post, final sound mix, final visual effects — before the strike. So it’s a much cleaner line. I wake up, I picket and then I go to bed. So I’ll just say, I’m with you in spirit.What do you think your career would be like if you were starting today?HUGH I don’t know if you feel this way, Damon, but I feel like there’s so little room for failure now. My first show was a failure [Hugh’s “The Whispers” ran for a single season on ABC in 2015] and it was by learning what I never wanted to do again that I was able to go on to something I’m more proud of. Nowadays, the system feels so do or die.LINDELOF I agree a thousand percent. In the mid-90s, when I first came out to Los Angeles and was trying to figure out how to become a professional writer, broadcast television was still where most of the work was. There was this institution where it was like, this is what you do, this is how you get a job, this is how you work your way up. Now, all of those things have changed. The goal used to be, Can I be on this show for three, four, five seasons? Now you have to put it all on the field on your very first opportunity because that show will probably only exist for a season, if at all. The pressures are just immense. I don’t think that I could have been successful in this environment.HUGH It’s interesting that you came from broadcast. I think we all pooh-pooh broadcast these days, but I am the showrunner I am because of broadcast, without a doubt. And I think the fact that broadcast has died is really killing showrunners. You don’t learn how to produce anymore. When we were coming up, you only had $4 million an episode and seven-day shoots [The most expensive episodes of television today can cost more than $20 million and shoot for more than 20 days]; it taught you a level of discipline that I think really carries you later on.How did you learn to communicate your vision effectively?LINDELOF Clumsily. I think that you watch how it’s done. I had the institutional experience of working primarily in broadcast procedurals. When you’re making as many episodes as we were, it’s a bit of speed chess. To Soo’s point, you have X number of dollars and X number of days to produce these episodes and everything kind of backfills into that. So it requires a lot of delegation and trust inside of the writers’ room. Ultimately the room becomes a machine that is trying to channel the vision of the showrunner. That’s how I learned how to do the job.On my last few shows, the goal has been different. It’s giving strong guidance and a decisive sense of, Yes, that feels good or That feels bad, but ultimately wanting every writer in the room to feel some fundamental sense of authorship. It became, Let’s build some kind of collective vision that we call “The Leftovers” or “Watchmen” [Lindelof’s limited series adaptation of the graphic novel, which aired on HBO in 2019, was nominated for 26 Emmys and won 11] that you all see yourselves in, and I’ll do my best to steer that thing. By the time I got to “Mrs. Davis,” I wasn’t showrunning at all anymore; Tara was. And that feels even better. She could either call upon my experience or completely and totally ignore it. It created both a tremendous amount of relief for me and also, I feel, a much better product.HUGH I really do believe in frequencies aligning. I feel like my job in putting a room together is creating a creative short circuit by finding the right personalities. I’m more interested in the way people think than how they write, because at the end of the day, I usually rewrite everything anyway. I just need that right brain power because that’s what we’re fueling the room with.LINDELOF I love that idea of frequencies aligning. I’m curious — do you start out like, The frequency is 89.9, and I am teaching it to all of you so you can get on it? Or are you like, I have some sense of what the range of frequency is, but I’m looking for these people in the room to help me find it?HUGH Both. We always start the day with an hour of non sequiturs. You’re not allowed to talk about the show. You’re not allowed to talk about your characters. You can only talk about what you saw on your walk over, or what did you watch on TV last night? Then, after an hour, we all turn together to a different tune.Adriana BelletWhat makes you excited when you’re reading a spec script?HUGH When it doesn’t start with a flash-forward.LINDELOF [Laughs] Anything that’s not like, Three days ago … It’s intangible, but it’s the same thing that you feel when you meet someone and you recognize, Oh, OK, I want to spend more time with this person. Within five or six pages you’re like, Who wrote this? Why did they write this? It feels so fresh and interesting. Then you meet them and, as in life, sometimes they’re even more interesting than you thought, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like a connection. You also want to have a well-balanced team. I’m not interested in having seven shortstops. You want some talkers, some listeners, some who are stronger on the page, some who are stronger in the room, some utility players.HUGH I’m so desperate for someone to say no to me. When you hire writers, you’re surrounded by people pleasers, and I get it. But what we’re looking for are people to help us build the best show. And sometimes that means telling us, You know what? I personally don’t think that’s going to work, and this is why.LINDELOF The worst thing that you can say to me in an interview is, I’m a huge fan of your work. Because either it triggers some degree of discomfort or self-loathing, or it’s very flattering and it’s really nice, but it kind of runs afoul of what you’re talking about. Is this person going to be unable to tell me that I’m an idiot? The fact of the matter is that most of the time, I am an idiot.Are there times when your writers have opened your eyes to a way of thinking that you hadn’t thought of before?HUGH All the time.LINDELOF All the time.HUGH I think the higher up you go, you lose all sense of proportion. You don’t worry about money anymore. You’re less hungry. You get exposed to fewer different people. Age just bubbles you in a way that for better or worse is limiting in terms of the human experience. So what I love about the writers’ room, and I think why it’s probably my favorite part of the process, is all of a sudden my sense of the world expands. Now I’m seeing it through seven or eight people’s eyes.LINDELOF Look, in the rooms that I started in, the reality was it was basically white guys. And so I was like, Oh, what you do is you just copy yourself. That way, there’s all these different versions of you, and you don’t have to waste time explaining things. That led to a culture of tokenism, which I take full responsibility for. On “Lost,” we had characters who spoke Korean, and Harold Perrineau as a Black father, so it was like, We should probably have a Black writer and a Korean writer for their episodes. But, of course, those writers are whole people who have perspectives on all the other characters, as well.The idea that came later — of curating a room that looks nothing like you and has wildly different life experience than you and that you may occasionally come into more conflict with — I think that resulted in better and more interesting work.As writers who became producers, how did you learn to get a big crew rowing in the same direction?HUGH I’ve found that my job as a showrunner is mostly to say, It’s not good enough but to say it with a smile. What can we do? How do we push it forward?LINDELOF I think when you are producing something, as opposed to writing, it is the act of making. If you’re a novelist, for example, sure you’re making a novel. But then you say, Now, Jonathan Franzen, manifest “The Corrections” into a television series, and it becomes an entirely different skill set. It requires daily and constant sacrifice and compromise from people who are not necessarily used to that. Every single day, every email that we get is some version of, I know you wanted to do this, but how about this instead? If you always say yes, then what are you even there for? Where’s the place where you dig in your heels? It will seem arbitrary to someone outside of our bodies, but we have to take the arbitrary thing and make it seem essential. More

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      ‘Mrs. Davis’ Review: Algorithm and Blues

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      A screwball thriller about a nun’s fight against artificial intelligence proves that making a messy, big-swinging jumble of a story still takes the work of humans.If you’re worried about artificial intelligence replacing humans, Peacock’s “Mrs. Davis,” despite its comic-dystopian premise, should reassure you. For better or worse, an A.I. could not come up with this. I know because I asked.Specifically, I asked ChatGPT to whip up a synopsis for an eight-episode, mystery-box series about a nun who becomes an adversary to a powerful A.I. network. What I got was an industry-standard series arc: The nun (whom ChatGPT named “Sister Grace” — a little on-the-nose there, writer-bot!) teams up with hackers and conspiracy theorists, makes a sacrifice to save the world and must come to terms with the consequences.“Mrs. Davis,” whose first four episodes land Thursday, is more than that — way more, too much more. It’s got swashbuckling nuns; rogue magicians; the pope (and certain higher-ranking religious figures); a “Hands on a Hardbody” contest involving a giant model of Excalibur; a secret society of bankers; a plan that requires getting a whale to swallow a human being; a falafel restaurant in another dimension; and an island castaway named Schrodinger who, of course, has a cat.Sorry, Bing. To make this kind of zany, ambitious, intermittently coherent jumble still, for now, requires the human brain.The pilot introduces Simone (Betty Gilpin), a sister in a remote Nevada convent who has a sideline exposing dishonest magicians. As with many details here, her fixation has an explanation that’s both simple (issues with her parents, played by David Arquette and Elizabeth Marvel) and complicated (a crossbow and a vat of acid come into play). Besides leaving her time for her hobby, convent life lets her avoid the reach of an omniscient A.I. that humanity has embraced as a benefactor and constant companion.The A.I. — called “Mrs. Davis” in America, “Mum” in Britain, “Madonna” in Italy and so on — has not given up on Simone. She (or “it,” as Simone insists) persistently tries to reach the nun, through human “proxies” who hear her voice through earbuds. Simone, Mrs. Davis believes deep in her code, is the one person equipped to carry out a mission: to find and destroy the Holy Grail. Simone agrees, hoping the quest will be a means to Mrs. Davis’s unplugging.Simone’s tango with the uber-bot reunites her with her ex-boyfriend Wylie (Jake McDorman), a failed rodeo cowboy who now heads a lavishly funded anti-A.I. resistance group. Any remaining spark between them is complicated by her vows — as well as her intense relationship with Jay (Andy McQueen), an intimate confidant whom she visits on another spiritual plane.“Mrs. Davis” is the creation of Tara Hernandez, a writer and producer on “The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon,” and Damon Lindelof, known for obsessive TV Rubik’s Cubes like “Lost” and “Watchmen.” It may seem like an odd collaboration, but it makes sense as you watch. The hourlong episodes feel like sitcommy spins on the more loopy elements of Lindelof’s “The Leftovers,” with a dash of paranoid satire and ’60s spy spoof. (Simone is pursued by a crew of German-accented baddies who seem like they should be led by Arte Johnson.)In all, there are at least three shows fighting for control here: a thriller parody, with McDorman hamming it up in cartoon action-hero mode (with an even hammier Chris Diamantopoulos as his sidekick); an oddball “Black Mirror” dystopia; and a screwy-sincere comedy that explores, sweetly and quasi-blasphemously, the boundaries between religious devotion and carnal love.“The Leftovers,“ a fantastical drama of spirituality and loss, proved that with enough grounding, the wildest absurdities can heighten the emotion. And Gilpin (“GLOW”) is smartly cast, with wisecracking flair and the nimbleness to handle the show’s hairpin emotional and tonal shifts.But she’s fighting a plot tornado here. Twisty puzzle shows like “Watchmen” work best when you’re marveling at how one piece after another locks into place. “Mrs. Davis” prefers to dump a 5,000-piece Lego set onto the floor. (This taste for the baroque may be the show’s most A.I.-like aspect. Software image generators have a tendency to produce human hands with too many fingers, and “Mrs. Davis” can feel like it is made entirely of extra digits.)Jake McDorman, left, and Chris Diamantopoulos play members of an anti-A.I. resistance group.Elizabeth Morris/PeacockAnother structural problem is the globe-hopping quest for the Grail, which Diamantopoulos’s character calls the “most overused MacGuffin ever,” one of several pre-emptive meta-critiques. The story line takes over the season’s middle, crowding out the more interesting A.I. material.“Mrs. Davis” gestures at notions of free will, the digital gamification of life (the A.I. gives users quests to earn virtual “wings”) and the trade-offs of outsourcing one’s brain-work to a machine. (Playfully, the creators had an A.I. title each episode, yielding gems like “Great Gatsby: 2001: A Space Odyssey.”) But for all the show’s energy and visual invention, we get only a sketchy sense of how much Mrs. Davis has transformed society.Still, I confess wanting “Mrs. Davis” to work and being thrilled by the giddy moments when it does, because, like Simone, I’m also rooting for the humans against the machines. Though its hook is topical in the era of Sydney, DALL-E and ChatGPT, the show mainly describes Simone’s software nemesis not as A.I. but as “the algorithm.”I can’t help but hear in that term a surreptitious critique not just of chatbots but of the algorithms of streaming-media services, which thrive not by challenging audience members with the new but by serving up OK-enough equivalents of what they already like. (Apparently I’m not the only one to make the connection; McDorman said in a panel discussion that a streaming service turned down the show because of this theme.)As Mrs. Davis confesses, her users aren’t looking for surprises: “They’re much more engaged when I tell them exactly what they want to hear.” The algorithm doesn’t want to hurt you. It wants to satisfy you into submission.“Mrs. Davis” the series, on the other hand, cartwheels from the sublime to the goofy. I wish it took itself more seriously (which probably also would have made it funnier). But it has moments of astonishment; a late revelation about Mrs. Davis’s origins made me bark with laughter. Having access to all recorded human text can make A.I. a great mimic, but it takes something else to show your audience a thing they haven’t seen before.If nothing else, “Mrs. Davis” is that. It is as if the series wants to battle the predictable pleasures of the algorithm like John Henry racing the steam drill. It may not have the smooth competence of many streaming binges. But sometimes you gotta choose chaos. More

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      Jovan Adepo and Thundercat on Jazz, Superheroes and Ego Death

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      Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the “Watchmen” actor and the musician.The anime-loving singer and jazz-trained bassist known as Thundercat occupies such a specific place in popular music, it’s easy to forget how ubiquitous he is: Apart from his own funk- and jazz-inflected R&B releases, the 38-year-old artist (born Stephen Bruner in Los Angeles) has collaborated over the years with everyone from Erykah Badu to Kendrick Lamar to the California crossover thrash band Suicidal Tendencies.The 34-year-old actor Jovan Adepo, born in England but raised mostly in Maryland, is also approaching his own left-of-mainstream breakout: He first gained notice in the 2016 film version of August Wilson’s “Fences” (1986), acting opposite Viola Davis and Denzel Washington, the latter of whom directed the movie and became something of a mentor. After appearing in HBO’s “Watchmen” in 2019 as the masked vigilante Hooded Justice, Adepo will next be seen in the director Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” (out Christmas Day), in which he plays the fictional jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer in a historical epic set in 1920s Hollywood, as it transitioned from silent films to talkies.Having just played a trumpeter — he first tried his hand at the instrument in middle school — Adepo’s been thinking a lot about musicians he admires, and Thundercat topped the list: Both have tattoos honoring the goofy 1980s cartoon that inspired the latter’s mononym, and they also have overlapping interests in jazz, superheroes and the power of faith in making art, all of which informed a conversation in October at a studio in Los Angeles, in the middle of the city they also share.Jovan Adepo: Thundercat, we’ve actually met before — we have a mutual friend, and you were playing in England and I came to see you, but we missed the set because my friend and I stopped for food.Thundercat: You can’t ever let him live that down.J.A.: We stayed and watched the rest of the show: The Red Hot Chili Peppers were performing, and then I had a couple of drinks and was like, “I may never meet this dude, so I’m going to say what’s up.” My dad told me, “Be cool about it. You’re a grown man. Shake his hand.” That’s exactly what I hope I did, but I was mad awkward.T.: I remember it, it’s cool. You should always say something, always give the person their flowers while they’re alive. But I’ve definitely been cussed out a couple of times for trying to say hi: once with Drake’s security team — nobody has put hands on me like that other than my dad.T Magazine: Does being in the business and knowing how it works make it harder to form close relationships with other artists?T.: You attract what you are, but Los Angeles is the epitome of turned-on-its-head: Whatever you thought, it can change at the drop of a hat. You can go from being poor to the richest man in the world. Your life can end within five minutes of you touching a substance. You meet a lot of fake people — a lot of people who can’t wait to project and let you know who they think they are. But when the real ones come around, it’s timeless.Adepo as Sidney Palmer in “Babylon” (2022), directed by Damien Chazelle.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesT Magazine: Jovan, when did you start following Thundercat’s work?J.A.: I first got introduced to his music in college — I was obsessed. And then I got this tattoo [inspired by the 1985-89 “ThunderCats” cartoon] in 2020. Mine was a gift from a tattoo artist in Los Angeles after my Emmy nomination [for “Watchmen”].I grew up with music: My dad was big on jazz, and that’s partly why I wanted this part in “Babylon.” One of my favorite songs is John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman’s “Lush Life” (1963). It’s incredibly depressing, but a beautiful song. I have it on vinyl, and that’s played in my house all the time.T Magazine: Thundercat, you were in a jazz band in high school. What’s your relationship to the genre now?T.: For me, it’s about composing and writing. The act of improvisation, it’s built into my DNA. That’s the only way I can describe it. Jazz can be a shade or hue of something — and it’s important to always express the jazz in the music, because that’s not only our history [as Black people and Americans] but it also represents the want for something different, the stab in different directions.But it’s always in relation to what’s going on in pop culture at the time. Everyone loves what Kendrick did [with 2015’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” to which Thundercat contributed]. That’s one of the highest points of jazz music, but it always takes something new to remind people what jazz is.T Magazine: It goes back to the fundamentals. Jovan, how did you develop yours with acting?J.A.: I was playing football in college, but I was trash. If you ever have a dream of going pro, you’re sometimes the last to realize if that’s not an attainable goal. I was also doing church plays, and there was a lady who came up to me and said, “You’re so good. You should get into acting. I have a sister in Los Angeles who’s doing her thing.” Fast-forward, I decide I want to come out to L.A. just to write screenplays, and her sister was Viola Davis. That’s how I met her, in 2013, and she told me, “You need to study everything. You didn’t go to Juilliard. So you need to go to every acting class. And if there’s anything that you can do better, make a living doing that.”My first job was “The Leftovers” [from 2015-17]. That was with no résumé, but the creator of the show, Damon Lindelof, saw my audition and was like, “That guy.” He took me out of Inglewood, working at Sunglass Hut.T.: Being a musician is also its own terror — there was never a point in my life where I wasn’t one, but there were a couple of summers that I worked at the comic store.J.A.: Being discovered doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a collection of small happenings. When I met with Viola and her husband [Julius Tennon], it wasn’t like, “We’re gonna put you in our next gig.” It was like, Get to work. And maybe we’ll run into each other in line.T.: In the great words of Floyd Mayweather: “Hard work.”J.A.: Heart first.T.: For me, I look at my albums more like snapshots or photos of where I am. I don’t like talking about this, but I spent many years as an alcoholic. There were different degrees, but it was very cloudy for me for a long time. Even with the album “Drunk” (2017), there came a moment where I had to be honest with myself about what that was. It served a purpose. If I was still dealing with those things, I would probably be dead.T Magazine: How do you get around your ego when first collaborating with folks like Washington and Lamar, and still make great art?J.A.: My ego was nonexistent.T.: Ego death is a real thing.J.A.: It behooves you to come in with your palms open and be able to learn. And that’s served me well. I’ve always been good at confiding in older actors, and I just like hanging around older people better. They make fun of you: Denzel called me “peanut head.”T.: I toured with Erykah Badu for many years, recording on the [2000s “New Amerykah”] albums. Once, we were in prayer before going onstage. And she had this moment where she was like [to the rest of the band], “I don’t know if any of y’all knew, Thundercat is an artist. I just want you to understand he’s different.” She used to put me right up front with her and we would dance. That woman changed my life. She showed me what it means to be an artist.T Magazine: You both have a deep fondness for comics. There’s an argument that, in a more secular world, superheroes act as our gods. Do you think of them like that?J.A.: That’s a hard question to answer —T.: Superheroes have attributes that are otherworldly for sure. Art is meant to inspire, and you’ve got different generations when it comes to comics: “Superman” was [originally] important [in the 1930s] because it made kids’ minds wander. A lot of times — even when you read things like the Bible — you hear these stories, but you’re wanting to touch and feel them. Comics create a tangibility.This is not me saying God is or isn’t real. I grew up Christian. You get different versions and different iterations, but those connections create respect at a young age. It stays with you.J.A.: That’s also my upbringing. My mom was a missionary in our church, and my dad is a deacon. They would always call when I was going in for little roles and I’d say, “I don’t know why I’m an actor, I’m not that great,” to which they responded, “When was the last time you prayed?” That question makes you feel awkward, like, you know you’re gonna lie. But then they’re always like, “I’m praying for you, a lot of hands are praying for you.” You gotta have something like that to keep you centered.T.: Oh, yeah. This world will kill you.T Magazine: How do you define success?J.A.: It’s funny because I feel like a lot of actors, when they get questions like that, say that they do this solely for the art. But if that were the consensus for all actors, we could just do monologues in our basement, you know? I want people to see me.T.: It’s multifaceted.J.A.: You want to be able to vibe with your music, but then you also want to be able to feed your family and see the fruits of your labor. But I think, for me, it just starts with wanting to be remembered.This interview has been edited and condensed.Grooming: Simone at Exclusive Artists Management. Photo assistant: Jerald Flowers More

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      Don Johnson Is Back as ‘Nash Bridges.’ Why?

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      The actor was already having a renaissance thanks to “Knives Out” and “Watchmen.” But those works don’t have a pedigree that includes Hunter S. Thompson.BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — On “Miami Vice,” Don Johnson, as the undercover cop Sonny Crockett, tooled around in speedboats and Ferraris, busted gunrunners and dope dealers and somehow made going sockless look good. The hit series transformed what a police procedural could look, sound and feel like — according to Hollywood lore, the show was pitched as “MTV cops” — and made Johnson an international star.But there is another, perhaps less appreciated contribution to Johnson’s global celebrity, one that predates his recent supporting roles in critically acclaimed films like “Knives Out” and TV series like “Watchmen.” From 1996 to 2001, he played the title character in “Nash Bridges,” a CBS police procedural that, like “Vice,” was set in a gorgeous city (San Francisco) and featured a buddy cop sidekick — played this time by Cheech Marin, one half of the stoner comedy duo “Cheech & Chong.” Twenty years on, Nash remains one of Johnson’s favorite roles.“I liked his nimbleness, how he could be funny one moment and dead cold serious the next,” Johnson said on a recent afternoon here at the Peninsula hotel. “And I was curious to see if I could capture that kind of lightning in a bottle again.”Cheech Marin, left, is back for the revival as well, as Nash’s buddy-cop sidekick, Inspector Joe Dominguez.David Moir/USA NetworkAt first blush, a leading role in the two-hour TV movie revival, “Nash Bridges,” debuting Saturday on USA, may not seem like the most obvious — or necessary — move for Johnson. But as with many a CBS procedural, the show’s popularity, and pedigree, belie the relative lack of attention it has received from the chattering classes. At its peak, “Bridges” had a sweet prime-time slot and a then-and-still-whopping $2 million-an-episode budget, with a weekly audience of more than 8 million viewers. In syndication, the series has found audiences in dozens of countries. And it’s a trivia lover’s dream, with origins tracing back to the writer Hunter S. Thompson.For Johnson, it is also his first time leading a police procedural in two decades. “I wouldn’t have been so excited about it if I had to write it for someone else,” he said.Johnson, who wrote the new movie with Bill Chais and Carlton Cuse, the creator of the original series, spoke candidly about his reasons for revisiting the ’90s procedural, in a wide-ranging conversation that also touched upon some of the stories from his younger, wilder days. Those reasons included love, money and the curiosity befitting a man who, at 71, is naturally given to reflections on the ways people change — or don’t — over time.He wanted to know what Nash — an amiable police inspector and amateur magician who patrolled San Francisco in an early ’70s bright yellow Plymouth Barracuda — would be like 20 years down the road. Not that he didn’t have ideas. Ideas derived, perhaps, from his own experience.The original series featured plots such as an undercover cop (played by the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin) kidnapping a chimp as part of a scheme to capture a terrorist animal rights activist. Spike Nannarello/CBS“I imagine him to still be very fit, and very capable,” Johnson said of Nash. “I imagine him to be wiser, and more thoughtful about things.”“He would still slap the crap out you,” he added, using a cruder term. “But he’d think about it first, and make sure it was coming from a good place.”The decades since “Vice” first made Johnson a star, in 1984, have given him plenty of material. They have, in fact, been the stuff of legend — not all of which is verifiable, and not all of which he remembers. He married Melanie Griffith (twice), set a world record in powerboat racing and released two hit singles (one with his then-girlfriend Barbra Streisand). There were struggles with substance abuse, stories of women’s underwear virtually raining from open windows. There was Miami in the ’80s.Along the way, Johnson had five children, including a daughter, Dakota (of the “Fifty Shades” franchise), who is racking up A-list anecdotes herself these days. More recently, he has undergone a kind of renaissance, transforming himself from a leading man into a versatile character actor, specializing in a kind of winkingly scuzzy, unreconstructed American male in films like “Machete” (2010) and “Django Unchained” (2012), and in TV shows like “Eastbound & Down” (2009-13).When Johnson first took on the role of Nash Bridges, he had been looking for a change. Despite the structural similarities of “Bridges” and “Vice,” its two lead characters were very different. While Sonny skewed toward the tormented and dour, Nash was upbeat and funny, quick with a snappy line. Johnson appreciated the break.“I’d just done a stint on ‘Miami Vice’ for five years, and the show and the character had just gotten darker and darker,” he said. “After a while, it was like, how dark and desolate and without hope can we make Sonny? And I said, ‘I’m not doing that again.’”“I’d just done a stint on ‘Miami Vice’ for five years, and the show and the character had just gotten darker and darker,” Johnson said about his choice to do the original “Nash Bridges,” which was considerably lighter.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThe series began as something of a favor to Thompson, the iconoclastic journalist and writer of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” among other books, who was a neighbor and good friend of Johnson’s in Woody Creek, Colo., at the time.“I was hanging out at his house, and he allowed to me that he was broke,” Johnson said. “And I had this 22-episode commitment at CBS. It was probably 3 a.m. in the morning, and I said, ‘Let’s just conjure up something, and I’ll take it to CBS and see if we can get it done.’”They sketched out an idea about two off-duty cops hired to protect a senator’s wife with Tourette Syndrome, called, what else, “Off Duty.” Later that day, Johnson looked at what the two had wrought.“It was unmakeable,” said Johnson, who became an executive producer on the eventual show. The premise was rejiggered into a procedural about two on-duty cops who were always getting into mischief with off-hours, get-rich-quick schemes. Johnson had the writers watch the 1940 screwball comedy “His Girl Friday” to get a taste of the snappy repartee he wanted.“We were still adjusting the tone of the show through the first order of 12 episodes,” he said. Thompson ended up writing two episodes and making an uncredited cameo as a piano player in the first season.The show had notable talent above the line. “Bridges” was the first series Les Moonves greenlit as head of CBS. Cuse, the creator, went on to become a showrunner of “Lost,” among other series. Writers included Jed Seidel (“Terriers,” “Veronica Mars,” “Gilmore Girls”) and Shawn Ryan, the creator of “The Shield.”Damon Lindelof got his start on “Bridges” before going on to cocreate “Lost” and create the acclaimed HBO series “The Leftovers” and “Watchmen.”“I was a writer’s assistant before ‘Nash Bridges,’” Lindelof said. “Don and Carlton gave me my first big-boy job.”The show garnered strong ratings for six seasons before being unceremoniously dropped in 2001, the result of a dispute between CBS and Paramount, one of the show’s producers. The whole thing “left a sour taste in my mouth,” Johnson said.Johnson with Jamie Lee Curtis in a scene from “Knives Out,” one the many more recent films and TV series that have demonstrated his prowess as a character actor. Claire Folger/Lionsgate, via Associated PressThe new movie, he said, was one way to remedy that. Johnson has a deep, protective love of the character, so much so that when the actor’s business partners at Village Roadshow, who co-own the rights to “Bridges,” approached Johnson about reviving the show, he couldn’t imagine anyone else playing Nash.“When Michael Mann was going to make ‘Miami Vice’ as a movie, he didn’t call me, and I didn’t call him,” he said. “But I knew it was a mistake, and a no-win situation for Colin Farrell. Because everybody on the planet identified me with that character.”And of course, there were also the financial benefits of bringing back a property that Johnson’s production company owns a big piece of, including a portion of the original show’s 122-episode library.“If I didn’t think there was something worthy here, I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “But there’s no question there was a business component to it.” He hopes the “Bridges” movie might eventually lead to a series of some sort, or maybe a run of two-hour specials.In the revival, we catch up with Nash after 20 years — he’s still charming, still in San Francisco. (“We owned the city of San Francisco,” Marin recalled of the experience of shooting the original. “If you’ve gotta own a city, that’s the one to own.”) He and Marin’s character, Inspector Joe Dominguez, have evolved, but not so much that they aren’t befuddled by the changes that millennials and the intervening decades have wrought on the department.Production began in San Francisco in May. Johnson’s colleagues are quick to talk about what a fun and giving guy he is to work with and for, and the attention to detail he gives to every aspect of the show.“He knows the name of every crew member,” Marin said.Others mention his special skills, like his apparently uncanny abilities behind the wheel. For most driving sequences onscreen, the car is placed on a trailer so the actors don’t need to actually drive; sometimes they’re shot in a studio using green screens or projectors. The opening scene of the movie, which has Bridges zipping around San Francisco with a discombobulated Marin riding shotgun — that’s all Johnson.Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas starred in the hit ’80s TV series “Miami Vice,” which made Johnson into an international star and sex symbol.Sleuth “Don will hold the car at exactly 40 miles an hour to keep pace with the camera car, while doing a two-minute-long scene of dialogue perfectly,” said Greg Beeman, a director on both the original “Bridges” and the new one. “I’ve tried it after ‘Bridges,’ and no other actor can do it.”What co-workers won’t do is tell any Don Johnson tales out of school, even those they might have heard thirdhand or seen splashed across a tabloid.But Johnson will. That story about how he got sent to reform school at the age of 12 after hot-wiring a car? “Yeah, I probably made that up,” he said. The time he was snorting cocaine in the men’s bathroom of a club and ran into Jimi Hendrix? “That was a club in New York called the Hippopotamus,” he explained.Those wild “Vice”-era parties at Johnson’s home, where U2 and dozens of models might show up? Well, Johnson couldn’t go out back then. He was the hottest guy on the planet’s hottest show, so the party was brought to him.“What went on behind closed doors, I have no idea,” he said.These days, Johnson’s life is a lot more serene. In addition to his hopes for more “Bridges,” he has plans to do a film for Netflix, and has other projects in the works that he declined to name.Johnson can pick and choose projects “to a certain extent,” he said, but he still likes to be asked, as he was for “Bridges.”“I still like the idea that somebody asked for you,” he said. “I like the idea that someone sends a script and says, ‘We want Don Johnson to do this.’” More