A brave new world for ‘Inconceivable’ fathers

By Cynthia Littleton

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – It was the jaw-dropping
thing that convinced writer-producers Marco Pennette and Oliver
Goldstick, co-creators and executive producers of the new NBC
drama “Inconceivable,” that their experiences with in vitro
fertilization and surrogate pregnancy had the makings of a
television series.

Even in 21st century Los Angeles, when Pennette and
Goldstick relate their stories of how two gay men involved in
separate long-term relationships became parents through
surrogate mothers, the typical reaction has been that “people’s
mouths fall open,” Pennette says.

“It usually takes a minute for people to grasp it,” he
adds. “They say, ‘So you mean you got an egg from one woman,
put it in another woman, and now you have a baby?” Goldstick
recalls with a hearty laugh how he “had to draw my mother a
diagram, and she still didn’t get it.”

It might sound like something out of an Aldous Huxley novel
– Pennette and Goldstick are the first to call it “surreal”
and “a brave new world” — but the cutting edge of in vitro
conception technologies are as real as it gets for those who
desperately want children but cannot, for myriad reasons, have
them in the traditional fashion.

“You can’t buy a pancreas. You can’t buy a kidney. But you
can buy an egg,” Pennette notes. “Believe it or not, it’s not a
highly regulated industry,” Goldstick adds. “That’s what’s so
wild and where there’s so much room for drama.”

Pennette and Goldstick have been friends and occasional
co-workers for years. At a dinner last year to celebrate
Pennette’s birthday, the two were comparing notes about what it
was like to run the gamut of emotional, legal and ethical
issues that surround the in vitro conception process.

“I said I wanted to do a movie about it,” Goldstick says.
“Marco looked at me and said, ‘You’re wrong. It’s a television
series.”

Pennette brought the notion of setting a show at a high-end
fertility clinic to Tollin/Robbins Prods. and Disney’s
Touchstone Television, thinking it would be a long shot for
anything but perhaps a cable outlet such as Showtime or
Lifetime.

But Tollin/Robbins and Touchstone embraced it as a relevant
and timely subject that would stand out in the sea of crime
dramas on the primetime landscape these days. NBC also was
immediately receptive, especially when Pennette and Goldstick
pitched them a season’s worth of story lines in one fell swoop.
Most of them were taken right out of the headlines, ranging
from divorced couples battling over custody of their embryos to
the growing cottage industry of surrogacy for women in states
with surrogate-friendly laws.

And then there are the characters who populate the clinics,
particularly the doctors. “Inconceivable’s” ensemble cast is
headed by Jonathan Cake, who plays a brilliant but arrogant
doctor who clearly enjoys the power he wields over his
patients, and Ming-Na as the clinic founder and single mother
who is forced to address her preteen son’s curiosity about his
sperm-donor father.

In today’s cultural climate, Pennette and Goldstick are
well aware that “Inconceivable” is likely to draw some fire as
it shines a primetime klieg light on a highly controversial new
medical frontier. As writers, they’re committed to leavening
the drama with healthy doses of humor, citing as their
inspiration how David E. Kelley walks that fine line even when
his characters are dealing with murder cases and the like.

“It’s too sacrosanct a subject to be irreverent, but we
also can’t be nonstop melodrama,” Goldstick says. Adds
Pennette, “Just as the doctors in this world always say, we’ll
have to work at finding the right balance.”

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter