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A brave new world for 'Inconceivable' fathers

Posted on: Monday, 25 July 2005, 02:44 CDT

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

Source: REUTERS

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