Shark: Behind the scenes

A legal drama - with teeth
James Woods is Sebastian Stark - a cunning, unscrupulous and brilliant attorney whose crisis of conscience and sudden determination to do good is chronicled in Shark.

We first meet him riding high as one of the best defence attorneys in the business - a man who eats prosecutors for breakfast and can get just about any suspect off the hook. But everything changes when one of his clients commits a brutal murder shortly after being acquitted - an event that prompts Stark to suddenly become a prosecutor himself and go after criminals instead of defending them.

The problem is that he has to work for his former enemy, District Attorney Jessica Devlin, who orders Stark to tackle his cases with the help of several young prosecutors. Which is a problem, as Stark isn't exactly the type to take advice. As the man once said, "When I want your opinion, I'll stop ice skating in hell and ask for it".

On top of that, Stark also has his uneasy relationship with his teenage daughter Julie to deal with. Life as a prosecutor isn't going to be easy...

Giving birth to a Shark
Shark was the creation of top US producer Ian Biederman, who'd long had a fascination with law, politics and power - like James Woods, Biederman studied political science at university.

His interest in such things only increased after seeing high profile celebrities acquitted of crimes despite the evidence against them. It struck him that "guilt or innocence is often based on the ability to afford a good defence", and Shark began to develop in his head after he pondered the question: "Why can't we have one of these big-shot attorneys on the prosecution side?"

Biederman sold the idea to the TV network as a "revenge fantasy about what it would be like to have one of these top defence attorneys switch sides", and the bigwigs duly ordered a pilot to be made. But there were troubled waters ahead for Shark...

The Jaws of defeat
While the TV studio was keen to get Shark made, the producers had one very big hurdle to face: casting the right man as Sebastian Stark.

The one name everyone agreed on was James Woods, but the Hollywood star was rather hard to pin down in the lead up to the pilot. Woods was sent the script, but no response was forthcoming and the studio became so anxious that it almost pulled the plug on the whole thing. Then, just as time was about to run out, Woods finally sat down and gave the script a chance. And it basically blew his mind.

"I thought that I probably wouldn't want to do television,' Woods later confessed. "But when I read the script I immediately knew a part as good as this wasn't going to enter my life again."

The sudden tragedy
Everything fell into place after Woods signed on. The producers even managed to get acclaimed filmmaker Spike Lee - the man behind movies like Malcolm X and Inside Man - to direct the pilot.

But then, just two days after production began, tragedy struck. James Woods was told that his brother Michael - with whom he had been extraordinarily close all his life - had died of a heart attack aged just 49.

Production was halted as Woods faced what he would later describe as "the worst thing that ever happened to me." Three traumatic weeks passed, but filming eventually resumed with a new sense of purpose. Terrible as the incident was, it helped bring the whole cast and crew closer together than ever before.

Keeping it real
As the rave reviews indicate, Shark is no run of the mill legal drama. It tackles the big themes - love, family, morality in the modern age - and provides a cutting expose of what really goes on in the cutthroat world of US attorneys. A lot of the realism comes down to the involvement of Robert Shapiro - the hotshot lawyer who became famous for being part of OJ Simpson's defence team.

Shapiro was one of the chief technical consultants on Shark, sharing insights on how lawyers really think and work, and making sure the script stays as true to reality as possible. That said, the producers also gave James Woods the go-ahead to interpret things his own way. Well known in the film world for being able to ad-lib brilliant lines, Woods was allowed to improvise whenever he felt the urge. Well, when you've got an A-lister in your show, you may as well get your money's worth...