James Costigan, TV “Golden Age” writer, R.I.P.

With the Hollywood writers’ strike dragging on with no prospect of an imminent settlement, with reality shows crowding out even sitcoms from the prime-time schedule, TV watchers have had little hope of catching quality comedy or drama that respected their intelligence.

Sadly, the weekend deprived them of one more reason for such hope, as The New York Times reported that James Costigan, an Emmy-winning television writer who provided vehicles for some of Hollywood’s finest actors, died on Dec. 19 of heart failure at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash. A recluse in recent years, Costigan had no known family members and was found dead by neighbors after not being seen for more than a week.

Filmgoers of the past quarter-century would only know Costigan for less-than-stellar works made from his 1980s scripts: Mr. North (1988), an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Theophilus North; Richard Gere's Biblical epic, King David (1985); and The Hunger (1983), starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon and David Bowie (think "Dracula Meets the 'L' Word," filmed like an MTV video).

But TV cognoscenti knew Costigan as the creator of some of the most mature, heartfelt work ever to grace the small screen, including a few that considered the predicament of Irish and Irish-American characters who were burdened by history or their own ineradicable sadness.

Chafing under the sway of the formulaic, ambitious early pioneers in TV’s infancy turned to the anthology series, a format without recurring characters or sets. It was, in a sense, television played “without a net” – innovative fare often broadcast live or stretching beyond the narrow half-hour confines then prevalent in programming.

Such anthology series as Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Playhouse 90, and Robert Montgomery Presents offered talented young scenarists such as Paddy Chayefsky, Roald Dahl, Richard Matheson, Reginald Rose, and Abby Mann the opportunity to earn writing credits and find their distinctive voices. Costigan was a veteran of several of these series, including Kraft Television Theatre, General Electric Theatre, and The United States Steel Hour.

Another such show was Hallmark Hall of Fame, for which Costigan wrote Little Moon of Alban (1958), starring Christopher Plummer and Julie Harris as a cynical British soldier and an Irish nun who slowly, tentatively, against all their most ingrained inclinations, fall in love during Ireland’s war of independence.

For all its obvious Romeo-and-Juliet overtones, the show won acclaim immediately upon airing, leading Costigan to stretch it into a two-act play that enjoyed only a short-lived run on Broadway two years later, with Robert Redford assuming Plummer’s role.

Watching it this last spring, at the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) in New York City, I could not help but think how well it compared, to today’s television or TV fare, despite the crudeness of the production values. (Much of Costigan's work from the time, like so many of his comrades, because they were broadcast live, was lost because it was not filmed; they survive today on grainy kinescopes.)

More than a decade later, Costigan delivered an even more searing TV realization of James Joyce’s dictum, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” His drama of The Troubles, A War of Children (1972), was as raw as the struggle that had recently ignited, stunning me at the time with gritty realism (shot on location in Ulster until sectarian violence forced the remainder of the production to be shot in Dublin) and deep sympathy for those caught in the grip of larger socio-political forces beyond their control. (Though the program came out on VHS in 1999, it has not, to my knowledge, appeared as a DVD yet.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Last of the Belles” (1974) showed how the creator-muse relationship between Fitzgerald and wife Zelda (a post-Dr. Kildare Richard Chamberlain and Blythe Danner) was reenacted in one of the writer’s most autobiographical short stories. (Its heroine was played by Susan Sarandon in her ingénue phase).

Costigan hit his stride in the mid-to-late ‘70s, starting with Love Among the Ruins (1975), a romantic comedy set in Edwardian England, directed by George Cukor and starring for the first time Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn, in golden autumnal roles; Eleanor and Franklin (1976), a telebio of President Roosevelt and his First Lady; and the latter's sequel, Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977). The first two productions netted him Emmy Awards and the third, a nomination. This creatively productive period was capped in 1979 when he won the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award from the Writers’ Guild of America for “outstanding contributions to the profession of the television writer.”

Neither the Times nor the Bainbridge Island Review accounts of Costigan’s life and death explain why he left the entertainment business and ended up as an isolated eccentric. But maybe he simply knew that film and television no longer had a place for him.

It wasn’t just that prestige programming was increasingly being squeezed out of the major networks. Hollywood is also a place that places a premium on youth. Several years ago, I heard Larry Gelbart of M*A*S*H remark that some writers on the show did not put this landmark series among their credits, lest it date them as hopelessly old-fashioned by today’s youthful TV executives.

What chance would Costigan have in this kind of atmosphere? Who wouldn’t withdraw, in Joycean “silence, exile and cunning,” to a psychic climate more congenial?