Creating "Three Rivers" (part two)

As Pittsburgh prepares to be in prime-time again with the locally-set CBS series "Three Rivers," we continue our conversation with creator/executive producer Carol Barbee. Earlier this month we talked about why Pittsburgh was selected as a setting. This week, we get into some of the local flavor that made its way into the pilot episode, which somehow managed to received an award before it even premieres (which sort of ruins the award's credibility in my eyes).

Note: As we've also reported, that pilot episode may not air first. It may not ever air. Networks are loathe to say they're scrapping a pilot, lest their shows get tainted with the moniker of "troubled," but it seems likely that some of  the scenes shot for the "Three Rivers" pilot will either be re-shot, inserted in a future episode or scrapped.

Barbee did medical research for "Three Rivers" at The Cleveland Clinic (hold your hissing, Cleveland bashers) before traveling to Pittsburgh to walk our streeets and get a sense of the city and to figure out where her characters would live.

"It's a really cool city and not so huge that you feel overwhelmed," she said. "It feels homey."

She imagines her lead character, Dr. Andy Yablonski (Alex O'Loughlin) lives on Mt. Washington, where he grew up.

Pittsburgh's famous Primanti Bros. gets a shoutout in the "Three Rivers" pilot. Barbee discovered in researching the world of transplant doctors that they're always concerned with what food is brought along for plane flights when teams go to collect organs for transplant. In the script, Barbee has one doctor order the new transplant coordinator to get him a sandwich from Primanti's.

"I went online and when I looked for famous food from Pittsburgh, Primanti's came up a thousand times," Barbee said. On her visit to Pittsburgh to shoot the pilot, Barbee made a pilgrimage to Primanti's with other members of the production crew. "I bought everybody a T-shirt that says 'Primanti Bros.' and 'Bite Me.'"

Barbee's one regret was that she didn't get more Pittsburgh paraphenalia on the set of the pilot.

"We were getting ready to shoot at a nurses's station and one of the guys on the crew -- most of them were from Pittsburgh -- said it should be filled with Pirates and Steelers memorabilia," Barbee said.

Although the series will be shot in Hollywood, Barbee said the intention is to return to Pittsburgh to film exterior scenes that will be inserted in episodes.

"The hope and plan is for us to go to Pittsburgh once or twice a year and save up scenes from different episodes and shoot scenes that show we're in Pittsburgh," Barbee said. "I really want to get those rivers and bridges in there. I really want to do a big funnicular scene. We have to use that."

Another question Pittsburgh viewers frequently ask: Why do shows set in Pittsburgh never seem to feature any Pittsburghese? In the past, producers have told me they're afraid the Yinzer accent would baffle viewers in the rest of the country. Barbee said a scene was shot for the "Three Rivers" pilot using a local actor that got cut.

"There's a scene where Andy is paged to come to the ER and there's a guy from the neighborhood -- Eddie, a working-class guy -- who got in a bar fight and figured if he asked fro Andy he'd get seen sooner," Barbee recalled. "It was a wonderful scene that gave a sense of Andy's connection to Pittsburgh and this one neighborhood. We cast a guy from Pittsburgh and he did the whole Yinzer accent and he was hilarious, doing the whole Yinzer thing. But once we got into editing we found it slowed the pilot down."

Barbee hopes to use the scene in a future episode or re-shoot it, possibly with the same Pittsburgh actor.

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Part three of my chat with Barbee will appear here in Tuned In Journal next week.