Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  With success also comes leverage, in particular for the ability to “bundle” a media company’s other stations alongside a popular one. So, for instance, AMC Networks (pointedly renamed that, from Rainbow Media, after the success of AMC’s original programming) could insist that a carrier take on IFC, Sundance Channel, and WE tv if it wanted also to show Mad Men and Breaking Bad. And when the satellite provider Dish Network refused, it could wage a public relations war, appealing directly to subscribers.

  At the same time, the era in which Stephen J. Cannell could have a show canceled while pulling a 32 share—that is, over a third of the entire viewing audience (Black Sheep Squadron, in 1978)—was obviously long gone. In its place was a collection of niches that could be targeted more directly. In magazines, The New Yorker versus Parade is a good analogy: the former may have thirty million fewer subscribers than the latter, but theirs are the readers a certain type of lucrative advertiser most wants to reach.

  Somewhere, of course, the vectors meet; a show needs viewers. But for all the reasons above, raw ratings ceased to be the most sacred of all TV metrics. They were replaced by something far less quantifiable: Brand. Buzz. David Milch, who had created an early version of TV’s difficult man in Detective Andy Sipowicz of NYPD Blue and would go on to expand the type in Deadwood, saw in this shift nothing less than a radical creative liberation.

  “For the first twenty-five years of television, commercials were the church—which is to say, you couldn’t offend the sponsor. Therefore, certain values had to be underscored in the subject matter.” The new realities of cable, he went on, stripped away that stricture, leaving a world ripe for exploring “the antiversions of all forms,” a place where “the Story” was free to “declare itself on its own terms, with no preexisting expectations.”

  “All the conventions have been hollowed out and revealed as barren,” he said. “In fact, the expectations are there to be deconstructed.”

  • • •

  And so came the antiheroes. Long before David Simon proposed that The Wire would document “an America at every level at war with itself” or The Shield spent an entire season playing out an L.A. allegory of the Iraq War, it was clear that the cultural climate of the 2000s would be propitious for such characters. America, as The Sopranos debuted, was well on its way to becoming a bitterly divided country. Just how divided would become vividly clear in the 2000 presidential election. After it, Americans on the losing side were left groping to come to terms with the Beast lurking in their own body politic and—as the decade rolled on with two wars, secret prisons, torture scandals, and more—with what things it might be doing in their name.

  That side happened to track very closely with the viewership of networks like AMC, FX, and HBO: coastal, liberal, educated, “blue state.” And what the Third Golden Age brought them was a humanized red state: cops, firemen, Mormons, even Nixon-supporting Don Draper and, crime of all crimes, nonvoting Jimmy McNulty. This was different from previous “working-class” shows, such as Roseanne, pitched at attracting a large audience who related to its financially struggling characters, or even All in the Family, which invited each side to laugh equally at the other. This was the ascendant Right being presented to the disempowered Left—as if to reassure it that those in charge were still recognizably human.

  “A show like The Sopranos has a soothing quality because ultimately there’s an unspoken assumption behind it that even the most monstrous people are haunted by the same concerns we’re haunted by,” said Craig Wright, a playwright who wrote for Six Feet Under and others. Such, he went on, has always been the case during conservative pendulum swings: the Left articulates a critique through the arts. “But the funny part is that masked by, or nested within, that critique is a kind of helpless eroticization of the power of the Right. They’re still in love with Big Daddy, even though they hate him.”

  That was certainly true for the women who made Tony Soprano an unlikely sex symbol—and for the men who found him no less seductive. Wish fulfillment has always been at the queasy heart of the mobster genre, the longing for a life outside the bounds of convention, mingled with the conflicted desire to see the perpetrator punished for the same transgression. So it was for the fictional men of the straight world on The Sopranos, who were drawn to Tony’s flame with consistently disastrous results. (Davey Scatino loses his sporting goods store after joining the gang’s poker game; Artie Bucco, the longest-standing member of the outside-looking-in crowd, suffers a never-ending series of painful humiliations.) Likewise for viewers, for whom a life of taking, killing, and sleeping with whomever and whatever one wants had an undeniable, if conflict-laden, appeal.

  • • •

  And likewise, most importantly, for TV’s creators themselves. It should come as no surprise that the job of showrunner—with its power to summon worlds to life, move characters around the universe, commit unspeakable acts, at least by proxy—attracts men not totally unfamiliar with the most primitive impulses of the characters they create.

  Certainly David Chase understood. “When I watch Mob movies, part of me is like, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!’” he said, quoting the proto-punk band MC5.

  Or, more to the point, there was the day the writer Todd Kessler found himself alone with Chase in the Silvercup writers’ offices. The showrunner had been late for a meeting to stitch together the two men’s halves of the final episode of the second season, “Funhouse.” Now, he distractedly sat down across from Kessler and announced that he’d had an epiphany.

  “‘Is it something you want to talk about?’ I asked. We were sitting across a table that was probably two and a half feet wide,” Kessler said. “He said, ‘Well . . . I realized . . . that I’ll never be truly happy in life . . . until I kill a man.’ And then he leaned across the table and said, ‘Not just kill a man’—and he raised his hands right on either side of my head—‘but with my bare hands.’”

  The two sat there silently for a long moment. And then Chase broke the spell. “I’m going to get a coffee,” he said, getting up from the table. “You want a coffee?”

  • • •

  In a sense, of course, Chase had already done exactly what he said he needed to do.

  If there was a single moment that signaled the new TV reality, it came only a handful of weeks after The Sopranos debuted. By that time, audiences had already begun to feel affection for this new, unusual hero. True, they had seen him involved in beating a man up; plotting insurance fraud, extortion, and arson; and committing adultery. On the other hand, he seemed to come by such behavior honestly, what with the crazy mother. And if you were accustomed to traditional TV narratives, there were signs that this might be a straightforward one about a man reforming himself through therapy and the love of his family. After all, the first episode began with what could have been a saint’s conversionary vision of the beauty and vulnerability of the world, contained in a flock of baby ducks. It was plausible, too, given the slightly exaggerated cinematography and design of the first few episodes, not to mention the repartee between Paulie Walnuts, Silvio, and the other gangsters, that the show would ultimately turn out to be a comedy more than anything else. Chase often said, quite seriously, that he was never 100 percent sure that wasn’t true.

  And then, in week five, Tony strangled a man to death. Right in front of us. In real time. While taking his daughter on a college tour.

  “College,” as the episode was titled, didn’t start out as a bid to change television. Instead the story grew, innocently enough, out of a TV impulse as old as The Brady Bunch. “After sitting there for three episodes, I said, ‘Oh, I’m so fucking bored with this. We gotta get these people out of town,’” said Chase. “‘Maybe they take a vacation or something.’” Chase had recently taken his own teenage daughter on a tour of colleges and quickly landed on the idea of sending Tony and Meadow on a similar tour of small liberal arts colleges in Maine.

  Chase a
lways maintained that the goal of each episode, regardless of what narrative business was necessary to the show’s ongoing story arc, was to create a “minimovie.” The premise of “College” was promising on that front even before the introduction of the character that would spur Tony to murder. The Sopranos was rarely more acute and unsettling than when it pulled back from the hermetic world of the North Jersey mob to allow a glimpse of the straight world outside. Think of a pair of mobsters’ flummoxed attempts to shake down a corporate coffee shop, or A.J. visiting a rich classmate and seeing what real money and power looks like. (The Wire would hit similar notes with equal effect, as when two young drug dealers drive out of town and are shocked to learn that radio stations differ from region to region—even more so that theirs is broadcasting A Prairie Home Companion.)

  Sending a mobster into alien territory, on one of the ultimate rites of passage for bourgeois parents, couldn’t have been a better setup. The first shot of “College,” directed by Allen Coulter, who would become a signature director of this series and many that followed in its footsteps, finds Tony stranded, like a piece of garish lawn statuary, outside an august stone academic building, bells tolling overhead. (The building, of course, like nearly everything else in The Sopranos, was actually located in New Jersey, on the campus of Drew University; as a location scout for the show said, “Everything in the known universe you can find in New Jersey.”) His conflicting roles of father and mobster are never as poignant as when Meadow confronts him knowingly, in the car, about what he does for a living. Or later, when the two join in a father-daughter conspiracy to keep her drunken evening a secret from her mother. Meanwhile, Carmela has stayed home with the flu, giving her the opportunity to spend a wine- and Merchant Ivory–soaked evening with oily, flirtatious Father Phil. After several glasses, she tearfully admits to knowing, and conveniently ignoring, the moral cost of her comfortable life—a cathartic moment of self-knowledge that, characteristically, will never be acted on.

  All of this would have made for an entertaining, satisfying minimovie that deepened and expanded our knowledge of, and queasy affection for, these characters. But the plot point that would define “College” upped all these stakes dramatically. It came from Frank Renzulli, who suggested, in the writers’ room, that Tony run into an ex–Mob member, now in the witness protection program. Chase straightened up and walked out of the room, to his office. The next morning, he arrived with the story’s eighteen beats intact: At a gas station somewhere on Tony and Meadow’s route, Tony believes he spots Fabian “Febby” Petrulio, a onetime made man who flipped on the Family after being busted for selling heroin—a realistic nod to one of the prime factors in the Mob’s diminishing power. In between bonding with Meadow and shepherding her to her Colby College interview, he confirms the snitch’s identity, tracks him down, and strangles him.

  Within a few years, the idea that a TV protagonist couldn’t kill somebody would seem as fusty and dated a convention as earlier generations not being able to share a bed or say the word pregnant. What remains shocking in “College” isn’t the death itself; it’s Tony’s unmitigated relish in doing the deed. There is no tortured internal debate—even after his snooping reveals that Petrulio, now masquerading as “Fred Peters,” has a new family and small daughter of his own—no qualms even about Meadow’s presence, other than the inconvenience it poses. Nor is there any suggestion that Tony stands to earn much in the way of credit or prestige by doing away with a rat; indeed, Christopher (whom we’ve already seen dismember a body for disposal in the back of Satriale’s) begs Tony to allow him to fly up and take care of the hit. It is simply a given in Tony’s world: a rat needs to be killed. At least in Chase’s original story, there are none of the “outs” designed to allow viewers to rationalize and justify what they’re about to see—which is Tony grunting, spitting, exultant, crushing Petrulio’s windpipe with an improvised garrote of electrical wire, the wire cutting deep into his palms from the effort, Petrulio begging for his life between gasps. The scene lasts an unwavering minute and sixteen seconds.

  In The Sopranos mythology, one that flatters both its creator’s sense of auteurship and HBO executives’ sense of enlightened patronage, the network delivered only two notes during the show’s eight-year run. Although it’s hard to believe this is literally true, it does seem that the network challenged Chase only twice on issues of substance. And both times, the showrunner prevailed. The first was over the series title, which HBO found sufficiently confusing (“What, is it a show about opera singers?” Jamie-Lynn Sigler thought when called for her audition) that they assembled a binder of alternatives, mostly variations on Chris Albrecht’s preferred name: the ham-fistedly punny Family Man. In the end, the title proved once again the lesson of the Beatles, Amazon.com, and others: that the silliest, most obscure name will seem perfect and inevitable the moment it is attached to a cultural phenomenon. Before long, a Google search would return hundreds of results on “Sopranos” the show before any on “sopranos” the centuries-old musical tradition.

  The second of the legendary two notes was on “College.” In Chase’s mind, murdering Petrulio wasn’t meant to be a grand narrative statement. Like Tony himself, he believed it was simply how things had to be—the natural outcome in the world his characters lived in. Sending the script in to HBO, he expected that it would occasion some discussion, but when the phone rang from Albrecht’s office, he wasn’t prepared for the passionate exchange that ensued.

  “You’ve created one of the most compelling characters on television of the last twenty years and you’re going to ruin him in the fifth episode!” Albrecht yelled.

  “What do you mean?” asked Chase, guileless.

  “He kills that guy! We’re going to lose the audience!”

  “Well, Chris, I have to tell you, I completely disagree,” said Chase. “In fact, I think we’d lose the audience if he didn’t kill that guy.” Viewers, he argued, understood what being a rat meant in Tony’s world; if he was to let Petrulio live, “what kind of mobster is that? He’d be without portfolio.”

  The argument went back and forth. Chase suggested they simply shelve the episode and move on to the next. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Albrecht sputtered. “We spent all that money and now we’re not going to show the episode? I mean . . . maybe if we knew this guy he killed was a real scumbag . . .”

  “He’s a rat!”

  In the end, Chase won the war—dragging Albrecht, who happily admitted he was wrong ever after, and TV history along with him. But it wasn’t without a concession that nearly cost him the battle. As an accommodation to HBO’s point of view, Chase inserted a scene in which it is revealed that Petrulio not only is dealing drugs in town, but is seen trying to hire a couple of junkies to kill Tony and Meadow. Predictably, the scene feels false and conventionally “TV.” It was the last such concession that Chase would make.

  “After that we’d talk about money, maybe. Budget stuff. He said some intelligent things,” said Chase of his relationship with Albrecht. “I never had conversations like that with an executive. Where you’re actually talking about the same things, and he’s not saying, ‘If he’s a gangster, maybe . . . his sister’s in a wheelchair or something?’ I used to joke that on a network, from day one, Tony would have been helping the Feds fight terrorism on the side. I’d never had conversations in which, nine times out of ten, we had the same goal.”

  For all that, he said of the drug scene, “I don’t think it was a terrible compromise, but it was a compromise. I wish we hadn’t done it.”

  • • •

  The “College” story had a slapstick coda. In a good example of how the collaborative process of the writers’ room works, the episode was a group effort: Renzulli had suggested the rat, Chase had outlined the main story, and the room had worked out the beats for the B story, of Carmela and Father Phil. However, luck of the draw gave the official credited writing assignment for the first draft to James Manos
. By his own account, Manos was an unusual guy, a chain smoker with a few agoraphobic tendencies. “I probably have an uncommon fear of being trampled to death,” he said. This made the Emmys, stressful under any circumstances, particularly excruciating. Adding to the strain was the fact that Manos was married at the time to his second wife, Hilda Stark, who several weeks earlier, in an off-screen ceremony, had won an Emmy for the production design of HBO’s movie The Rat Pack.

  “We had a very competitive relationship,” he said. “I knew that if I didn’t win, it was going to be ugly at home.

  “So there were all these famous people around, and I got very tense,” he went on. “I thought I had plenty of time to go out and get some air, smoke a cigarette, calm down. So I left. And then I met somebody, met somebody else, we talked . . . and then I remember my phone ringing and it was my mother, in Brooklyn, watching the show live and asking, ‘Where are you?’”

  “College” had won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Chase, onstage alone, asked, “Where’s Manos? He was sitting right next to me.”

  Despite not making it onstage, the award served Manos well; he went on to write for The Shield and create the pilot for Dexter, during which he also met his next wife, the actress Lauren Vélez. His main memory of the 1999 Emmys, though, is being yelled at by a producer who wondered where the hell he had been and later standing onstage next to Helen Mirren for a group photo of the night’s winners. Looking over, he noticed a trickle of blood running down Mirren’s side. She had been stabbed by the Emmy statuette’s knife-sharp wings.