by Brett Martin
It was coincidence that brought him there. A Yale roommate, Jeffrey Lewis, had joined Hill Street Blues in its second season. Lewis introduced Milch to Steven Bochco, without mentioning any of his friend’s eccentricities. “He was an English professor, and that’s what walked into my office: tweed jacket, glasses, I think he was wearing a tie,” Bochco said. “We started talking and he was very smart, very charming. Clearly a big piece of equipment.”
Bochco assigned Milch a freelance episode centered on the rape and murder of a nun that incites a mob response in the city. The first draft was a dud. “I told him, ‘David, that’s not your fault, that’s our fault. We didn’t solve this problem in the writers’ room,’” said Bochco. The two were about to break for the day when they hit on the idea of juxtaposing the nun’s murder, and the police’s handling of it, with that of a Latino store owner, which the department would deem all but unnecessary to solve. The story was little more than a “D” plot, a nagging, half-remembered presence at the periphery of the main action, but it underscored the rest of the proceedings and lent them a very different, more complicated tone.
“The lightbulb went off over David’s head, and fifteen minutes later we had it,” Bochco said.
The episode, “Trial by Fury,” aired as the first of season three and won Milch his first Emmy. Bochco deemed it “maybe the best episode of Hill Street we ever did.” Milch’s voice is most evident in the ritual opening roll call officiated by Michael Conrad as Sergeant Esterhaus—a man whose playfully ornate language bears more than a little resemblance to that of Deadwood’s Al Swearengen. At roll call, Esterhaus addresses an issue that would be of particular interest to Milch throughout his career: Police brass, the sergeant says, has demanded that Hill Street station’s officers employ more linguistic discretion in their dealings with the public. On the blackboard, he has written a list of acceptable terms—“shucks,” “drat,” “fudge,” and so on—and he offers a piece of literary advice Milch might have done well to heed himself on Deadwood: “Now [these] won’t come trippingly to your tongue at first, but with time and usage, you could find them becoming second nature. Your recourse to obscenity will then be fresh and vital when you encounter those situations and individuals for whom only obscenity will suffice.”
After Milch’s second draft of “Trial by Fury,” Bochco offered him a staff position in the Hill Street Blues writers’ room. Stable employment did not exactly prove a stabilizing force. Whether he was loaded or temporarily sober, Milch’s behavior became legendary. Eric Overmyer arrived at MTM for his first day as a writer on St. Elsewhere to see a man in the second-floor window peeing on the flowers below. “Oh, must be Milch,” the receptionist told him.
“He had a drawer full of money and he liked to whip his dick out,” said Robin Green, who worked with Milch on a post–Hill Street project, Capital News. “He’s a wild man.” At one point, Bochco told The New Yorker in a 2005 profile, he learned that his friend and employee had begun commuting from Las Vegas every morning, the better to spend long nights gambling.
None of this was enough to prevent Milch from staying employed. On the contrary: For executive-producing the last three seasons of Hill Street Blues, he received a $12 million contract. At least in retrospect, Bochco seemed to regard Milch’s habits as the antics of a mischievous child: “He’s nuts. He’s just crazy. He had a recklessness about him that to this day thrills me.” Still, the two could butt heads—not always a pleasant experience: “David can be very intimidating. He’s almost always the smartest person in the room, and he will not hesitate to bully. He’s so observant about people, he’ll scope out how you’re vulnerable and he can attack you.”
It helped that Milch was able to remain almost demonically productive, churning out high-quality scripts at a breakneck pace. The demands of creating twenty-two episodes a season were both a creative liberation—leaving him no time to succumb to his various blocks—and, as long as he produced, a kind of insurance policy against unemployment. The train, after all, had to keep rolling. From the vantage of 2012, he said the pace of working on a hit network drama was grueling: “I’ve written 300 scripts in my life and I couldn’t do the first 250 again,” he said. “It’s a younger man’s game.”
When Hill Street Blues ended its seven-season run in 1987, Milch was in a position to create his own shows. The first was an ill-fated experiment called Beverly Hills Buntz, in which Dennis Franz reprised a role from Hill Street Blues, this time in a half-hour comedy format set in Los Angeles. Capital News was even shorter lived. Steven Bochco had had a similar run of failures with dramas since following up Hill Street Blues with LA Law (most legendarily, the musical-drama hybrid Cop Rock). In 1993, the two decided to rejoin forces and created NYPD Blue.
The show was at least nominally based on the experiences of a tough, battle-tested New York City cop named Bill Clark, who was to Milch much the way Ed Burns was to David Simon, a kind of kindred spirit, even spiritual twin, from the other, tougher side of manhood’s tracks. NYPD Blue announced in no uncertain terms its intention to push Hill Street Blues’s commitment to dramatic realism to the edge of what network TV would tolerate. Even before airing, it drew an organized protest from the conservative American Family Association, which succeeded in convincing more than fifty ABC affiliates to black out the premiere episode because of its language and partial nudity.
Part of Bochco’s pitch to ABC had been the prescient notion that network TV needed to adjust its standards to compete with the coming threat of cable programming. Indeed, the series’s traditionally handsome leading men—first David Caruso, who left after season one in search of success in films, and then, for five seasons, Jimmy Smits—proved hardly as important as the figure of Detective Andy Sipowicz. Played by Franz, Sipowicz—with his temper, his crankiness, his struggling back-and-forth with addiction, even his dumpy body type—heralded far more about the generation of complicated antiheroes to come than any number of bare buttocks or instances of the word asshole.
From the beginning, Milch fully indulged the modern showrunner’s autocratic prerogative. He never convened a writers’ room, instead meeting one-on-one with writers and giving vague notes for scripts that he would then almost completely rewrite. “One thing you had to come to terms with, you knew you could never get it to where he would be pleased,” said David Mills, who joined NYPD Blue after collaborating with David Simon on their Homicide script. “When it came to writing on that show, that was the biggest thing to deal with. You can’t outwrite him, which means that you can’t even win an argument with him on a story point, so why argue?”
(In one of the great near misses of TV history, Mills arranged for Simon to write an NYPD Blue spec script and brought him out to Los Angeles to meet with Milch. The two got along well, and Milch offered Simon a full-time job on the show the same week that Tom Fontana did the same on Homicide. “It was more money, a bigger hit, but Tom said, ‘Listen, I might not be able to pay you as much, but I’ll teach you how to produce,’” Simon said. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be a producer.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you do. In this game, the only way you protect your writing is to produce.’” He added, “I think I would’ve learned to really like David Milch.”)
Mills found the experience of working with such a volatile leader exhilarating. Not everybody agreed. In her book Free Fire Zone, playwright turned screenwriter Theresa Rebeck wrote an essay that appeared to be a thinly veiled account of her time on the NYPD Blue staff. She nicknamed the Milch character Caligula.
“Caligula’s stories were fantastic—I mean he was a terrific storyteller—and he could really write,” Rebeck wrote. “He was also, often, a terrible human being.” She described bullying acts of cruelty and professional intimidation, alternating with ostentatious generosity; Milch was famous for randomly handing out hundred-dollar bills and running a weekly lottery for the entire cast and crew in which he gave away thousands of his own dollars.
“When he wasn’t being a completely abusive, chaotic nightmare, Caligula was exquisitely charming. He was funny and compelling, kind, alert, and at times deeply compassionate,” Rebeck wrote. “He had a prodigious hunger to believe that not only was he a good writer, he was a great writer, and it was pretty much understood around the building that anything he wrote, casually, on a napkin, say, was vastly more brilliant than anything the rest of the writing staff could ever hope to accomplish even with thirty years of sweat and hard work.” (Rebeck also charged that “Caligula” once hired a prostitute to service himself and his friends and then attempted to expense her fee as show payroll.)
However you cared to analyze Milch’s behavior, NYPD Blue quickly became a very strange place to work. At some point, Milch stopped committing scripts to paper at all, preferring to come to set and extemporaneously dictate lines to the actors. “There was usually a draft he was working from, but those drafts bore no resemblance to what we ended up doing,” said Mark Tinker, one of Grant Tinker’s sons, who was an executive producer on the show. “You never knew what you were going to shoot the next day or where it fit. A lot of times the murderer would change in the course of his rewrite.”
This often forced the entire production to wait around without any idea of what to do. “We’d say, ‘Okay, David, we’re going to be done in an hour.’ He’d come down and act out a scene. Everybody would stand around and watch. He’d go up to get it transcribed while we guessed at what the staging would be, because the actors didn’t have any lines to go on yet. It was crazy,” said Tinker.
If there was a method to this madness, it seemed to be that of a fireman setting blazes only he is capable of putting out, thus ensuring his own heroic indispensability and heroism. “It was narcissistically brilliant, in that it essentially disempowered everybody else. Because nobody could do their job,” said Bochco. “Everybody became completely dependent on David showing up, David being so brilliant on his feet, he could make up a scene. And so he became the absolute center of a completely dysfunctional universe.”
Milch himself saw it in a slightly different light. “The entire television construct is organized around fear. Everyone feels expendable, so they try to make themselves necessary. And the reason they insist on punctuality is that they don’t know what the fuck works, so at least they’re not going to be vulnerable by being tardy,” he said. “In a way, that’s a liberation for people who are fear based, because they can say, ‘What are we going to do?’ I believe that deep down people who are governed by fear want to be governed by faith.”
Put more simply: “What I am demonstrating is that if it fails, it’s going to be my fault. And so that’s a guarantee of future employment for the people whose fault it isn’t.”
Whatever the underlying motive, there was a general feeling that the chaos could not be stopped, that to force Milch into more traditional, accountable ways of working would be to squash his creativity—and, not incidentally, the success of a highly rated show. “We were all his enablers. Enabling his bad behavior so we could get the show done,” Tinker said. “Mostly we didn’t know he was using again, we just thought he was crazy. But we would put up with his crazy behavior when we shouldn’t have, in order to keep the train moving down the tracks.”
Inevitably the process began to take its toll, first on Milch’s health—he suffered a series of serious heart complications requiring time off from the set—and eventually on his relationship with Bochco. As the show became a bigger and bigger success, Milch began to demand more and more money.
“It was a constant,” Bochco said. “Finally he came in one day and said, ‘I need more money,’ and I lost my temper. I said, ‘You’re already the highest-paid writer-producer in television. You’re making more in fees on this show than I am!’ And he went off on me and I went off on him and we were nose to nose, shrieking.”
That night, Bochco said, he was too upset by the fight to sleep. The next day, he called Milch into his office and said he couldn’t stand fighting with a friend and creative partner and had a solution: “I said, ‘Go back to your office, talk to your agent, and tell me everything you want. And I’ll give it to you. Whatever it is. So, think about it because you’re not going to hear the word no from me.’”
Milch left and, ten minutes later, was back. “I know what I want,” he said. Bochco readied a pen and paper to take down his demands. “He said, ‘Promise me that you’ll have lunch with me once a week.’ I said okay and he turned around and walked out. We never had another conversation about money ever again.”
Ultimately, though, Milch’s behavior began costing in the metrics that really mattered. “We went from half a million underbudget to a million and a half over,” said Tinker. Jimmy Smits, fed up with the strain of trying to prepare without a script, left the show. And the plots, inevitably, grew more and more incoherent. After the seventh season, Milch left the series. By that time, anyway, network TV had all but given up reserving a time slot for risky, prestigious adult fare, the equivalent of a movie studio’s Oscar-baiting Christmas releases. A few years later, that niche would have migrated to HBO. And so, naturally, had Milch.
• • •
Carolyn Strauss claimed to have never heard the stories about David Milch when she and Chris Albrecht met him for lunch in early 2002. HBO was riding about as high as it ever would then, with The Sopranos having concluded its third season, Six Feet Under about to start its second, The Wire set to debut, and, with the exception of rumblings on a revived basic cable station called FX, little challenge anywhere on the dial.
For all his craziness, Milch had always played relatively well with suits. He could take notes, at least when he thought they made the work better. And he had been remarkably successful at pitching. While he was trying to make it as a literary writer, he said, editors had begun to sniff him out immediately. “I had such an immature relationship to that world, I’d just be out to steal the money. I didn’t like the people, I didn’t like any of that, so I enjoyed fucking them up a little bit. But by this time, I wanted to tell stories and they could sense that.” Besides, he said, he had a track record; we might not know what the hell he’s talking about, he imagined executives thinking, but “you throw a piece of meat in a room and after a period of time he comes out with a script.”
Even for those, such as Strauss and Albrecht, who had already weathered a David Simon statement of purpose, Milch’s pitch must have been a heady experience. The story was about Roman centurions, city cops, in the time of the apostle Paul, just after Christ’s death. That only began to suggest the underlying themes as Milch saw them.
As he later described it, he began with reference to the Christian existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, who said (in Milch’s paraphrase) that “an effective symbol partakes of the reality it represents.”
I was interested in the way that Christianity, which was originally based on the lived experience of Christ, came to be accepted more universally and how the symbol of the cross became the organizing principle, detached from the suffering body of Christ. And how that allowed a much more complicated and extensive social organization.
From there, he diverged into a piece of abstrusely metaphorical social biology:
I used the example of baboons: Baboons can only move in groups of forty-four because they have to be able to see the leader. If they can’t see the leader, it’s like the current has been turned off. The leader is in the center.
And then a profane retelling of Bible lore:
Paul, who was the first guy the city cops in Rome arrested, for proselytizing, had an epileptic seizure and a vision. Paul had murdered the first of the apostles, St. Stephen, because he said if Christ is truly the Messiah, then this is the end of days. If this ain’t the end of days, he’s not the Messiah and these people are apostates. So he went out and organized the stoning of St. Stephen. The Pharisees said, “This guy is a little fucking crazy. You should go to Damascus. Yo
u’ll be strong in Damascus.” And on the way to Damascus he had a seizure, experienced Christ. What he then began to say was, ‘You don’t have to be a Jew. You do not have to be circumcised. All you have to do is confess Christ crucified and believe in his symbol.’ And so the separation of the symbol from the lived experience, now Christianity spread everywhere.
It was, in other words, a classic Milchian rap: funny, lyrical, part lecture, part hustle; designed to both flatter and intimidate the listener; so packed with ideas that it veered toward incoherent; but also, if one could grope his or her way through the allusions, the discursions, and the puffery, containing much deep and fascinating thought. This was Milch’s all but constant mode, often verging on self-parody. Talking with him, you could find yourself playing a kind of game in which you asked the simplest possible question—one calling for a yes or a no or some fundamental declaration of fact—to see if he would still find the answer by launching into a discussion of the Tao or Kierkegaard or St. Paul. Most often, he did.
The rap, one suspected, was equally that of a former wunderkind—one who at age sixty would, within ten minutes of meeting, still show visitors the elaborate acknowledgment to himself in R. W. B. Lewis’s 1991 biography of the James family—and of a genuinely unique and fertile mind. It also had a practical function. Who, in the face of such erudite and celestial musings, would be vulgar enough to press the point on crass, earthbound matters like, say, budgets or deadlines—or, for that matter, what was actually going to happen in a proposed show?
In any event, it is both a credit to Strauss and Albrecht and an indication of the strangeness of the moment in TV history that their response to Milch’s Roman centurions was, “That’s the best pitch we’ve ever heard. Unfortunately, we already have a show set in Rome in development. Have you ever thought about doing a western?” And it’s a credit to Milch’s supple, idea-based sense of narrative that he was able to say, “No problem.” If the Roman show was to be about civilization organizing around a common symbol—the cross—then why not substitute an equally potent “agreed-upon lie”: gold. Thus, Deadwood was born.
