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

by Brett Martin

  In season five, there may have been nobody in The Wire writers’ room with enough power to say “Yeah, but” to Simon. He had lost his all-important “bounce.” Pelecanos openly admitted that he himself had at least partially checked out: “I’m pretty sure we all felt we had no dog in that fight,” he said of the newsroom story lines. “There was no passion there for us.” More important, Burns was largely missing. Early on, he had been dividing his energies between the show and the miniseries Generation Kill. Several episodes into The Wire’s season, he left to begin prepping for the miniseries’ shoot in South Africa, Namibia, and Mozambique. Throughout the triumphant fourth season, Simon had been there to assist Burns’s vision and rein in his ever-expansive impulses. When it came time for season five, though, Burns wasn’t there to return the favor with his gift for ingenious plotting and deft characterization. Indeed, he said he had never watched season five in its entirety.

  Similar problems would nag at Treme, Simon’s next, Burns-less, HBO series about post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, which was long on atmosphere, politics, and passion, short on compelling plot and nuanced character. Meanwhile, despite a head bursting with projects, Burns produced nothing publicly for at least a half decade following The Wire and Generation Kill. The truth—no graver than the difference between Wings and the Beatles—may be that the two men, auteur’s egos and all, simply needed each other to do their best work.

  • • •

  You’ve got to write for yourself, yourself and the other writers. That’s it,” Simon said, looking back and employing a favorite analogy. “If you go with the audience, they’ll always ask for ice cream. ‘You gotta eat vegetables,’ you say. ‘No, I want ice cream. Give me more ice cream. The last time you gave me ice cream and I liked it.’ The audience is a child.”

  At the end of sixty hours of television, season five included, Simon could rest easy that he had served up something unique to, and yet also uniquely of, television: a work of literature with the nutrition of broccoli and the flavor of ice cream and the show—five years after leaving the air—most commonly referred to as “the best show ever on television.” It may also have been the last time HBO could unequivocally claim that title.

  PART III

  The Inheritors

  Eleven

  Shooting the Dog

  In the spring of 2012, HBO debuted Girls, a half-hour series about four women in their early twenties navigating life in post–Sex and the City New York. For about three weeks, the show was all that anybody talked, tweeted, blogged, or otherwise electronically bloviated about—at least in the world in which any new HBO show was discussed with talmudic intensity. Girls became a vessel for all that attention because (a) it was good—though perhaps not hefty enough to support the weight of all the Rorschach-like baggage commentators brought to it; (b) it was created and run by a woman, still an unfortunate rarity more than a decade into an otherwise deeply fruitful artistic revolution; and (c) the woman in question, Lena Dunham, was only twenty-six years old.

  To Dunham, then, thirteen years old when The Sopranos debuted, the notion that TV was a wasteland must have seemed like a rumor from another universe, in the same category as the fact that phones once came with cords. In this, she was just the most dramatic example of the group of showrunners and TV visionaries who inherited and solidified the Third Golden Age. Though only a decade or two younger than the men who pioneered the transformation of TV, they came from a very different place. They were not aspiring filmmakers, or journalists, or novelists who had lost their way. They were television people through and through—unburdened by any of David Chase’s chest-beating grief about the direction of their careers. If they’d spent time toiling in the old network trenches, it had been just long enough to instill in them a taste of the hunger for something bigger and more fulfilling, something that then came to them, almost as their due. But though it was HBO that opened the door, it was not the home to this generation’s best work. That would happen instead on basic cable, broken up, just like the bad old days, by commercials.

  • • •

  There was nothing secret about the HBO formula,” Chris Albrecht would later say. “It was a good formula: You don’t have to do twenty-two episodes. You don’t try to program ten new shows in one month. You don’t try to figure out what the audience is going to watch. You try not to interfere in the creative process too much. And you put a little money against it. After a while, we proved that you could have both creative opportunity and big success, i.e., money. And once you have those things, there’s going to be a lot more people looking to be in the game.”

  Back when the Fox broadcast network was ascendant, it had made a fateful bargain: If cable operators wanted the right to carry it—which is to say NFL football, The Simpsons, and other highly desirable properties—the operators would have pay not only in cash, but in bandwidth. Fox, in other words, wanted channels—which is how it ended up with a curious appendage called FX that it had no idea what to do with.

  Original programming had actually been one of the calling cards for FX (or, as it styled itself then, fX) upon launching in 1994: “TV Made Fresh Daily,” as the motto had it. Emanating from “the Apartment,” a 6,500-square-foot space in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, the offerings included slapdash shows on such topics as pets and antiques and were anchored by a strenuously wacky morning show called Breakfast Time, co-hosted by Laurie Hibberd, Tom Bergeron, and a puppet of undefined species named Bob. (Bergeron would go on to host America’s Funniest Home Videos and Dancing with the Stars. In fact, fX’s most lasting contribution to the future of television might have been the employment of eventual reality TV hosts; it also featured Jeff Probst of Survivor and Phil Keoghan of The Amazing Race.) The rest of the network’s schedule was packed with reruns.

  By 1997, only the reruns remained. The now uppercase FX did little more than show properties of its parent company, particularly those geared toward men in their late teens to late thirties. The network reached barely thirty million homes; it was not available in New York City. In terms of ratings and public profile, it may as well have not existed at all.

  Then, in 1998, Peter Chernin, the president and COO of News Corp., tapped a tall, affable Bronx native and vice president of marketing named Peter Liguori to run the network. As Liguori remembered it, Chernin delivered the news this way: “I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I’m giving you a network to run. The bad news is, it’s FX, it’s total garbage, you’re probably going to fail, and I’m going to have to fire you.”

  “The subtext was, ‘This can’t get any worse, so go for it,’” Liguori said.

  Liguori had a pedigree when it came to networks seeking to define themselves. He had been vice president of consumer marketing at HBO under Michael Fuchs and had been present as the network began setting its sights on original programming. He had even played some role in the birth of the line “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO” (the authorship was also claimed by the advertising agency BBDO), though he just as happily took credit for what he called “the worst line in the history of HBO”: “Something Special’s On.”

  Now, to help him reconceive FX, he recruited another executive close to the roots of the TV revolution. Kevin Reilly had helped midwife The Sopranos at Brillstein-Grey but was looking for new opportunities. Having started his career at NBC, he did not relish a return to a broadcast network. And he had begun to see the opportunities in a changing cable universe.

  Still, he was skeptical when he agreed to a lunch with Liguori. The men discussed looking to the Lifetime network, at that point the most successfully branded cable station, with its cheesy but instantly recognizable original movies for women. Liguori imagined doing something similar for young men, a station modeled on Maxim, the crude British-based lad magazine that dominated American newsstands in the late 1990s. The new regime had opened with shows like Son of the Beach, a parody of Baywatch executive-produced by Howard Stern, a
nd a raunchy variety hour called The X Show.

  “I thought the strategy was terrible,” Reilly said.

  As lunch progressed, though, Reilly began to change his mind. Liguori was talking less about any particular kind of programming than he was about giving FX a recognizable identity, one informed by HBO, where The Sopranos and Six Feet Under were suddenly making waves. “He was smartly saying, ‘It’s a general entertainment network, but it can be branded through tone,’” Reilly said. “And the more he talked, the more he started to sound like what he really aspired to do was HBO. I thought, like, ‘Well, I can do that.’”

  That became the men’s shared buzz phrase: “Free HBO.”

  “I just looked at the landscape and thought, ‘Here’s HBO, that gets accolades for authentic programming, that doesn’t shrink from presenting adult themes and adult issues in an unvarnished fashion. And here’s the general interest networks: TNT, TBS, USA.’ And there’s nothing in the middle,” Liguori said. “My hunch was there was an underserved audience of people who weren’t in the pay category. I laid that out for Chernin and Murdoch: ‘There is no reason why those guys have a monopoly on authenticity.’”

  The Fox brass agreed but left little doubt that FX remained an ugly stepchild. The network’s offices were located on downscale Sepulveda Boulevard, far from the luxurious Fox lot in Century City. Reilly, who had taken an enormous pay cut—half what he was making at Brillstein-Grey, he said—remembered being shocked.

  “I had come from a place where they literally had museum-quality art on the walls. If you wanted a new coaster, there was a house designer who would have to come in and approve your $500 coaster. I walked into the FX offices and there was a huge stain in the center of the carpet. There was a hole in the wall, half-covered by a picture. I asked the office manager, ‘Do you think I can get two chairs that match?’ She said, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t do that.’ I remember my assistant, who came with me, looking white as a ghost, like, ‘Why did I follow you here?’” Casting was done in a conference room wallpapered in what Liguori remembered as some form of green velvet. “You kept looking around for the avocado refrigerator in the room,” he said.

  Nor was that the most significant shock for Reilly. “I looked at the ratings and, you know, I’d never seen the decimal point on the left side of the number before. I’d seen a 7 rating, but I’d never seen a .7 rating,” he said. “I asked, ‘What’s success? What does Lifetime do?’ They were doing a 1.5. But the word was, ‘Oh, we’ll never get there. If we can do a 1, we’ll be thrilled.’”

  For Liguori, though, low expectations were part of the promise of the nascent network, the thing that would allow them to be creative. “That was the thing: we didn’t have to hit it out of the park in terms of ratings,” he said.

  Reilly began calling in writers and showrunners to pitch material for the new network—so many that a shocked security guard at the Sepulveda building, unaccustomed to signing so many people in and out, vocally complained. Reilly and his boss were clear about what they were seeking.

  “I don’t think they’ve cornered the market on antiheroes at HBO. They’re on in twenty-three million homes; we’re going to be in seventy-five million. So how about we snuggle in as close as we can? We’re not bound by the FCC either. Let’s just do something that’s going to blow them back on their heels.”

  • • •

  Of all the strange inlets in the flow of TV history where talent has pooled for a time, none—not even The White Shadow—was as unlikely as Nash Bridges. The show, which ran from 1996 through 2001 on CBS, was an entirely conventional hour-long drama starring Don Johnson and Cheech Marin as irreverent detectives solving crimes while cruising around San Francisco in a big yellow convertible. If the show had its sights set anywhere, it was backward on a previous generation of Stephen J. Cannell productions that mixed comedy with formulaic cases of the week. “It really should have been in the eighties,” said Shawn Ryan, who secured the show’s place in history as an unlikely incubator of a basic cable revolution.

  Ryan was a large-framed, balding guy with the air of a former jock gone slightly to seed. He subscribed to the David Simon school of showrunner antifashion, favoring high-top sneakers and T-shirts. It was easy to imagine him playing beer pong or slumped on a couch, holding a video game controller.

  Raised in Rockford, Illinois, Ryan had studied playwriting at Middlebury College in Vermont, then made his way to Los Angeles. For three years, he learned his craft at Nash Bridges and then spent a year writing for Angel, Joss Whedon’s spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He also wrote two pilots with decidedly ungroundbreaking premises: one about a former wild girl returning to her hometown after her father died, to keep the family business going, and one a workplace comedy set in a veterinarian’s office. Neither went anywhere, but they were enough to land Ryan a modest development deal at Fox Television Studios. He spent his first nine months unable to come up with any mutually agreeable comedy ideas. In semi-desperation, Ryan offered to try his hand at drama instead and began sketching out the beginnings of a police series.

  “At its heart it was, ‘What’s a cop show I’d want to watch?’” he said. “I felt a lot of things on TV—even that I’d worked on—were bullshit. In my head, I saw something very different from what I had ever seen. But it’s hard to pitch ‘different,’ so I just started writing the first five or six pages of the script.”

  A handful of characters quickly took shape around a police station in a crime-plagued East Los Angeles neighborhood: an older African American detective with a younger, ambitiously brainy partner; a Hispanic captain with political aspirations; a rookie cop hiding his homosexuality. Notably absent was anything resembling the rough-and-tumble, morally compromised antigang team that eventually defined what would become The Shield. The team entered the picture only after Ryan had gotten a tentative go-ahead to finish a pilot script.

  At that time, Los Angeles was still reeling from the fallout of the Rampart scandal, which had revealed astonishing levels of corruption in the LAPD’s antigang “CRASH” unit. Delving into the scandal, Ryan shifted the pilot’s focus to what he redubbed the “Strike Team” and its intense, charismatic leader, Vic Mackey. He began to get excited by the possibilities.

  “I was jazzed. Coming off of three years of Nash Bridges, where the guys were real heroes and never made mistakes and always did the right thing, I wanted to write something where people could be assholes,” he said.

  The pilot for the show, then titled Rampart, dropped viewers in medias res at the Barn, a converted church being used as a police station in the Farmington District, or “the Farm.” All is not nearly well. Mackey’s team, a squad of testosterone-fueled, hyperaggressive dudes, has clearly been operating rogue for some time, sticking their hands into the pockets of the gangs and drug dealers they’d been given carte blanche to control. Mackey finds an instant adversary in the new captain, David Aceveda, who insinuates his own man, a spy, into the Strike Team. In the episode’s final moments, Mackey, who has engineered a chaotic drug raid for the purpose, shoots the interloper point-blank in the face. Meet your new hero.

  Ryan had certainly succeeded in banishing any ghosts of Nash Bridges. He had also, he assumed, written his way out of any possibility of having his pilot produced. Rampart had been a fun exercise, but he was resigned to it ending up a writing sample, nothing more.

  Indeed, that’s how it ended up on Kevin Reilly’s desk, in a stack of spec scripts he’d called in to find new writers. He and Liguori were still casting around for what the shape of their new “free HBO” would look like. One thing they were not interested in was a cop show; everybody did cop shows. But when Reilly read Ryan’s script, he thought, ‘Holy shit. I don’t know if people are going to love this or hate it, but it’s definitely not going to go quietly.’”

  He called Ryan and said, “We’re going to make it.”

  “What do you mean?” R
yan said.

  “We’ll make it.”

  Ryan began to form the opinion that a friend was playing a prank on him. “Who is this?” he asked. And then: “That script?”

  “We’re going to make your script.”

  Reilly did worry whether the pilot’s ending was a step too far. The Sopranos “College” episode may have aired two years earlier, but this was asking the audience to accept something of a different magnitude: a protagonist murdering a fellow police officer in cold blood. More important, it was asking advertisers to place their products next to the protagonist doing so.

  “You’ve got to realize, this is what we’re going forward with, forever,” a worried Reilly told Liguori. “This is a guy who killed his partner. This is going to live forever.”

  Liguori played the Bronx card. He pointed out that, as in “College,” the victim was a snitch. “I said, ‘Kevin, you’re from Port Washington’”—on Long Island’s affluent north shore—“‘I’m from the Bronx. In the Bronx, rats lose. And I think there are more people out there with the mind-set of the Bronx than of Port Washington.’”

  • • •

  The pilot was shot fast and cheap, under the supervision of Scott Brazil, whom Reilly had brought in to assist and mentor the novice Ryan. Brazil was a veteran of network fare good and bad, going all the way back to Hill Street Blues. Clark Johnson was hired to direct and instituted a spontaneous run-and-gun style, shooting in Super 16 mm and relying heavily on handheld camera work and Steadicam. Spotting a pack of stray dogs near the location of one scene, he grabbed a piece of salami off the craft services table and tossed it into the frame. “Shoot the dog! Shoot the fucking dog!” he yelled as the strays came running. “Shoot the dog” became on-set shorthand for a style that came to define the show for the length of its run. In the third season, writer Charles “Chic” Eglee was shocked to show up on set and see its Emmy-nominated star, Michael Chiklis, shooting a scene in which he plunged into real-life East L.A. traffic, a Steadicam operator in dogged pursuit.