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

by Brett Martin

  “It was very much a ‘knock the bullshit off of it’ attitude that we had to shooting. There was a sheen to a lot of shows that we didn’t want,” said Ryan. “I would always talk to the directors about that: ‘Go for the most truthful moment.’ There are lots of shows where if you don’t get certain shots of coverage, they’ll fire you. One of the first things I’d say is, ‘I’m not going to get upset if there’s some piece of coverage we don’t have, as long as the moment feels real.’”

  Chiklis had hardly been the obvious choice to play Mackey. He was well-known to TV audiences as the genial dad/cop of The Commish, a network show that went a long way toward making Nash Bridges look edgy. Nevertheless, he and his wife were friendly with Ryan and his wife, and he had read the pilot. “If this gets made,” he told Ryan, “I want to play that role.”

  Ryan was dubious, as was Liguori. “All Kevin and I were thinking was, ‘The fat guy from The Commish is not this guy,” Liguori said. “But he kept calling. I said, ‘Michael, you’re a star. I’m not going to insult you by asking you to come in and audition.’ Meaning, I guess, ‘I don’t want to have to tell you no.’” Chiklis’s own agents were in agreement, for different reasons. “The agencies were not being supportive at all,” said Ryan. “They certainly didn’t view it as an opportunity. We had tons of actors who either wouldn’t consider it for a moment or took the position, ‘If you want to offer me the role, maybe I’ll think about it.’”

  Chiklis, though, could not be dissuaded. An audition was finally arranged in FX’s green-wallpapered conference room. On his way in, Liguori passed a bald, buff guy in a skintight black T-shirt. “Where’s Chiklis?” he asked the room. “You just passed him,” was the answer. The actor came in, gnawing on a mouthful of Nicorette, and proceeded to blow the room away.

  “He scared the crap out of all of us,” was how Liguori remembered it. “He leaves and there’s no oxygen left in the room. No one’s saying anything. Finally, I break the ice and I go, ‘I don’t think he just won the role, I think he is the role.’ The only question left was whether we were going to have the balls to put the future of this show in the hands of a guy known for comedy.”

  The rest of the cast came together in almost as guerrilla a style as the shooting. Johnson had worked with the actress CCH Pounder on his first movie and pushed for the black detective, Charles, to become “Claudette” instead. For her partner, Ryan tapped one of his best friends, Jay Karnes, whom he had met at a college playwriting retreat. With the main characters cast, there was almost no money left to secure actors long-term, in case the show actually went to series. So Ryan dipped even deeper into his personal Rolodex. He persuaded another friend, Dave Rees Snell, to work for extra’s wages, $85 per day, with the promise that he’d get more lines in later episodes. Snell’s character, Ronnie Gardocki, went on to be an enigmatic central figure for seasons to come. For Mackey’s wife, meanwhile, Ryan turned to his own wife, Cathy. “I know I can get you back,” he told her.

  The most spectacular casting story, however, involved a forgettable role and an actor who didn’t win it. The part was for a young dealer who taunts Mackey that he’s too late to catch him with drugs. Mackey chases him, knocks him down, pulls down his pants to reveal a bag taped to his crotch, and delivers the line: “Too late, huh?” Clark Johnson described the audition tape:

  The kid comes in, stands at the mark. The casting associate says, ‘Okay. State your name. Are you ready to go? Whenever you’re ready.’ And all of a sudden the kid takes off running! You can hear his footsteps receding down the hall. She’s in there by herself, going, ‘What the fuck?’ She starts to go toward the door and you hear the kid run back in. The kid runs back to his mark. He punches himself in the stomach. He pulls his own pants down, and he’s got no underwear. There’s his dick hanging there. He yanks the drugs from his crotch. And then he says Chiklis’s line: ‘Too late, huh?’”

  Johnson paused, grinning, for the kicker.

  “And then he stands there, smiling, and goes, ‘Scene.’”

  Once the pilot was shot, a screening for Chernin was arranged. For Reilly, it was a flashback to showing The Sopranos to Chris Albrecht. “The reaction was just silence. You thought, ‘Okay. . . .’” After some consideration, Chernin gave the go-ahead. “I don’t think it’s going to work,” he said. “But go for it.”

  The troops inside FX’s offices were more fired up. Only weeks before, twenty-four-year-old Jeremy Elice had taken a temp job in the public relations department, thinking he’d work for a brief spell and then return to New York, where he was interviewing for a position in features producer Scott Rudin’s office. One night, the head of the department, John Solberg, sent him home with a VHS copy of the pilot. “I just thought, ‘They can’t do this.’ I didn’t know much about the place, but one thing I did know was that they had advertisers,” he said.

  “Hell, yeah, we’re putting this on fucking TV!” cackled Solberg, a large, excitable Texan, when Elice approached him the next day. “We’re gonna shove it up HBO’s ass!” But where was the good guy? Elice wanted to know. “He is the good guy!” Solberg hooted.

  Elice called Rudin’s office and withdrew his name from the job search. (“Can you spell that?” the features people asked when he told them where he was going. “F,” Elice explained patiently, “X.”) A few years later, he would be a key part of bringing Breaking Bad to the air.

  It remained, crucially, for Reilly and Liguori to get advertisers on board. The men flew to New York to host a screening. Before it started, Liguori tried to prepare the audience. “I want to show you a show that I think is going to represent where FX is going, and I want to talk to you about it,” he said. “But while you’re watching this, think of one thing. If you could put an ad in The Sopranos, would you do it?”

  “The room was stone silent when the lights came up,” said Reilly. “People’s faces were like peeled back. A couple of guys slinked out the back door, looking at their shoes.”

  “How many of you liked the show?” Liguori asked those who remained. Most hands went up. Liguori nodded and asked the more important question. How many would buy advertising for their clients during the program? Every hand went down.

  “I said, ‘Guys, I could bring you this kind of programming,’” Liguori recalled. “‘You think it’s good. I think it’s great. But I can’t put this on unless I have you. I would expect 95 percent of your clients would never come within a hundred miles of this, but there’s 5 percent that will. Think about that 5 percent. Video game companies. Beer companies. Fashion companies. Guy-type things. Just please support the show.’ And that’s what they did.”

  One more major hurdle remained. The Shield was officially green-lighted on August 30, 2001. Had the powers that be waited another twelve days, it’s likely the show would never have gone forward. Even then, in the aftermath of September 11, there was enormous doubt about whether they could proceed. All the conviction that the network had about people’s willingness to accept the show was thrown into question anew. This was a time, the common wisdom went, when the public would be craving hero-heroes, not antiheroes—and certainly not a cop antihero.

  What became clear, once The Shield debuted exactly six months and a day after the terrorist attacks, was that it now resonated in ways that its creators could never have anticipated. The moral heart of the show was the question of to what degree Mackey’s behavior was justified by the results he got. The Farm, his character would argue, was in a state of war, demanding extraordinary measures. As Claudette put it in the pilot, after the captain has compared Mackey to Al Capone:

  Al Capone made money by giving people what they wanted. What people want these days is to make it to their cars without getting mugged. Come home from work and see their stereo is still there. Hear about some murder in the barrio, find out the next day the police caught the guy. If having all those things means some cop roughed up some nigger or some spic in the ghett
o . . . well, as far as most people are concerned, it’s don’t ask, don’t tell.

  In Ryan’s original conception, the question of exactly what behavior one might be willing to tolerate in the name of security was focused on Aceveda, whom he envisioned struggling with how much he should or should not lean on Mackey to get what he wanted. Making Mackey himself the main character posed a more direct and discomfiting challenge to an audience that would soon be grappling with myriad real-life versions of the same quandary, from Guantánamo Bay to Abu Ghraib to domestic surveillance.

  Still, as the debut approached, Liguori had little idea what to expect of the show on which he may well have bet his network presidency. The night before, he called a company-wide meeting and spoke passionately about how proud they should be about the risky work they had done together, regardless of what the ratings turned out to be. Privately, he was praying to at least double the network’s baseline prime-time rating of .8. A 1, he figured, would represent a raging success.

  “The ratings come in at four forty-five a.m. on the West Coast. My home phone was ringing. At that point I still had a pager and it was going off. My cell phone was ringing. I knew it was the rating, one way or the other, but I didn’t want to give the impression that it was all about the rating for me. I needed to walk the walk,” he said. Finally, he arrived at the office, deliberately late. Every person at the network was waiting. He checked the number: it was 4.1, the highest-rated basic cable debut of all time.

  “Soon people started writing, ‘This is HBO, but free,’ and we were like, ‘Holy shit. They’re putting it in the reviews now!’” said Reilly.

  That fall, The Shield was nominated for three Emmys—Chiklis for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and Ryan and Johnson for writing and directing the pilot. Liguori and Reilly were so convinced that there was no chance of winning that they didn’t buy tickets for the traditional postceremony Governor’s Ball. “They were like $2,000 apiece,” said Reilly. “We went to the show, but, fuck it, we’ll go out after and get drunk. We’re not paying $4,000 to eat bad breadsticks at the Governor’s Ball.”

  When Chiklis unexpectedly won—beating out the two leads of Six Feet Under, Martin Sheen of The West Wing, and Kiefer Sutherland as another compromised, post-9/11 cop in 24—the FX team was stuck on the outside, trying to crash. “It was me and Chiklis, trying to scam our way in,” Reilly said. “He got busted. They stopped him at the door. He’s just too guilty looking.”

  • • •

  The Shield debuted three months before The Wire. (This was also the era of The Job, The Unit, The District, The Practice, and others; “People love articles,” Liguori said.) The proximity, name similarity, and broad overlap of subject matter guaranteed a certain amount of comparison between the two shows, at least among a passionate fan base with a new medium—the Internet—on which to express their loyalties. “It was the same old argument: ‘I love the Beatles, so the Rolling Stones have to suck,’” Ryan said. Fans of The Shield complained about how boring and slow-moving HBO’s show was, while The Wire partisans attacked The Shield for being unrealistic.

  Both assessments suited each show’s creators just fine. Ed Burns was sent a screener of The Shield pilot: “In the first half hour, the guy yelled at his superior officer in the squad room, which you never do. Even I wouldn’t do that. Then he has this hooker who’s an informant and he gives her dope and then money so she can buy something for her baby. And then he killed a cop. So I said, ‘We don’t have to worry. This show is going nowhere.’”

  As for the other side: “My issue with The Wire as a viewer was that it took too long,” said Ryan. “They could afford that, being on HBO. But I didn’t believe in having an episode that set up something cool three episodes later. I wanted that episode to be cool. I felt an obligation for every single episode to have one or two ‘Holy shit’ moments in it.”

  He had a similar assessment of The Sopranos. “They were always promising a different show than they delivered. Their promos were always action-packed: Somebody’s betraying somebody else. Somebody’s going to get whacked. And then the next week it would be a very well-produced, well-written family drama.”

  Ryan believed in a brand of proud TV populism that would have had David Chase choking on his braciola. “Our show was a show that was trying to sell Budweiser and detergent,” he said flatly. Even more scandalous, he was a defender of that supposed scourge of nonpay TV television, the very thing that supposedly would prevent basic cable from ever approaching the rarefied quality of HBO: commercial breaks or, more precisely, the “act-out” preceding them.

  “I believe in act-outs. I like them,” he said. “They give a little jolt to your heart, if done properly. They give you three or four minutes to think about what you’ve seen and what you think is going to happen next.” In the editing room, he would obsess over those moments: five of them, in an episode that had a pre-credits teaser and four acts. Because he was prone to moving scenes around in postproduction, directors were instructed to treat every scene as though it could be the end of an act: he was looking for what he called “buttons.” “It could be a look, a line delivered strongly, a reveal—anything, but it has to be a point of view: ‘This is something. It’s important. Bam. You’re out.’”

  Complaining about the necessities of the form, he said, was an old-fashioned brand of snobbery. “There are people who don’t want to believe they’re making television. It’s easier for them to believe they’re film auteurs than to embrace that this is a different genre and that there’re ways to take advantage of that genre,” he said. “I wasn’t going to Scorsese film festivals in Greenwich Village as a kid. I was watching Brady Bunch repeats. I didn’t walk into this business with an attitude toward television.”

  Indeed, The Shield was giddy with TV love in the same way Quentin Tarantino movies are geeked on films. Its realism was the heightened realism of boys acting out a cop show in the backyard: sneaking up, crouched, on a suspect and gesturing a partner on with a drawn gun; getting shot and dying in elaborate slo mo; dramatically taking sunglasses on and off to make a point.

  The show’s testosterone-fueled spirit was reflected in a rambunctious writers’ room. “We had a bunch of writers who had very little experience and who were just trying to one-up each other by getting crazier and crazier and further out there,” said Glen Mazzara, a writer Ryan brought over from his days at Nash Bridges. “It was like, ‘Let’s put on a show.’”

  The staff included a few veterans—among them, James Manos from The Sopranos’ “College”—but was dominated by younger talent. Two of the more influential writers—and future showrunners—had never written for TV before: Kurt Sutter and Scott Rosenbaum. Story-breaking sessions often ran deep into the night; writers would sleep in their offices, then begin again the next morning.

  It was a fun room but often the scene of vicious battles over the show’s direction. “The writers were all brutally honest people. All very talented, but hard hitting. Nobody could pitch an idea unless they were ready to have it completely eviscerated and ripped to shreds—so much so that people were emotionally destroyed by some of the criticism,” Mazzara said.

  Sutter, a long-haired, tattooed ex-actor and former addict, was the source of frequent battles with fellow writers. Several believed his more gonzo impulses held too much sway with Ryan, who presided over the battles as the final arbiter. “Anything that seemed rash, grim, grueling, over the top, like a guy getting his head pushed down on a skillet—that would be Kurt,” one writer said. It was emblematic that one of his biggest battles with Mazzara was over whether a character should wield a gun or a hand grenade in a crucial scene. As it would be several years later on his own, aggressively violent FX show, Sons of Anarchy, several years later, Sutter’s philosophy could be summed up as never using a mere gun when an awesome grenade could do.

  For all its cartoonish aspects, there was no mistaking The Shield for The A-Tea
m. From the beginning, the show plumbed the same modern obsessions that occupied HBO’s more refined shows: power and violence, work and family, addiction and sexuality. Mackey was given unexpected depth by his attachment to his wife and autistic son, even as he inexorably drove them away.

  But Mackey also remained a vivid expression of a man struggling with his inner beast—and, for the audience, of the beast himself, simultaneously seductive and repellent. It could be a dangerous game. Even the character’s creators found themselves underestimating the boundaries of fans’ love for their monster.

  “If I said to you: I’m going to have a story about a corrupt cop who murdered another cop and stole a bunch of money. And that there’s a pretty virtuous Internal Affairs detective who starts digging into the case and becomes hell-bent on bringing this man to justice. Who would be the hero of that piece?” Ryan said, referring to the character played by Forest Whitaker who enters in season five and sets the final downfall of Mackey in motion.

  “But our audience viewed Vic as the hero. They wanted Vic to get away with it. They found every negative thing to say about Whitaker’s character they could think of. When we wrote it, I was convinced: ‘Boy, we’re really going to make it tough for the audience. They’re not going to be sure who to root for.’ I was an idiot. They knew who to root for.”

  • • •

  Having inadvertently gained extra resonance after 9/11, The Shield continued to reflect current events—and never more so than in its fourth season. In that, the show’s most self-contained and best season, the Barn receives an imperious new captain, Monica Rawling, who is intent on occupying the Farm and crushing the local drug regime regardless of the morally charged costs and, in some ways, oblivious to the reality on the ground. “We were very aware that we were writing about Bush’s invasion of Iraq,” Mazzara said.