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

by Brett Martin

  Season four was notable in another way that would affect the course of FX’s fortunes and the cable revolution. In looking for someone to play Rawling, the show needed “an actor that could match up to Mackey, not as a physical force, but as a force of nature,” said John Landgraf, who took over as president and general manager in 2005. Throwing out dream names in the writers’ room—Annette Bening was one of them—Ryan and his team hit upon Glenn Close. TV had made a few gigantic stars, but it was still all but unheard of for a major film actor to become a series regular. Ryan, Landgraf, and Liguori flew to New York to pitch Close at her apartment. They left with a promise that she would at least watch some of the previous three seasons on DVD. Excited by the depth of the character, and coming from a movie world in which opportunities for great female characters were ever harder to come by, Close dived in.

  There was some discussion about continuing the Rawling character for another season, but Close insisted on returning to New York, where her daughter was still in high school. The experience had apparently been fulfilling enough, however, that Close agreed to take on an even bigger television role, as Patty Hewes in Damages, the series created by Sopranos alum Todd Kessler. In her hands, Hewes became the one central female character of the Third Golden Age to match her male counterparts in complexity, power, and capacity for monstrous behavior.

  As for movie actors being willing to work in television, Close proved to be at the vanguard of a nearly complete reversal. Actors it would have once been unthinkable to see on the small screen were, soon enough, clamoring for the kinds of multifaceted, complicated roles TV offered. For actresses in particular, the relative bounty of roles for women over the age of thirty was a powerful allure compared with the limited options of film.

  • • •

  Damages capped off a golden initial run for FX that was comparable, at least in defining the network’s identity, to HBO’s first flurry of original shows. The Shield had been followed by Nip/Tuck, Ryan Murphy’s salacious, darkly comic series about plastic surgeons. Then came Rescue Me, a collaboration of Denis Leary and Peter Tolan, a veteran of The Larry Sanders Show. The two had first worked together on a half-hour ABC series called The Job, featuring Leary as a New York police detective. Despite being what Leary called “quite possibly the darkest situation comedy ever seen on network television,” the show won critical acclaim and renewal for a second season but was put on an extended hiatus after September 11, on the assumption that American audiences would not tolerate anything that even mildly sullied the reputation of police officers. It was revived the following January, only to be summarily canceled, and Leary and Tolan resolved that they were done with the conventional networks.

  “There are people who panic and run and hide and cry in response to almost any crisis,” Leary wrote. “Ninety-five percent of them work in network television.”

  Still, The Job’s demise turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Rescue Me—inspired in part by the death of Leary’s cousin, a Worcester, Massachusetts, firefighter, in a devastating warehouse fire—took the base materials of the truncated sitcom and alchemized them into something deeper, more resonant, and, not coincidentally, funnier. It grafted a workplace comedy onto the family saga of an alcoholic fireman living, literally, with the ghosts of September 11. It was the first show to deal head-on with the terrorist attacks and the closest thing FX ever did to HBO’s best work.

  • • •

  All of these shows, and the wave of original programming that soon followed across basic cable, had The Shield to thank for the opportunity. On a content level, it had further institutionalized—to something approaching the point of cliché—the Troubled Man as the Third Golden Age’s primary character. In order to pitch FX, hopeful TV writers reported being flat-out instructed that their shows had better revolve around flawed but ultimately sympathetic men. Inexorably, the network would find itself going from edgy to something like EdgyTM.

  But what FX had amply shown was that the signatures of HBO shows—shorter seasons, higher production values, better writing, more complicated storytelling—weren’t virtues found only in a subscriber-based TV model. In that, the value of The Shield would be incalculable.

  “I wish I could calculate it,” Ryan said with a wry smile.

  He was not the only one. That question—exactly what quality was worth, especially outside of HBO’s rarefied atmosphere—would persist and fuel TV’s biggest negotiations over the next few years. Meanwhile, HBO would never again be alone at—or even necessarily at the top of—the quality heap.

  • • •

  The threats to that reign did not all come from barbarians storming the gates. HBO faced equal problems on the inside. On the one hand, they were the kinds of growing pains that were inevitable in any organization that had undergone a major transition in stature, visibility, and productivity in less than half a decade. On the other, they were deeply human, involving vanity, fear, competitiveness, the existential perils of getting what you want, and the twin remoras that attach themselves to any success: arrogance at how you got there and fear that it will all go away. The stuff, in other words, of a fine series on HBO.

  In 2002, Jeff Bewkes had moved up to become the chairman of Time Warner’s entertainment and networks group. Chris Albrecht became HBO’s CEO while also maintaining control over programming. He had reason to feel confident: his two dramatic series The Sopranos and Six Feet Under were riding high, The Wire had just debuted, and Deadwood was in the early stages of development. Other divisions were doing just as well, with Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm doing an equal job of defining the network’s comedy side, and high-prestige miniseries like Band of Brothers and Angels in America, starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep, foreshadowing the future migration of movie talent to TV.

  In 2003, Variety named Albrecht “Showman of the Year.” An accompanying article stressed HBO’s climate of hospitality to artists. “We are the network and we don’t always agree with the final product of the things that we put on the air,” he told the magazine, an astonishing assertion. “But everybody can walk away feeling a little bit better because we haven’t screwed up somebody’s good idea.” In a New York Times profile, he compared the network to the Medicis, Renaissance Florence’s patrons of the arts. It was a high-minded allusion, to be sure, but also, in its way, a call back to the philosophy of MTM’s Grant Tinker, who had taken pains to insist he was no artist himself, just a facilitator.

  That same year, though, marked HBO’s first significant failure with a one-hour drama since The Sopranos had debuted. Carnivàle was a visually sumptuous, magical-realist drama set in the Depression-era Dust Bowl. Its creator, Daniel Knauf, who had only two episodes of a network show and a 1994 HBO movie under his belt as a credited writer, supposedly had a six-season plan, but those around the show worried that it had no discernible direction or leadership, and viewers felt the same.

  “We fell in love with the genre more than what the writer had to say, which is a more cynical way of programming,” said Michael Lombardo. “You’re guessing what people are going to respond to, when what people respond to, for us, is great writing executed really well. If we think we can guess the genre, we’re in the same game as the networks.”

  There were other duds to come: Lucky Louie, which debuted several years later, was a half-hour comedy from Louis C.K. The comedian’s sensibility would later prove to be the perfect foundation for a boundary-pushing, if overly self-satisfied, show, Louie, on FX, but in this first go-round, the point seemed to be less his take on domestic life than the form of the show itself: an old-fashioned multicamera sitcom filmed mostly on an ostentatiously fake, one-room set in front of a studio audience. In theory, perhaps, this was the perfect counterintuitive move for the network that had shot The Larry Sanders Show with a single camera, back when that was almost unheard of for a half-hour sitcom. In practice, though, it felt cheap and odd and—crucially, for a business built on bra
nd—simply wrong. Some internally urged Albrecht to run the show late at night, framed as an experimental piece rather than announcing it with the usual HBO fanfare, but he refused. He was heard to say that with Lucky Louie he was creating his own The Honeymooners, about as sacred a reference as it’s possible to make in the world of TV, especially by a onetime comedy agent.

  Yet another series, Tell Me You Love Me, about three couples with various intimacy issues, defied even the prurient interest spurred by (false) rumors that its sex scenes involved actual sex to debut to a dismal 910,000 viewers in September 2007.

  Of course, not every series that HBO aired could be a hit. Albrecht believed that the backlash was inevitable after such a string of successes. “The story that HBO was brilliant and the best thing that ever happened, that story had gotten old. So at some point the story has to become, ‘Well, what’s wrong with these guys?’ I mean, with Lucky Louie, I still think it was ahead of its time. But you would have thought we had done something sacrilegious. We were taking a chance that nobody would have paid attention to before, and now they were reacting like you insulted their mother!”

  Nevertheless, there was a sense inside and outside the company that with success, the powers that be had begun to fatally change their approach.

  “Something changed,” said Henry Bromell, who briefly executive-produced Carnivàle. “It was like they convinced themselves that ‘it wasn’t David Chase, it was us! It wasn’t Darren Star who did Sex and the City, it was us!’”

  “We were lucky: we had these zeitgeist shows that just walked in the door,” said Richard Plepler, then the executive vice president of communications. “The truth has always been that we are only as good as the people we work with.”

  The bigger problem for HBO may not have been what was in development, but what was not. The network’s signature hits had been the product of what Albrecht liked to call “the HBO shrug”—that devil-may-care attitude that comes with low stakes and lower expectations.

  “I think that, from a creative standpoint, to have hit a home run so quickly with The Sopranos became a little bit of a creative albatross,” said Lombardo. “Our ethos had always been to be fearless, take risks, but once you had an enormous success, it became almost impossible for people not to on some level start gauging everything against it. We had evolved into a culture of saying the smart ‘no,’ which is a lot easier and less ass exposing than ‘yes.’”

  To some who had reason to expect they’d be welcomed warmly into the HBO family, the “no” was surprising. Terence Winter and Tim Van Patten, both high-ranking members of the Sopranos family, each had a development deal at the network. One day, on set, they got to talking about outlaw motorcycle gangs. “Hey, this is a TV series!” Winter said. When he called Strauss, however, he was shocked by the executive’s lack of encouragement. “We’re getting paid whether we work or don’t work,” he said. “To me, the only logical answer is, ‘Great! Why don’t you go write a script and bring it back to us.’ It doesn’t cost them a dime and, God willing, we have a show.” Instead, the idea died on the vine. (Kurt Sutter apparently had the same experience pitching his outlaw biker show, Sons of Anarchy. “Yes, we left your pitch meeting scratching our heads, wondering if the executive who was yawning, staring at her watch, putting her feet up on the table, and sighing exasperatedly was somehow testing our resolve,” he wrote in an open letter to HBO on his blog. Sons would find a successful home at FX; Winter and Van Patten would go on to executive-produce HBO’s Boardwalk Empire; and HBO would finally try its own biker show—a failed pilot from screenwriter Michael Tolkin, titled 1%.)

  At the precise time that there were more and more varied options for TV writers with serious visions, the impression began to spread around Hollywood that HBO’s door was closed more than it was open—and then only to well-established writers.

  “David Chase, remember, had worked on all network shows,” said Lombardo. “We had gotten to the point where we might not have taken a pitch from him. He might not have been on our level.”

  • • •

  None of this would have been apparent to the viewing public. The cancellation of Deadwood in May 2006 certainly was. As Albrecht told it, that surprising turn of events started as a normal internal discussion about renewal that quickly snowballed out of control.

  “By the third season of Deadwood, the show had found its core audience,” he said. “It was a show that had accomplished what we felt it could accomplish. It wasn’t growing as a franchise. And David had talked to us about some other ideas that we were excited to move on to. It was about, ‘How do we maximize our David Milch relationship.’”

  It could not have hurt that several very real business considerations were working against Deadwood. Like any period piece, the show was expensive to produce. The situation was compounded by the fact that, unlike most of its shows, HBO did not own the series outright; Paramount, with whom Milch had an overall deal, owned the foreign rights, thus cutting off a future revenue stream. In that light, the same problems that plagued a show like The Wire—a passionate but small, and declining, audience, critical acclaim, but little Emmy consideration—loomed far more seriously.

  In the New York offices on a Friday, Albrecht called Milch in Los Angeles and told him that he wanted the showrunner to begin thinking about wrapping up the show in one more season. Might he be able to do so in six or eight episodes, instead of the usual twelve? Albrecht said he got the distinct impression that Milch was unenthusiastic about continuing at all, or at least in a shortened season, but that the conversation was the first of what he imagined would be many more.

  Upon hanging up, however, Milch felt duty-bound to call Timothy Olyphant, who was in the process of buying a house, to let him know that the show might be coming to an end. Olyphant, in turn, called his agent. “The next thing we know, it’s Saturday and we’re getting calls from all the trades, saying, ‘We hear you canceled Deadwood,’” Albrecht said. “By Monday, it was a story. We couldn’t get David on the phone. And it just went from the air going slowly out of the balloon to the balloon totally collapsing.” There was a flurry of talks, reviving the idea of a shorter season, but Milch demurred. “I didn’t want to limp home,” he told a reporter. “My old man used to say, ‘Never go anyplace where you’re only tolerated.’”

  Looking back, Milch (who had left NYPD Blue before its conclusion and would later have John from Cincinnati and Luck end prematurely) was philosophical:

  “You try to live your creative life as you would live your actual life, which is, if it turned out to be your last day, you wouldn’t be ashamed of the way you finished up,” he said. “I think that, in some sense, the idea of an ‘ending’ is constantly redefining itself. Something is ending in one sense, but it’s the beginning of something further. So it’s not a question that I allow myself to linger over.” With a wry smile he added, “There are some series that end halfway through and just don’t know it.”

  As he told another interviewer, “It’s a child who believes that such things go on forever. It’s a child also who believes you can’t start over. But you can, and you have to.”

  Inside HBO, though, the decision reverberated as a serious blow to morale, if not an out-and-out identity crisis. Being “Not TV” had become a point of pride in the offices on both coasts—was it still true? Several executives feared privately that to kill Deadwood was to irreparably damage HBO’s brand.

  As important was a different bond of trust, one between the network and its audience. This, as much as technologies like DVDs and DVRs, had made the resurgence of serialized television possible, the tacit agreement that if we, the viewers, invested time and emotion in a show, they, the makers, would compensate us with the confidence that we were in good hands: not that we would necessarily be happy with the way things turned out—the average series death toll was evidence enough that that wasn’t going to happen—but that there was a plan in place, at
tention would be rewarded, perhaps above all that the show would not simply disappear before fulfilling its creative arc, like some normal network TV show. Whatever one might have thought of Deadwood, its cancellation helped break the spell HBO had held over its audience. The network would never again be seen as something utterly different from those springing up in competition.

  • • •

  By this time, Albrecht’s portfolio was growing larger. He moved back and forth between Los Angeles and New York; some said he was stretching himself thin. Albrecht pointed out, correctly, that the network’s development and production pipeline was in full swing in early 2007, as The Sopranos finale approached: The Pacific, John Adams, and Generation Kill, all miniseries, were in various stages of development; the fifth season of The Wire was about to begin broadcasting, along with a new season of Big Love. On the comedy side, Entourage was a hit, with its brand of insider, name-dropping consumption porn, while the experimental five-night-a-week, half-hour drama In Treatment was in production. Most important for the future of the network, three series on which it would bank for years to come—True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones—were all in development, though only True Blood was in active production.

  For all that, when it came to hour-long dramatic series, the programming most likely to benefit from the boost of following the Sopranos finale—easily the biggest cultural event in HBO’s history—there were strikingly few options. Which is the best and most plausible explanation for how John from Cincinnati came to be broadcast on an American television network.

  The series was one that Milch had pitched verbally to Strauss and Albrecht while Deadwood was still on the air. In terms of coherence and narrative niceties, it made his earlier show look like Murder, She Wrote. It took place in a gritty San Diego surf community, into which a mysterious supernatural visitor makes a disruptive appearance. Even those working on it seemed to know little more than that. “We would sit, the producers, and joke among ourselves: ‘What is this about? Nobody had a clue,’” said Mark Tinker, who was an executive producer and directed two episodes.