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

by Brett Martin

Instead, he began thinking of other towers around the world—Seattle’s Space Needle, the Shot Tower at home in Baltimore—and how they didn’t lean.

  I’m thinking to myself, “It’s a Homeric fucking triumph that every other one doesn’t just tilt on over. It’s a victory for all of humanity that this one Italian edifice is world famous for doing what other structures just don’t seem to do.

  “Maybe there’s cause for hope.”

  • • •

  Simon’s partner, spiritual twin, and worthy adversary, Ed Burns, left Baltimore. After The Wire and Generation Kill, he and his wife, Anna, moved to the rural panhandle of West Virginia, to a big house overlooking a hill up which deer come to nibble at the landscaping.

  Burns did not work on Treme. “Ed recognizes two songs: One is by Van Morrison, and the other one isn’t,” Simon said. “He didn’t dig this show.” After a decade the men also needed a break from each other. But the newly bucolic surroundings did nothing to diminish Burns’s energy—every third or fourth sentence seemed to be about a new project, a possible collaboration, an amazing new book he’d read. The small city nearest his house was both a victim of the recession and a stop on the drug pipeline east toward Washington and Baltimore. Burns was busy spearheading an ambitious educational reform program there, based on the philosophy of Harlem’s Geoffrey Canada. An intrepid development executive, one who managed to find West Virginia on a map, could rent a truck, head up the dirt road, scratch Burns’s bemused surface, and watch ideas flow like sap from a maple. One hopes that Simon is the one who does it instead.

  As for The Wire actors, they suffered the fate of all actors: the need to work, even if, in some cases, they’d already done the best work of their lives. Some rode the prestige of the show to fine second acts: Idris Elba as cop and classic difficult man in the BBC series Luther, as well as in softer roles, like a guest stretch on The Office; Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters in Treme. Others popped up in awkward places—commercials, network sci-fi and teen dramas—causing severe cognitive dissonance. Given the still limited range and number of roles for African American actors, many members didn’t pop up at all.

  • • •

  The Sopranos alumni likewise ended up spread across the new TV landscape. Terence Winter and Matt Weiner assumed showrunner status. Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess moved back to working successfully on more conventional network and basic cable shows. Todd Kessler was beginning a new post-Damages project.

  Edie Falco slid over to Showtime, to star in Nurse Jackie, where she was finally the top antihero: an addicted, adulterous, morally compromised nurse, though still only in a half-hour format. And James Gandolfini, the man on whose broad, burdened shoulders the Third Golden Age was borne into our lives, was blessedly allowed to leave Tony Soprano behind. He acted on Broadway and in movies, produced two HBO documentaries about the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on returning soldiers, was involved in a long-gestating biopic of Ernest Hemingway and a pilot for a new HBO series, co-written by Richard Price, with the most un-HBO-sounding name, Criminal Justice. In 2009, he bought a big house with a long driveway, deep in the New Jersey suburbs. News reports said it was invisible from the street.

  • • •

  Chris Albrecht’s post-HBO time in the wilderness was brief. By the end of 2007, he had accepted a position as the head of the talent management titan IMG Global Media and a partnership in its parent company, Forstmann Little & Co. In December 2009, he became the president of Starz, another pay movie channel hoping for a transformation through the magic of original programming. Carolyn Strauss moved deftly from the buyer’s side of the table at HBO to the seller’s, executive-producing three of the network’s highest-profile series: Treme, David Milch’s Luck, and the fantasy adaptation Game of Thrones.

  It was a list that pretty much summed up the range of dramatic programming on HBO thirteen years after The Sopranos debuted. True Blood, kept from pure pulpdom by Alan Ball’s hand and a patina of racial and sexual allegory, was the network’s biggest hit since Tony left the scene. The show posited northern Louisiana as a menagerie of beautiful, horny half-humans of seemingly infinite variety.

  This was one end of the new HBO spectrum: big, splashy productions that wore their budgets on their sleeves. Here was where genre pieces had settled: the vampire soap opera, the 1920s gangster saga (Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire), the fantasy epic (Game of Thrones). It was also, in the spirit of HBO’s earliest days, where you found almost comically gratuitous sex, often in the background during otherwise boring but necessary scenes. The critic Myles McNutt coined a term for it: “sexposition.” The basic cable barbarians may have eaten away at chunks of HBO’s brand, but, now and forever, there would always be boobs.

  On the other end of the spectrum, there was space seemingly reserved for showrunners emeriti to explore their private obsessions outside the confines of genre or even traditional drama. For Simon, it was New Orleans; for Milch, the world of the racetrack. After Deadwood, John from Cincinnati, and an abortive pilot set in 1970s New York, Milch came to Luck under a set of new rules. To executive-produce, HBO brought in Michael Mann—a film director accustomed to the power and primacy writers usually enjoyed on TV shows. Milch was barred from visiting the set and the editing room. It was, he admitted, an adjustment.

  “It’s been absolutely different, but it hasn’t been awful. It’s a different discipline, a different experience,” he said midway through the first season. “Learning to live with the given is the great humbling educational process of life. And I’ve had a sufficiency of education this past year.” As it turned out, the education was not complete; Luck suffered the same fate as its predecessors. After three horses broke down and needed to be euthanized during production of the first two seasons, HBO abruptly suspended filming. A day later, the network canceled the show outright. Despite the woes, it appeared that the charm Milch exerted over network executives remained undiminished. With his daughter, he was already involved in developing a project for HBO based on the novels of William Faulkner. As the network’s Sue Naegle said, “You want to help him achieve his vision. It’s transcendent.”

  The most notable change at HBO, as the Bush years faded in memory and the Obama era proceeded, was that its programs no longer seemed as intent on challenging its viewers with characters from the other side of the sociopolitical spectrum. When the final polygamous Mormon of the underrated Big Love left the screen, we were left with the liberated pansexuals of True Blood, the spoiled Brooklyn strivers of Girls, the twee Brooklynites of Bored to Death, the bloviating, middlebrow liberal superheroes of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. Watching HBO, it seemed, was now less about discovering new worlds and hearing new viewpoints and more about seeing oneself.

  • • •

  Of the men who brought the Third Golden Age to basic cable, Peter Liguori was the most peripatetic since leaving FX, logging time as the chairman of entertainment at Fox Broadcasting, the COO and senior vice president of Discovery Communications, a consultant at the Carlyle Group, and, finally, CEO of the troubled Tribune Co. Kevin Reilly, after a stay at NBC—where he developed the fine, cablelike Friday Night Lights, among others, landed back at Fox Broadcasting, as chairman of entertainment. He had several big hits but complained that he couldn’t get A-list actors to come work for the network. They wanted to act only on cable.

  Chic Eglee, the writer on The Shield who had worked in television going back to the MTM days, said that Shawn Ryan was the showrunner who most reminded him of Steven Bochco—a man with the creative nimbleness and strength of ambition to be the builder of a TV empire. For a little while, it did seem that all of Fox Studios ran through Ryan’s office. Moving back and forth between cable and broadcast, Ryan said, didn’t faze him.

  “I can write a poem in free verse and enjoy writing that poem,” he said. “But now if someone says, ‘Write a haiku,’ I’m not going to bitch about the restrictions. I’m going to say, ‘W
hat’s the best poem I can write by haiku rules?’”

  None of Ryan’s shows, though, approached the success of The Shield. Two in a row, Terriers for FX and The Chicago Code for Fox, were canceled after one season. Eventually he left Fox for ABC, where he debuted Last Resort, a big, splashy, very network show about a nuclear submarine gone rogue. That show, too, ended after only thirteen episodes.

  In the years after The Shield and Rescue Me and Damages, FX had turned the testosterone dial even further up on its dramatic series—most notably in Sons of Anarchy and Justified, a neo-western adapted from the work of Elmore Leonard. The subversive, boundary-pushing, devil-may-care spirit of the network’s early shows was funneled more into comedies—a gleefully profane string of them, from the cerebral shocks of Louie and Wilfred to the raucous vulgarity of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The League. Louis C.K.’s Louie, which the comedian wrote, directed, edited, and starred in, suggested yet another model of auteurship, in which creative freedom was granted in exchange for tiny budgets. The approach was not without its risks, as BrandX with Russell Brand, also on FX, proved.

  By 2013, the small group of executives who had brought Mad Men and Breaking Bad to AMC had all moved on, largely because of friction with new management. Rob Sorcher ran the Cartoon Network; Jeremy Elice and Christina Wayne were both on the producing side of the development table. The network would retreat into brandable genres and have by far its biggest ratings hit with The Walking Dead, a zombie horror show created by Frank Darabont, based on a comic book, and later run by The Shield alum Glen Mazzara. Despite the show’s overwhelming success, Mazzara, too, would leave after two seasons, the network citing “a difference of opinion about where the show should go moving forward.” Combined with the ouster of the creator of one of its other original series, Hell on Wheels, about the building of the transcontinental railroad, and its very public contract battles with Matthew Weiner, the network that had given the world Mad Men and Breaking Bad had developed a reputation for, of all things, having trouble playing well with showrunners.

  And what of their revolution? In 2012, no Emmy nominee for Outstanding Drama Series was from a traditional broadcast network. (Except for PBS’s Downton Abbey, all appeared on cable.) Nobody evinced much surprise at this development. Where once the broadcast networks had reserved a spot on their schedules for prestige, quality drama, even if just as award bait, they had long since ceded that niche to cable. Even when acting with the best of intentions—trying to keep alive a show like Friday Night Lights, whose only crime was not having been a cable show—the networks proved time and again that, when it came to one-hour drama, they were simply out of the quality business.

  To judge by the torrent of film people lining up to work in television, the same was true of the movie business. There might have been no more emblematic moment than when Martin Scorsese, hero of the seventies New Cinema, signed on to be an executive producer of Boardwalk Empire and to direct its pilot. Soon afterward, Dustin Hoffman was starring in Luck. Steven Soderbergh, a Scorsese of the indie film movement, was right behind them. After directing thirty-three movies, large and small, he told the Associated Press, he was giving up and switching to television. “American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative,” he said. “I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.”

  • • •

  So, could we pull the Six Feet Under trick from its finale and slide forward—see where we’ll all be in two, five, ten years’ time?

  The artistic triumphs of the Third Golden Age were the product of creative opportunism in the face of dislocation, confusion, and low stakes. The men and women who took advantage of the moment were working below the radar, without a map, and with all the incentive in the world to take wild risks. Of course, the very things those circumstances allow—success and innovation—are the very things all but guaranteed to change them. Thus we’ve seen the locus of TV’s best work hopscotch across the dial: from HBO to FX to AMC to wherever it lands next. All had brilliant first acts in the Third Golden Age, and although they certainly produced quality work afterward, none was equal to its first, thrilling wave. By the evidence, this is a structural problem, perhaps never to be overcome.

  The good news is that there is seemingly no end to the number of places for quality to alight next. By 2012, the drive toward original programming was ubiquitous, not only among cable networks but with all the other ever-multiplying, ever more fragmented platforms and systems used to deliver media. There was a new profusion of innovative deals from entities not previously thought of as content producers. Netflix had original programming. So did Hulu. DirecTV believed it was in its best interest to get involved directly with the resuscitation of shows no longer considered viable on either cable (Damages) or network (Friday Night Lights). It had become clear, in a landscape of infinite choice, that content was the only identity any “channel” could claim.

  The other, related, cause for hope was the new economic reality that “success” no longer requires a huge, or even very large, audience. As long as there is no true consensus audience for anything—or at least as long as the chase for one is relegated to the broadcast networks and the multiplexes—quality storytelling, fresh voices, challenging ideas, all the hallmarks of the Third Golden Age, may be able to remain another brand, a niche, right alongside home improvement, cute puppies, and weather disasters.

  Shawn Ryan, surprisingly, had the bleakest view of what might be to come. He looked at the bland, populist, nominally “quirky” shows on more family-friendly cable networks and imagined executives getting spoiled by their relative success. He invoked the blockbuster films of the late seventies that Peter Biskind, in his seminal Easy Rider and Raging Bull, blamed for the downfall of the New Hollywood. “I’m saying USA shows are the equivalent of Jaws and Star Wars,” he said.

  David Milch had a different take. “I think we’re in such a state of fluidity in terms of the changing of the market and form that in five years this conversation is gonna seem childish,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what the new paradigm is gonna be, but something absolutely different is gonna be going on.”

  • • •

  As for David Chase: He would not have approved of this exercise. He had already made his views on endings perfectly clear.

  The final scene of The Sopranos had begun to take shape two years before it was written, when Albrecht approached Chase, asking him to start thinking of a way to end the series. “He wanted us to write toward something, have a definitive ending, so that the last episode was like the end of a movie or a book,” Chase said. He had never considered the luxury of constructing an ending to be a foregone conclusion. Shows, most of them, just disappeared one day, resolution or not. And it was both in Chase’s temperament and crucial to his ongoing creativity to assume that the same would be true of The Sopranos, regardless of how successful it had been. Nevertheless, he said, “Chris asked, ‘Are you up for that?’ I thought about it, and I was.”

  The notion of an ending presented a problem, however. Mob story convention suggested a limited number of options for a boss: Tony in jail, Tony becoming a rat and going into hiding, Tony killed. None felt right to Chase.

  “The object of all these shows in the past had always been, the protagonist pays for his sins. Crime doesn’t pay. Well, that’s false. Crime does pay. Having done the show for all that time, I knew that crime paid,” he said.

  For five and a half seasons, the show had been distinguished and animated by a worldview and storytelling philosophy that rejected easy endings, dismissed cheap catharsis, insisted that life was more complicated than that. If this insistence sometimes drove the audience crazy—what the hell ever happened to the Russian whom Christopher and Paulie shot in “Pine Barr
ens”?—it was also inseparable from what had made the series great.

  As Chase described it, the answer came impressionistically. One early idea was that Tony would be last seen heading off into Manhattan for a meeting with New York boss Johnny Sack (who would have been left alive, rather than felled by cancer). As the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time” played, Tony would descend into the same Lincoln Tunnel from which we had seen him emerge at the very beginning, on his way to who-knew-what fate.

  Soon afterward, though, other images began coming to Chase. “I saw this diner. Actually, the diner I pictured was a diner across from the Santa Monica Airport. Why it would be there, I don’t know. But the spark was Nighthawks, the Edward Hopper painting. Like everybody else, I’ve always been taken with that painting. I always thought it would have made a good series, about those four people in the diner.”

  The painting had been the subject of an argument between Chase and his wife. Denise, like many, saw it as the embodiment of loneliness. “But I don’t see it that way,” he said. “Because it’s in the light. In the middle of all this darkness, they’re in the light. And they’re talking to each other. There’s a little community in there. If you were walking along that street at night, and you saw that place, you’d want to go in.”

  This had been a recurring image in The Sopranos, ever since the family (small “f”) had gathered at Vesuvio during a storm in the final scene of season one. “What does the ending mean?” Chase said. “I don’t know if it means this, but a lot of it had to do with people huddled against the cold. It was a repeat of that scene: there’s a storm outside and they’re in a place where there’s food, and light, and warmth, and human companionship.”

  Now, though, as the family gathered over onion rings at a Jersey diner called Holsten’s, there was also something else: menace, in the person of a mysterious “Man in Members Only Jacket.” Though perhaps the point was that it was always there, lurking on the periphery. In any event, the answer was not forthcoming. Instead—to the strains of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”—we got one last look at Tony’s quizzical face, no closer to an answer than he had been when we first met, and then . . . darkness. Ten long seconds of it. Millions across the country believed their cable systems had gone out at the worst possible moment.