Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (11 page)

More important was the fear that success could breed creative complacency. Strauss herself had said, “The fear doesn’t creep in until you start winning Emmys.” In September 1999, HBO won more than any other company, led by the writing award for “College” and Edie Falco’s award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. (
The Sopranos
was bested in the Outstanding Drama Series category by
The Practice
; Gandolfini lost the award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series to Dennis Franz of
NYPD Blue.
)

At the same time, it wasn’t at all clear that
The Sopranos
would not prove to be a fluke, that what HBO offered—more freedom and artistic integrity but less viewership and money—was enough to draw the kind of talent it needed to succeed. After all, it was still just
television
.
Scott Sassa, president of NBC West Coast, may have soon had reason to regret his confident pronouncement to
The New Yorker
that traditional networks would always retain their monopoly on serious talent—“If you’re a great writer, you don’t want to be the tallest midget on cable”—but many at that point would have agreed with him.

All of this had to be in Strauss’s mind when she met with Ball. In the wake of
American Beauty
, he was precisely the kind of writer Sassa was talking about: one who, if he was going to opt against the artistic legitimacy of film, could be expected to shoot for the biggest, broadest bucks possible. On top of everything else, Strauss’s idea was hardly an obvious career builder: she had recently watched Terry Southern’s 1965 adaptation of
The Loved One
,
Evelyn Waugh’s ice-cold satire of American culture as seen through its funeral industry, and now she wanted to do a show about death.

Specifically, she imagined a show centered on a family funeral home. “I liked the idea and I knew Alan’s writing had the right tone for it,” she said. “But, you know, you pitch a million ideas and nothing ever comes of it. Like,
never
.” Lunch went well, but she soon put it out of her mind.

Thanks to a perfect alignment of personal and professional circumstances, however, the idea couldn’t have found a better host in which to incubate. Ball was still in the midst of a three-year TV development contract with Bob Greenblatt and David Janollari’s production company. “I didn’t want to be the guy who’s like, ‘I have this movie, so now I’m not going to honor my commitment.’ I knew I had to do something to justify those paychecks,” he said. “But people were calling me up with ideas like ‘This lame stand-up comedian and that lame stand-up comedian are twins separated at birth!’ Or ‘Her husband died, but he came back as her
dog
!’ I was like ‘Oh, Jesus God. Just shoot me.’”

That month had seen the debut of Ball’s own network sitcom,
Oh, Grow Up
, about three men living together and encountering various real-life complications to their postcollege bachelor idyll. The cast of characters included types that would be familiar to watchers of Ball’s subsequent HBO series: the guy with a Peter Pan complex, the buttoned-down gay man coming out late in life, the precocious teenage girl. But the process, as Ball told it, had been a virtual parody of thickheaded network interference. We love everything about it, one executive had told him, if only it could be set in the suburbs instead of the city and the gay character could be straight. When Ball dared to offer input on a casting issue, another executive gave him a withering look. “I was like, ‘Oh. Okay. This is
not
going to be a dialogue,’” Ball said. The results bore out the difficulty of the creation.
Oh, Grow Up
never found its voice or an audience. In December, ABC canceled it after eleven episodes, leaving two forever unaired.

That Christmas, devastated, Ball retreated to his childhood home in Marietta, Georgia. As it happened, it was a place suffused with death. Ball had grown up the youngest, by many years, of four children. His father, a quality control inspector at the nearby Lockheed aircraft plant and a three-pack-a-day smoker, had died years earlier. But by then grief had already been a longtime tenant in the Ball house. When Alan was thirteen, his sister Mary Ann was driving him to a piano lesson in her Ford Pinto. It was her twenty-second birthday. As they passed through a tricky intersection involving a four-lane road and a highway off-ramp, another car slammed into their driver’s-side door, killing Mary Ann and leaving Ball with little more than a bruised leg.

The accident broke the family. Ball’s mother entered a depression so severe, she was briefly hospitalized. His father, already remote, withdrew further. The notion of grief counseling or therapy for Alan didn’t come up. Instead, “the preacher came over and there was a lot of talk about Jesus,” he said. Left alone in the sorrow-stricken house, he came to feel invisible, as though he lived among ghosts.

Decades later, the accident still manifested itself in bouts of post-traumatic stress. It would be triggered by any big changes or experiences of loss, and the cancellation of
Oh, Grow Up
fit the bill perfectly. “Grief. Tremendous grief and anxiety,” was how he described it. “Just a general meaninglessness and bleakness and hopelessness. The world suddenly seems alien and unrecognizable. Everything seems really absurd.”

That feeling was only magnified by the extra surreality of life as the writer of a hit movie. Ball stumbled through what would have been the best period in most writers’ lives in a daze, experiencing success as an almost Felliniesque grotesquerie. “I remember standing next to Brad Pitt at a urinal. I remember being on the red carpet behind Charlize Theron and her turning around and saying, ‘Is my gold dust okay?’ Seeing Joan Rivers in the flesh—that is frightening. Everybody is suddenly your best friend. Everybody goes nuts. It’s all odd enough without reexperiencing the most traumatic experience of your life at the same time.” Unlike James Manos, Ball was able to make it through the entire awards ceremony by sticking to chemicals digestible at his seat: he accepted his Oscar with a flask tucked into his tux pocket.

Now he was back in the very house where this traumatic state had its roots, even sleeping in his sister’s old bedroom, his own room having been converted into a den. Ball’s mind began to fix on Strauss’s idea. He read Jessica Mitford’s scathing
The American Way of Death
and
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
, a collection of essays by the poet and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch. Quickly, the idea for a series began to take shape.

Given the caprice of the entertainment industry, a writer of his stature would almost never produce a script on spec—that is, without negotiating a contract beforehand. He had no way of knowing if Strauss was even still interested. But Ball was possessed by his idea and pressed on, launching what he called a “preemptive strike.” Within a few weeks, he had a pilot script for
Six Feet Under
. Bob Greenblatt sent it to a surprised Strauss the day after Ball’s Academy Award nomination was announced. In contrast with David Chase’s torturous waiting period, Albrecht and Strauss offered to buy it several days later. Using his newly acquired leverage, Ball demanded an entire series commitment.

“History was on our side,” said Alan Poul, a TV and independent film veteran who was brought in as executive producer to assist Ball, a novice at both hour-long and single-camera drama. “HBO had very deep pockets in the wake of
The Sopranos
and
Sex and the City
,
and the normal relationship of bottom-line cost to immediate earnings that you could calculate didn’t apply.”

In
Six Feet Under
’s
version of
The Sopranos
’ “two notes” legend, Ball supposedly received only one comment on his pilot: “We love the characters. We love the story. But the whole thing feels a little safe. Can it be more fucked up?” In episode three, Claire steals a severed foot from the morgue to place in the locker of a boy who jilted her. Note addressed.

The series was set in a rambling old house/funeral home belonging to the Fisher family and located in a not very glamorous part of Los Angeles. (The house used for exteriors sat at West Twenty-fifth Street and Arlington Avenue, in the West Adams neighborhood.) Ball had originally imagined that a show about death should take place somewhere windswept and severe in New England, but, like Waugh, he quickly came to see that Los Angeles offered the opportunity for sharper satire and deeper poignancy. The city, he said, was “the capital of the denial of death.”

In the opening minutes of the pilot, which takes place over Christmas, the Fisher patriarch, Nathaniel, is killed by a bus that plows into the side of his hearse, much as the car had done to Mary Ann’s Pinto. That “death of the week” would become a structural element throughout the show’s run, as both a convenient plot engine—bodies moved in and out of Fisher and Sons, along with their stories—and a pointed, often cruel illustration of the series’ final message: It can happen—
will
happen—to any of us, at any time.

The surviving Fishers were prodigal Nate, home for the holidays from his job managing a health food store in Seattle; his buttoned-up, closeted younger brother, David; their confused, high school–age sister, Claire, who spends the pilot dealing with her father’s death while high on crystal meth; and the matriarch, Ruth, forced suddenly to emerge from years of repressed domesticity. The actor Richard Jenkins, who played Nathaniel, learned the happy lesson that dead doesn’t always mean dead in the Third Golden Age, where ghosts and flashbacks are as common as shrinks and cursing.

• • •

S
ix Feet
’s primary protagonist and audience surrogate was Nate, played by Peter Krause; in the writers’ room the character was referred to as “Marilyn Munster,” the one normal guy in a house of freaks. If Nate’s transgressions were less pyrotechnic than Tony’s,
Six Feet Under
was no more in the business of providing tidy morality or conventionally cathartic resolution than
The Sopranos
was. Nate was a seductive protagonist, but a deeply disappointing one—not least to himself. His flaws, his fears, his least likable impulses: All recurred as inexorably as the brain condition that finally killed him. His relationship with Brenda Chenowith, a volatile former prodigy, was “basically a relationship between a narcissist and a borderline personality,” said Ball, hardly
Friends
’ Ross and Rachel.

Brenda, too, was hard to root for, even before departing on the DSJ—writers’ room shorthand for “dark sexual journey”—that defined her later seasons. The actress Rachel Griffiths was at home in Australia when her agent faxed her the script. She stood by the machine, devouring each page as it scrolled out. HBO wasn’t going to pay for her to fly first class to Los Angeles for an audition, but Griffiths was so enamored of the role that she proposed a deal: She would pay her way to California, but the show would reimburse her if she got the part. “God bless her, she got on the plane, came in, and nailed it,” Poul said.

But most complete story lines belonged to David and Ruth. Their parallel journeys—his toward coming out, hers out of a dazed domesticity—were explored in perfectly paced, microscopic detail. Both were stories near to Ball’s own experience; he had not mustered the courage to come out until age thirty-three, and he had watched his own mother blossom after his father’s death, while the rest of the family looked on, alarmed. Both, in their subtlety, their complicated psychology, and their clear-eyed empathy, are ideal examples of the kind of storytelling thirteen hours affords
.

Ball vividly remembered the open casket at his sister’s funeral and his mother being hurried behind a curtain the moment she began to express her grief. Years later, he and a cousin had been traveling in Europe and were on a boat off the coast of Stromboli when they witnessed the delivery of a body back to the deceased’s village on shore. “It was met on the beach by all these women in black,” he said. “They threw themselves on the casket, screaming and beating their chests and pulling their hair.” Both approaches to death made it into
Six Feet Under
’s
pilot.

Indeed, repression, in varying degrees, was the show’s overriding theme, as palpable in its look as in its plot. Ball instructed the set designer to dress the house as though it were buried under a muted layer of carpeted, upholstered insulation. The presiding palette was the green pallor of the Fishers’ kitchen. Poul established guidelines for the rotating cast of directors: very few long shots, no extraneous camera movements. The show’s standard-shot angle was just beneath eye level, creating a slightly distorted, detached sensation—and something else: “On a certain level, it’s a corpse-eye view,” Poul said.

Ball insisted on drawing writers from outside television, particularly playwrights. Unlike most showrunners, he refused to read spec scripts, which in this case refers to a fake script written for a different, existing show as a writing sample. Specs had long been the standard audition for TV writing jobs, but Ball found them unreliable, presaging a shift that would take place throughout TV staffing in the following decade.

“I don’t need to know if somebody can write a great
Dexter
. I love
Dexter
,
but I’m not going to hire somebody based on a
Dexter
script because maybe they can nail the voice of that show but I don’t know if they can nail the voice of
my
show. What I’m looking for is an inherent sensibility: am I surprised by what I’m reading, or does it go where I expect it to go?”

In the course of its run, the
Six Feet Under
writers’ room would include
New Yorker
cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan; the playwrights Rick Cleveland, Nancy Oliver, and Craig Wright (who had also been a seminarian); and the writer Jill Soloway, whom Ball hired on the strength of a short story entitled “Courteney Cox’s Asshole.” Soloway had also worked, with fellow future
Six Feet Under
writer Scott Buck, on a short-lived sitcom starring Nikki Cox as a Vegas showgirl married to a professional wrestler. Hired for
Six Feet Under
’s second season, but before the first had aired, she was sent all thirteen finished episodes and found herself sobbing after watching four—not out of sorrow for the characters, but from relief for herself. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe this is going to be my life. I’m going to get to do this on TV,’” she said. Then she marched over to the house of a boyfriend who had been treating her badly and broke up with him. “I was like, ‘I write for
Six Feet Under
now,’” she said.