Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (24 page)

• • •

F
or these, among other reasons, perhaps the deck was stacked against
The Wire
as it moved into season five. For many involved, there was a palpable sense of having peaked.

“I thought that no matter what we did after the kids’ story was going to suffer. Emotionally, you weren’t going to top that,” said George Pelecanos.

HBO, too, seemed to think that the best was over and it was time for a denouement.
The network had committed to doing one more season, but it was adamant that it be shorter than the previous three. Simon pitched hard for the usual twelve or thirteen episodes, but HBO stood firm at ten.

Under any circumstances, this would have been disruptive. Twelve or thirteen one-hour episodes had proven over the past half decade to be organically, almost magically, well suited for the telling of certain kinds of stories. By some accounts, the number thirteen was merely a fortuitous holdover from the days of twenty-two-episode seasons, when networks would order that many episodes to start and then another nine on the “back-end,” if all went well. David Milch had a more numerological explanation for the use of twelve, which became the alternate standard for HBO shows after
The Sopranos
:

“To the extent that the corollary theme is what we learn or fail to learn over the course of time, then form and content inform each other. So twelve, which is formally just an attribute of the calendar, becomes a thematic principle,” he said, also noting that days consist of two twelve-hour halves.

Whatever the underlying reason, the new genre of drama seemed invariably to lose its way when its usual rhythm was disrupted—either by a shortened season or lengthened double episodes. The pacing would seem off, the storytelling judgment flawed. Since even in a full-length season
The Wire
would have more story than the allotted time would allow, being limited to ten episodes was bound to be an issue.

And Simon had plenty to say—a decade’s worth of fuming passion about where his beloved
Baltimore Sun
had gone wrong. In particular, he took aim at two star editors, John Carroll and Bill Marimow, who had taken over the
Sun
in
the early nineties. The outsiders, to Simon’s mind, had instituted a corrupt and cheapened culture more concerned with winning Pulitzers than serving the community—or, for that matter, getting things right. In 2000, Simon had denounced a
Sun
reporter, Jim Haner, in the magazine
Brill’s Content
. Haner, a prize-winning star at the paper, Simon charged, repeatedly embellished and perhaps fabricated stories, while Marimow and Carroll looked the other way. For his trouble, Simon was painted as an angry, vindictive ex-employee. Now, with more visibility at his command, he revisited the same turf, creating a fictional
Baltimore Sun
led by imperious, detached editors and harboring a serial fabulist.

Underpinning the story, beyond whatever grudges were being worked out, was a serious point about how the media is fatally detached from the reality it purports to cover. This, to Simon’s mind, was the final piece in the big “Why” of
The Wire
. It was summed up in one scene, perhaps the best of the season, when Omar, who had loomed so large throughout the previous fifty-seven hours of the show, a walking myth whose name literally rang out as he walked down neighborhood streets, failed to merit even a mention in the city’s paper of record when gunned down. Even to the reporter and editor whom Simon clearly admires, he’s just another “thirty-four-year-old black male, shot dead in a West Baltimore grocery.”

It was an elegant, devastating scene, one that said everything about the two radically different worlds inhabited by the show’s rich and poor, black and white, powerful and disenfranchised characters, and about the futility of ever bridging the divide between them. Unfortunately, there was much more newsroom plot. The simple truth was that in several important ways, season five was a failure, dramatically. All of the concerns Simon’s fellow writers had in previous seasons about new characters and story lines crowding out old ones came true: Pelecanos’s ex-con Cutty was all but gone. Pryzbylewski, gone. Two of the four kids from season four, gone. And so on. Only this time the losses came without the compensatory pleasure of rich, three-dimensional replacements. Simon’s newsroom felt schematic, its villains too obviously evil, its heroes too ruggedly saintlike. (Even the name of the fabricator, Scott Templeton, was a ham-handed reference to the rat from
Charlotte’s Web
.) Many devotees, watching the shortened clock run out on this universe they had come to love, couldn’t help resenting every minute spent in the company of these interlopers. And the characters’ woodenness planted a seed of doubt in those for whom the newsroom was the most familiar of
The Wire
’s
worlds. If he’s this wrong about these guys, the thinking inevitably went, maybe he was wrong about all those
other
guys, too.

In the writers’ room, oddly, there was more dissent about a different story line: one in which McNulty (reactivated for this final season), in a final, desperate effort to direct the department’s energy toward the drug infrastructure, invents a false serial killer. Simon had been toying with the story for many years; it had started as part of an aborted novel he had begun to write as far back as 1996 and of which he had completed one hundred pages. The plot would not seem to be any more of a radical departure from reality than Hamsterdam had been, but it was the cause of much conversation both in the writers’ room and among viewers who felt it finally exhausted their suspension of disbelief.

All of this led to something unique in the history of
The Wire
: a chorus of bad reviews. “What Happened to Our Show?” pleaded the title of a representative essay in the
Washington
City Paper
.
“Simon may yet right the ship,” the article read, but
The Wire
was
“thudding to a close, stuck in a stereotypically TV-like world it’s heroically avoided until now.”

Simon did not respond to the criticism with grace and stoicism. In fact, he created an angry and airtight syllogism: If the media had a problem with season five, he said, it was because they felt threatened by its critique of the media. It was, necessarily, a matter of thin skin. (Never mind that the degree of association between modern TV critics and traditional hard-news journalists of the type he was portraying was slight, at best.) His lengthy lectures on the subject to anybody who raised an objection were successful in drowning out more substantive criticism of the season’s artistry, but it was hard not to feel that the argument would not have passed muster at the Simon family dinner table in Silver Spring.

How did it happen? How did such an acute and assured show lose its way in its waning moments? One popular answer was that Simon was too close to the material, that his judgment was impaired by the strength of his lingering resentments. But Simon himself seemed to nail a more subtle diagnosis. He was talking about the role he had played in season four, when Burns was intent on critiquing the school system: “Everybody, if they’re trying to say something, if they have a point to make, they can be a little dangerous if they’re left alone,” he said. “Somebody has to be standing behind them saying, dramatically, ‘Can we do it this way?’ When the guy is making the argument about what he’s trying to say, you need somebody else saying, ‘Yeah, but . . . ’”

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.

• • •

Y
ou’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.

Shooting the Dog

I
n 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.

• • •

T
here 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
,
and 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.”

• • •

O
f 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.’”