Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (26 page)

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-Team
. 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.”

• • •

H
aving 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.

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.

• • •

D
amages
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.

• • •

A
ll 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 Edgy
TM
.

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.

• • •

T
he 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.