Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (27 page)

“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 brand—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.”

• • •

N
one 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, attention 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.

• • •

B
y 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.

The most generous assessment was that in
John from Cincinnati
, Milch was groping toward a kind of new narrative language. “My understanding of the way the mechanism of storytelling works is [that] any story is constantly appending specific values to the meanings of words, and of the actions of characters. And the fact that story uses as its building blocks words or characters that the audience believes it has some prior recognition or understanding of, is really simply the beginning of the story, but not its end,” he told one blogger. The least generous assessment was it was an inchoate mess.

• • •

I
will go to my grave saying the first four episodes of that show were as interesting and valid as any show I’ve worked on,” Albrecht said, blaming at least some of the harsh criticism on residual anger over
Deadwood
. In any event, by the time
John
aired, Albrecht was no longer at HBO. A month before, early on the morning of May 6, he had been arrested outside the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas, where Floyd Mayweather had just defeated Oscar De La Hoya in a light middleweight fight broadcast by HBO pay-per-view. Police reports described him dragging his then girlfriend, Karla Jensen, toward the hotel with both hands around her neck. He slurred his speech and smelled of alcohol. After being pulled off Jensen, who was left with red marks around her throat, Albrecht was booked for suspicion of domestic assault and spent that night in the Clark County Detention Center. He would eventually plead no contest to misdemeanor battery, pay a $1,000 fine, and attend domestic-violence counseling. 

The career ramifications far outweighed the legal ones. Time Warner Chairman and CEO Richard Parsons immediately announced that Albrecht would take a leave of absence. Albrecht released a statement saying he had lapsed in his treatment for alcohol abuse and would return to Alcoholics Anonymous. Several years later, in an interview with
GQ
that portrayed him drinking while on a business trip in Dublin, he would disown that statement, saying instead that the story about his alcoholism had been cooked up by HBO’s PR team and that he had reluctantly gone along with it in an effort to save his career. “After years of reflection and working with specialists, I have recognized that alcohol is not an issue in my life,” he told reporter Amy Wallace. “What I really needed to get at the heart of was my complicated and often very difficult love relationships with women.”