Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (31 page)

Talking about the policy, Weiner was defensive but steadfast. “For me, it’s just a matter of the well-being of my daily interaction with the people I work with,” he said. “For me to watch somebody go up and get an award for something I had written every word of . . . I couldn’t live with it. I’m not Cyrano de Bergerac.”

Despite Weiner’s assertion that “there’s no residuals in basic cable. I’m not fighting for money,” the arrangement included a financial component. Half credit on a script indeed meant half the residuals on reruns, foreign broadcasts, and so on for the other credited writer. (Giving Weiner the benefit of the doubt, he may have been suggesting that the residuals for
Mad Men
were so negligible as to be nonexistent; still, one imagines a writer preferring to make that judgment on his or her own.)

The debate was charged enough to itself end up in an episode of
Mad Men
—which, after all, is in part about creative people working together in a collaborative atmosphere where, nevertheless, some members are more equal than others. In “The Suitcase,” Peggy complains to Don about his not giving her sufficient credit for her ideas. The fight gets heated.

Don:
That’s the way it works. I give you money, you give me ideas.

Peggy:
You never say “thank you!”

Don:
That’s what the money is for!

“I don’t know how it ever got to be the other way,” Weiner said of the tradition of a sole writer getting credit, no matter what the circumstances. “It’s like, ‘You know what you wrote and I know what I wrote. You
really
want everyone to think you wrote all of it? You can really sit there and not have a problem with that?’ I mean, it’s one thing for me to pretend I didn’t write something. But for someone to pretend that they
did
?
That’s hard to stomach.”

Other showrunners, if they didn’t adopt Weiner’s policy, certainly sympathized with him, even admired his abandoning of traditional niceties. All had at least one stomach-wrenching experience of watching someone take credit for their work.

“I’m impressed,”
Breaking Bad
’s
Vince Gilligan said. “I recall times when I would rewrite other people’s scripts and my name wouldn’t go on the rewrite and, more than missing out on some money, I would have the feeling of ‘The world’s not going to know the work I did here.’ It would gall me. Maybe tradition is something to fight against.”

Gilligan was speaking in a roundtable that also included Weiner and David Milch. “Ego suppression,” Milch agreed, “can be an act of unhealthy ostentation.”

“Well,” said Weiner, “I’m very healthy.”

• • •

C
ertainly it was not a unique question in the history of the arts: how someone capable of seeming insensitive and out of emotional touch in the real world could also produce work of exquisite emotional intelligence and empathy. And
Mad Men
, in its best moments, was just that.

It was the first major show of the Third Golden Age to forgo any instantly recognizable genre; it didn’t arrive in the guise of a cop show, a Mob show, a western, or even a soapy family drama. It was, however, as much of a Trojan horse as any of its predecessors,
with the costumes, the smoking, the drinking, and the nostalgia standing in for
The Sopranos
’ blood, guns, goombah jokes, and strippers. Article after article described Weiner’s fetish for period detail; a pocket Internet industry popped up to catalog and explicate each episode’s references, no matter how oblique or even imaginary. With no apparent irony, Banana Republic launched a
Mad Men
marketing campaign and line of clothes; Bloomingdale’s devoted its entire Third Avenue window display to the show.

Beneath that, though, it is in many ways a story as brutal and ruthless in its view of human nature as its predecessor. Don may be a searcher, but he is a blinkered, often selfish, sometimes ridiculous one. Weiner never lets us forget how frequently Don is on the wrong side of history: he sides with Nixon over entitled, glib Kennedy; he doesn’t get the Beatles. Emotionally, like Tony Soprano, he makes, at best, halting progress—forcing the audience to reexamine its affection for and loyalty to him at every turn. That people act nearly always on their worst impulses, whether they’re aware of it or not, was an item of bedrock faith for Weiner; anyone who felt differently was fooling himself.

“He has absolutely a conviction not only that his characters think the way they do, but that
all
people think the way that his characters think,” said Bedard.

Male-female relations—in both the personal and the historical contexts—are the most obvious subject of
Mad Men
. In many ways, the series is as much about the journey of Peggy Olson as it is about Don’s. Weiner copped to having a special affection for Peggy, perversely most evident in his granting her foibles (ego, irritability, bad judgment, coldness about her abandoned baby) that mirrored those of her boss and mentor. (Weiner was guilty, it seemed, of loving the show’s other great female character, Joan, too much: alternating between sanctifying her as office Madonna and punishing her with grotesque plot twists.)

But the show was as much about male combat—its infinite variations and the constant, exhausting toll it takes. This, more than alcoholism, the effects of smoking, or any other bad results of ancient mores, was the dark side of unequivocally running the world. It was also vital to Weiner’s worldview, a fact that explained, as much as anything, the rougher edges of his personality.

“I’m constantly putting on my armor,” he said. “It’s all about what you think you’re entitled to, what your ambition is, what’s in your way. I’m not somebody who tries to destroy people, but I am very conscious of these things. It
is
combat: Do
you
ever want to give up feeling sexually viable? I don’t. Do you ever want to give up feeling powerful? Do you want to look at a twenty-year-old kid and say, ‘He can beat the shit out of me’? It’s all combat.”

Above all,
Mad Men
may have been the purest use of the new form of serialized TV. Weiner understood innately the rhythms of thirteen one-hour episodes, the ways in which they could be made to serve an overarching narrative while simultaneously acting as discrete hour-long weekly “movies.” An episode was closer to a feature film than it might at first appear, he pointed out, since a two-hour movie often required as much as an hour of setup, exposition, and characterization. At the start of any given hour of
Mad Men
, that work was already done, by the two, or three, or sixty-five hours before it.

And
Mad Men
used the ongoing, open-ended format to approach a kind of radical realism that went way beyond whether, say, the refrigerator in the Draper home was the perfect shade of 1962 olive green. The show, in a wildly un-TV-like way, insisted on portraying how the passage of life
feels
.

“The first season of
The Sopranos
, you literally felt like you were being dropped out of an airplane every episode,” Weiner said. “You constantly had the sensation that you missed an episode: ‘Everybody in this story seems to know that guy. Do
I
know that guy? Was he on last week?’ No, they act like they know that guy because they have a life without you.”

This ethic came to the fore, especially, at the outset of
Mad Men
’s season three, when all the initial mysteries that animated the first two seasons had been resolved—Don’s true identity, the fate of his and Betty’s marriage, what Peggy would do about her baby—and the show became more about life simply
happening
,
much the way it actually does, tough truths included: First wives become small, distant chapters of a person’s life. People leave to take new jobs. Hurts are forgotten or else harbored much longer than necessary. Sometimes there are both a Bert and a Burt in an office (just as New Jersey had a Big and Little Pussy); sometimes a man named Don winds up with a secretary named Dawn. What other show would have thought to devote an entire season—its fifth—to the problems of having a
happy
marriage?

The ethos extended perhaps most of all to the insight into what it means to live through momentous periods in history—when it’s not clear which side is the right side or which events will later be important. “If you’re in the middle of a divorce, and there is the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Weiner said, “your problem is bigger.”

Mad Men
is about a transitional generation—caught between the upheavals of World War II and the youthquake of the 1960s—written by another such generation, one growing up under the shadow of the baby boomers’ self-mythologizing, but too near to claim something new as their own. As much as it is an act of obsession with the 1960s, the show is also a thrilling Oedipal demystification of The Sixties and what it meant to live through them. What it meant, Weiner seemed to be saying, was waking up every day struggling with the exact same things, making the same mistakes, and missing the same big pictures as any generation before or after.

If much of
Mad Men
feels like a child’s rapt view of his parents’ glamorous, mysterious doings (“I’m often in the role of Sally,” Weiner said, referring to the Drapers’ daughter), it is because that insight applies as much to the personal sphere as to the public. To imagine your parents as real people—to truly investigate the question “How are they like me?”—is an act of empathy, adoration, and also murder.

It is such truths that become the chief pleasure of watching
Mad Men
,
more than the specific twists and turns of what can at times feel like contrived “action.” (Though the occasional foot being cut off by a lawn mower doesn’t hurt.)

“I always thought it would be the experience of a human life,” Weiner said. For that goal, serialized television turned out to be the perfect, if accidental, instrument—and its perfect artist a man who could say with total confidence, “I’ve always assumed that people have the same feelings as me. And I’m usually right. They just won’t admit it.”

Thirteen

The Happiest Room in Hollywood

I
t was an all-time record hot day in the San Fernando Valley. On West Burbank Boulevard, lined with offices and strip malls, the air shimmered; people took pictures of their cars’ temperature displays: 110, 112, 116. In an anonymous building across from an AutoZone, the lobby directory showed the offices of a private eye, a dental supply company, a handful of financial companies, and, in suite 206, something blandly mysterious and vaguely sinister called Delphi Information Sciences Corporation. The plastic nameplate on the suite’s door did little to illuminate the nature of what such a corporation might do. Certainly it offered no clue that behind the door, under the dropped ceilings, the fluorescent lights, and the hum of air-conditioning of the onetime data services office, was the most coveted workplace in Hollywood: the
Breaking Bad
writers’ room.

It was so not only because
Breaking Bad
was arguably the best show on TV, in many ways the culmination of everything the Third Golden Age had made possible, but because its creator and showrunner, Vince Gilligan, was known as a good man to work for—someone who managed to balance the vision and microscopic control of the most autocratic showrunner with the open and supportive spirit of the most relaxed. He was a firm believer in collaboration.

“The worst thing ever the French gave us is the auteur theory,” he said flatly. “It’s a load of horseshit. You don’t make a movie by yourself, you certainly don’t make a TV show by yourself. You invest people in their work. You make people feel comfortable in their jobs; you keep people talking.”

In his room, he said, all writers were equal, an approach that he insisted had less to do with being a Pollyanna than with pure, selfish practicality. “There’s nothing more powerful to a showrunner than a truly invested writer,” he said. “That writer will fight the good fight.”

On this day, a Monday, he sat at the head of a conference table as his writers gathered for work after the weekend, chattering about the heat. Forty-three years old, he wore light jeans, an orange T-shirt, and silver sneakers; his face, with its goatee and glasses, was poised at a precise fulcrum between relaxed southern gentleman—a young Colonel Sanders, maybe—and eager fantasy geek. You could easily see a shadow of the young Gilligan who had showed up in Washington Square to be an NYU undergraduate film student.

Gilligan, surprisingly, was the only major showrunner of the Third Golden Age to have started his path to TV with a semisuccessful, if frustrating, career in feature films. On the strength of a script he completed at NYU—which would much later become the movie
Home Fries
—he spent five years writing screenplays back home in Virginia. One,
Wilder Napalm,
a romantic comedy about pyrokinetic brothers vying for the same woman (sort of
The Fabulous Baker Boys
bred with
Firestarter
), actually got made, starring Dennis Quaid and Debra Winger, in 1993.

That was also the year that
The X-Files
, Chris Carter’s latter-day incarnation of
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
,
debuted on Fox. Gilligan was an immediate fan and arranged to meet Carter, who then offered him a freelance episode. The experience turned out to be satisfying and fun enough to lure him across the country to relocate in L.A. By the end of
The
X-Files
’ run in 2002, Gilligan had risen to executive producer and penned some thirty episodes.

The X-Files
was about two FBI agents, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, he a true believer in the supernatural, she a skeptic, assigned to investigate paranormal activity. It was a notable waypoint in the evolution of quality TV. Faced with the network necessity of seasons in excess of twenty episodes, Carter made an ingenious adaptation: half of the series consisted of tightly wrought, often funny stand-alone episodes, while the other half was an ever more recondite “mythology” of aliens, secret agencies, and other conspiracy theories.

Ironically, given that he would become a master of serialized TV, Gilligan’s specialty on
The X-Files
was the stand-alone episodes. One of his most memorable was called “Drive.” In it, Mulder ends up trapped in a car with an ugly, anti-Semitic character who is afflicted with a condition whereby he must keep driving west or his head will explode. It was a difficult role to cast. “You needed an actor who could play this guy who is an asshole, an unpleasant redneck creep, and yet at the end of the hour, you need to feel bad when this guy dies,” Gilligan said. “Casting bad guys is easy. Casting a bad guy you feel sympathy for is much trickier.” The actor he found, Bryan Cranston, would eventually perform the same tightrope act as Walter White, the antihero of
Breaking Bad
.

Near the end of
The X-Files
, Gilligan spent one season on a spin-off,
The
Lone Gunmen.
It was a project so patently doomed that Gilligan said the fellow Fox show
King of the Hill
featured a character wearing a “Bring Back
The Lone Gunmen
” T-shirt that was scripted before the spin-off ever aired. He then spent four years becoming reacquainted with the frustrations and snail’s pace of feature-film making, working on
Hancock
, a movie about a surly, alcoholic superhero. “There’s a weird kind of hang-fire misery involved in living a life in which you get paid a lot of money, you can go write in the south of France if you want, instead of a crappy little stiflingly hot office in Burbank, but there’s a very good chance that what you’re working on may never get made,” he said. “In television, at least, you write something, and a week or two later it’s being produced.”

In the midst of the endless rewrites, in 2005, Gilligan was on the phone with an old friend and fellow
X-Files
writer Thomas Schnauz. The two were complaining about the state of the movie business and wondering what they might be qualified to do instead.

“Maybe we can be greeters at Walmart,” Gilligan said.

“Maybe we can buy an RV and put a meth lab in the back,” said Schnauz.

“As he said that, an image popped into my head of a character doing exactly that: an Everyman character who decides to ‘break bad’ and become a criminal,” Gilligan recalled. It was a powerful enough image that he got off the phone and began jotting down notes. The heart of the show came together in a hurry. The main character, Walter White, is a mild and beaten-down high school chemistry teacher who finds himself diagnosed with lung cancer. Inadequately insured, with a baby on the way, he is desperate to provide for his family when he’s gone and hits on the idea of going into the crystal meth business with a junkie ex-student named Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul. Thanks to White’s chemistry expertise and relative (by the standard of meth dealers) discipline and devotion to quality, Walt and Jesse’s product becomes much in demand. Legal, familial, and moral complications ensue.

The underlying project Gilligan had in mind, though, was something deeper—a radical extension of the antihero trend that had by then become the signature of the decade’s TV. The idea was to convincingly transform a milquetoast into a monster or, as Gilligan often put it, “Mr. Chips into Scarface.” As the series progressed, he would take away Walt’s justifications for his criminal behavior one by one—starting with the cancer, which quickly went into remission. At the same time, Gilligan, more than any other showrunner except maybe David Simon in
The Wire
, gave Walt adversaries the viewer actually cared for—foremost his own brother-in-law, Hank, a DEA agent with whom Walt ends up locked in a zero-sum game. This was not
The Shield
;
it was not at all clear whom to root for. The series became a study in empowered masculinity run horribly amok, without even the compensatory wish fulfillment granted Tony Soprano or Don Draper. This made the challenge even more direct: Why
did
we still want Walt to win? Effectively, it was a five-season-long “College” episode.

Walt’s journey to darkness was not the only way in which
Breaking Bad
would come to seem like both an echo of and an answer to
The Sopranos
,
The Wire
, and other shows that had ushered in the Third Golden Age. Walter’s wife, Skyler, played by Anna Gunn, would end up as a distant sister-wife to Carmela Soprano, grappling with her husband’s crimes and their implications, especially for her children, to a degree that her predecessor never did. More important, whereas the antiheroes of those earlier series were at least arguably the victims of their circumstances—family, society, addiction, and so on—Walter White was insistently, unambiguously, an agent with free will. His journey became a grotesque magnification of the American ethos of self-actualization, Oprah Winfrey’s exhortation that all must find and “live your best life.” What if,
Breaking Bad
asked, one’s best life happened to be as a ruthless drug lord?

• • •

O
ne of the first things you do, when you have an idea like this, is ask yourself, ‘Is it a TV show or a movie?’” Gilligan said. Twenty years earlier, there would have been no question that it was a movie. In 2005, though, he quickly decided that cable TV was his only hope.

Which didn’t mean that, about halfway through his pitch to executives at Sony Television, he didn’t hear himself talking and think, “Gee, this is crazy.” Against the odds, Sony bought the idea and arranged a pitch meeting at TNT. It was, Gilligan remembered, the best meeting of his life. The TNT execs were at the edge of their seats, asking what happened next, laughing at all the right places. When Gilligan was done, they looked at one another, crestfallen. “We don’t want to be stereotypical philistine executives,” one finally said, “but does it have to be meth? We love this, but if we buy it, we’ll be fired.”

Still, Gilligan remembered the meeting fondly. “I give them great credit for not leaving me hanging,” he said. “The best meeting of all is when they buy your story in the room. A close second is when they turn you down quickly. And the third way is you do your song and dance and go away and never hear from anybody again.”

That was the meeting he had with Carolyn Strauss at HBO. “I couldn’t tell whether she was loving it or hating it or even listening. We got to the end, and she stood up and said, ‘Well, thanks for coming in.’ I said to my agent, ‘Oh boy. I guess this isn’t going to be an HBO show.’” Indeed, HBO never gave them an answer of any kind.

At the next meeting, with FX, another potential obstacle presented itself. John Landgraf listened to the pitch and said, “Sounds a little like
Weeds
,” the recently debuted Showtime series about a suburban mom who becomes a pot dealer. Gilligan, who didn’t have Showtime
,
felt his stomach fall into his crotch. “What is
Weeds
?” he asked.

In the end, Landgraf judged
Breaking Bad
different enough to order a pilot. But by the time, two months later, that Gilligan handed it in, there was yet another problem. The network was committed to making only one new series that year, and it had come down to
Breaking Bad
and
Dirt,
starring Courteney Cox, fresh off the juggernaut run of
Friends
, as the editor of a tabloid gossip magazine.

“Nobody had a crystal ball, but at the time it made perfect sense to go with
Dirt
,” Gilligan said, though the show would be canceled after two seasons. “I think they were trying to expand their female viewership, and
Dirt
came with a bona fide television star. I don’t blame them a bit.”
Breaking Bad
, however, he assumed was “dead as a doornail.”

So gracious was Gilligan about these and most other matters that one had to remind oneself he was the author of some of the most harrowing, grisly, gleefully sanguine scenes ever to appear on television of any kind: a human body dissolved by acid in a bathtub, for instance, the acid subsequently burning through both tub and floor, so that the entire pink, swollen mess came crashing down in a magnificent
sploosh
. In case that somehow slipped your mind, the writers’ room was peppered with further reminders—most strikingly, a clay model of a tortoise on whose back rested a decapitated, mustachioed head. It was a reproduction of an indelible image from season two.

Yet even in the midst of great violence, a certain gentlemanliness reigned. In the script for one of the tensest episodes of the series, in which Jesse and Walt are being held captive in a desert hideout by a psychotic dealer named Tuco, a stage direction contained a parenthetical that would be hard to imagine in a
Sopranos
or
Mad Men
script: “Tuco lunges at Jesse, grabs him by the collar (or hair, if we can make that work without hurting Aaron).”

Gilligan had been justified in assuming, when FX passed on producing
Breaking Bad
’s pilot, that none of this would ever see the light of day. FX owned the show outright, and networks were generally disinclined to see shows they had developed become hits on other channels. That was what had happened to a pilot Gilligan had shot for CBS. “They said, ‘We’re not going to let you make it. We bought it and now we’re going to keep it in a file cabinet somewhere,’” Gilligan said. “At a corporate level I understand those kinds of decisions, but they’re hard to justify in any moral way.”

In any event, the question was moot. HBO, Showtime, TNT, and now FX had passed on
Breaking Bad
. “There was no place left in the known universe,” Gilligan said. With a TV veteran’s stoicism, he stopped thinking about the show and turned to yet another rewrite of
Hancock
.

By that time, however, Jeremy Elice, who while working at FX had watched the show’s development process excitedly and then disappointedly, had landed at AMC. He certainly remembered it when ICM agent Mark Gordon called to say it might still be available. He and Christina Wayne set up a meeting with Gilligan at the L’Ermitage Beverly Hills hotel. Gilligan was dubious but agreed.