Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (33 page)

• • •

T
his afternoon, it seemed, little storytelling would be taking place—visual, verbal, or otherwise. Lunch came and went, with no answer to the Jesse question. “It’s the kind of thing where we’ll know it when we hear it,” Gilligan said with genial resignation. “I just haven’t heard it yet.” Finally, the staff broke for the day. The discussion would take up another three days before being settled: Jesse would be explicitly instructed to guard the radio knobs in Mike’s car while Mike ran errands—not
touch
the knobs, merely guard them. The detail was duly recorded on an index card and pinned to the bulletin board. At the end of the day, it would be included in a fifteen-page, single-spaced digest of daily notes. Then it was enshrined in an outline, to be fleshed out in Schnauz’s script. That, in turn, was passed around for notes from each of the other writers and Gilligan himself, before being sent back for a revision. Eventually, it would make its way into the crisp white pages of a production draft.

Then the story moved onward: to the tone meeting, the production meeting, the table read. It was pored over by line producers, prop masters, location scouts, production designers, scenic designers, costume designers, directors, assistant directors, second assistant directors, and second second assistant directors—at each step becoming more real, as if slowly emerging from the shimmer of some distant desert horizon. Finally, it was off to New Mexico to be set, forever, on film.

And then it came to us: By fiber-optic cable, by the Internet, by digitally imprinted disk; into our homes, our bedrooms, the phones in our pockets; and we absorbed it, discussed it, argued about it, recapped it, pressed it on our friends. It became one more holy object in the communal sacrament that, thanks to the gods of business, technology, and creativity, TV had become in the early twenty-first century.

Somewhere along the line, the knobs were dropped. The task ended up as nothing more complicated than riding shotgun while picking up hidden packages of money in a series of remote locations. Unfolding as a montage, it took up eighty-two seconds of screen time.

Endings are the hardest part.

VINCE GILLIGAN

I
n the new world of television, now nearly fifteen years old, there may be nothing more unnatural than an ending. After all, the whole financial model of the medium depends on longevity, the long run, the gaudy number of seasons. In a perfect TV world, no door shuts forever, no show ever dies. As the song goes, “The movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on. . . .”

It was the happy accident of the Third Golden Age that precisely that impulse, in the right hands, helped transform TV into not only a serious art form, but the dominant art form of the era. No endings came to mean no
crappy
endings, no cheap catharsis—new kinds of stories free to wend their way through an approximation of real life.

At the same time, we know that all shows have a natural life span, a period after which the intersection of overfamiliarity and overcontrivance starts producing diminishing returns. Rare is the show—thanks to commercial pressure and the myopia that comes from being too close to the action—that recognizes its organic expiration date until after it’s passed. Remember what David Milch said: “There are some series that end halfway through and just don’t know it.”

Certainly the revolution in how we watch, where we watch, and what we watch goes on beyond the span of this book, just as it flowed out of events before it. Let’s, then, honor the approach to endings taken by
The Wire
,
which closed every season, including the last, with a montage of its characters and institutions, forever in motion, sailing into the future.

David Simon continued to work at HBO, moving toward the conclusion of
Treme
, his and Eric Overmyer’s love letter to post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, rendered in both
The Wire
–like documentary detail and a deeply romantic blush. It was, he said, a kind of rejoinder to
The Wire
,
a celebration of what the urban experiment does well, why it is necessary, in a city that nearly disappeared.

“You go into a bar in Kathmandu or Budapest and some form of African American music with a flatted third and a flatted seventh note has triumphed as almost the dominant musical form of the species. That could only happen and did only happen in an eight-square-block area of New Orleans. And it only happened because of a variety of things that are uniquely American. It’s the greatest American export. This is what the city is capable of. This is what the city can give you,” he said.

Simon had also increasingly become a kind of pundit laureate, a ranter in chief, particularly on the subjects of urban policy and the future of newspapers. He tacitly embraced the role by starting a blog titled
The Audacity of Despair
—as if his output were not already sufficiently prodigious or, for that matter, audacious and despairing. Oddly, for such a dedicated newsman, he explained the move to the Web in part as a way to circumvent traditional media, which, he said, often misinterpreted him.

In any event, it gave us the gift of an anecdote, from a family summer vacation in Italy: Simon and his teenage son were in Pisa, regarding the Leaning Tower. “I’m supposed to be the pessimist,” he wrote. “I’m the guy who is reputedly drawn to a constant parsing of human failure. The Leaning Tower should be pretty much in my philosophical wheelhouse, right?”

Instead, he began thinking of other towers around the world—Seattle’s Space Needle, the Shot Tower at home in Baltimore—and how they
didn’t
lean.

I’m thinking to myself, “It’s a Homeric fucking triumph that every other one doesn’t just tilt on over. It’s a victory for all of humanity that this one Italian edifice is world famous for doing what other structures just don’t seem to do.

“Maybe there’s cause for hope.”

• • •

S
imon’s partner, spiritual twin, and worthy adversary, Ed Burns, left Baltimore. After
The Wire
and
Generation Kill
, he and his wife, Anna, moved to the rural panhandle of West Virginia, to a big house overlooking a hill up which deer come to nibble at the landscaping.

Burns did not work on
Treme
. “Ed recognizes two songs: One is by Van Morrison, and the other one isn’t,” Simon said. “He didn’t dig this show.” After a decade the men also needed a break from each other. But the newly bucolic surroundings did nothing to diminish Burns’s energy—every third or fourth sentence seemed to be about a new project, a possible collaboration, an amazing new book he’d read. The small city nearest his house was both a victim of the recession and a stop on the drug pipeline east toward Washington and Baltimore. Burns was busy spearheading an ambitious educational reform program there, based on the philosophy of Harlem’s Geoffrey Canada. An intrepid development executive, one who managed to find West Virginia on a map, could rent a truck, head up the dirt road, scratch Burns’s bemused surface, and watch ideas flow like sap from a maple. One hopes that Simon is the one who does it instead.

As for
The Wire
actors, they suffered the fate of all actors: the need to work, even if, in some cases, they’d already done the best work of their lives. Some rode the prestige of the show to fine second acts: Idris Elba as cop and classic difficult man in the BBC series
Luther
, as well as in softer roles, like a guest stretch on
The Office
;
Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters in
Treme
. Others popped up in awkward places—commercials, network sci-fi and teen dramas—causing severe cognitive dissonance. Given the still limited range and number of roles for African American actors, many members didn’t pop up at all.

• • •

T
he Sopranos
alumni likewise ended up spread across the new TV landscape. Terence Winter and Matt Weiner assumed showrunner status. Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess moved back to working successfully on more conventional network and basic cable shows. Todd Kessler was beginning a new post-
Damages
project.

Edie Falco slid over to Showtime, to star in
Nurse Jackie
, where she was finally the top antihero: an addicted, adulterous, morally compromised nurse, though still only in a half-hour format. And James Gandolfini, the man on whose broad, burdened shoulders the Third Golden Age was borne into our lives, was blessedly allowed to leave Tony Soprano behind. He acted on Broadway and in movies, produced two HBO documentaries about the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on returning soldiers, was involved in a long-gestating biopic of Ernest Hemingway and a pilot for a new HBO series, co-written by Richard Price, with the most un-HBO-sounding name,
Criminal Justice
. In 2009, he bought a big house with a long driveway, deep in the New Jersey suburbs. News reports said it was invisible from the street.

• • •

C
hris Albrecht’s post-HBO time in the wilderness was brief. By the end of 2007, he had accepted a position as the head of the talent management titan IMG Global Media and a partnership in its parent company, Forstmann Little & Co. In December 2009, he became the president of Starz, another pay movie channel hoping for a transformation through the magic of original programming. Carolyn Strauss moved deftly from the buyer’s side of the table at HBO to the seller’s, executive-producing three of the network’s highest-profile series:
Treme
, David Milch’s
Luck
, and the fantasy adaptation
Game of Thrones
.

It was a list that pretty much summed up the range of dramatic programming on HBO thirteen years after
The Sopranos
debuted.
True Blood
,
kept from pure pulpdom by Alan Ball’s hand and a patina of racial and sexual allegory, was the network’s biggest hit since Tony left the scene. The show posited northern Louisiana as a menagerie of beautiful, horny half-humans of seemingly infinite variety.

This was
one end of the new HBO spectrum: big, splashy productions that wore their budgets on their sleeves. Here was where genre pieces had settled: the vampire soap opera, the 1920s gangster saga (Terence Winter’s
Boardwalk Empire
), the fantasy epic (
Game of Thrones
). It was also, in the spirit of HBO’s earliest days, where you found almost comically gratuitous sex, often in the background during otherwise boring but necessary scenes. The critic Myles McNutt coined a term for it: “sexposition.” The basic cable barbarians may have eaten away at chunks of HBO’s brand, but, now and forever, there would always be boobs.

On the other end of the spectrum, there was space seemingly reserved for showrunners emeriti
to explore their private obsessions outside the confines of genre or even traditional drama. For Simon, it was New Orleans; for Milch, the world of the racetrack. After
Deadwood
,
John from Cincinnati
,
and an abortive pilot set in 1970s New York, Milch came to
Luck
under a set of new rules. To executive-produce, HBO brought in Michael Mann—a film director accustomed to the power and primacy writers usually enjoyed on TV shows. Milch was barred from visiting the set and the editing room. It was, he admitted, an adjustment.

“It’s been absolutely different, but it hasn’t been awful. It’s a different discipline, a different experience,” he said midway through the first season. “Learning to live with the given is the great humbling educational process of life. And I’ve had a sufficiency of education this past year.” As it turned out, the education was not complete;
Luck
suffered the same fate as its predecessors. After three horses broke down and needed to be euthanized during production of the first two seasons, HBO abruptly suspended filming. A day later, the network canceled the show outright. Despite the woes, it appeared that the charm Milch exerted over network executives remained undiminished. With his daughter, he was already involved in developing a project for HBO based on the novels of William Faulkner. As the network’s Sue Naegle said, “You want to help him achieve his vision. It’s transcendent.”

The most notable change at HBO, as the Bush years faded in memory and the Obama era proceeded, was that its programs no longer seemed as intent on challenging its viewers with characters from the other side of the sociopolitical spectrum. When the final polygamous Mormon of the underrated
Big Love
left the screen, we were left with the liberated pansexuals of
True Blood
, the spoiled Brooklyn strivers of
Girls
, the twee Brooklynites of
Bored to Death
,
the bloviating, middlebrow liberal superheroes of Aaron Sorkin’s
The Newsroom
. Watching HBO, it seemed, was now less about discovering new worlds and hearing new viewpoints and more about seeing oneself.

• • •

O
f the men who brought the Third Golden Age to basic cable, Peter Liguori was the most peripatetic since leaving FX, logging time as the chairman of entertainment at Fox Broadcasting, the COO and senior vice president of Discovery Communications, a consultant at the Carlyle Group, and, finally, CEO of the troubled Tribune Co. Kevin Reilly, after a stay at NBC—where he developed the fine, cablelike
Friday Night Lights
, among others, landed back at Fox Broadcasting, as chairman of entertainment. He had several big hits but complained that he couldn’t get A-list actors to come work for the network. They wanted to act only on cable.

Chic Eglee, the writer on
The Shield
who had worked in television going back to the MTM days, said that Shawn Ryan was the showrunner who most reminded him of Steven Bochco—a man with the creative nimbleness and strength of ambition to be the builder of a TV empire. For a little while, it did seem that all of Fox Studios ran through Ryan’s office. Moving back and forth between cable and broadcast, Ryan said, didn’t faze him.

“I can write a poem in free verse and enjoy writing that poem,” he said. “But now if someone says, ‘Write a haiku,’ I’m not going to bitch about the restrictions. I’m going to say, ‘What’s the best poem I can write by haiku rules?’”

None of Ryan’s shows, though, approached the success of
The Shield
. Two in a row,
Terriers
for FX and
The Chicago Code
for Fox, were canceled after one season. Eventually he left Fox for ABC, where he debuted
Last Resort,
a big, splashy, very network show about a nuclear submarine gone rogue. That show, too, ended after only thirteen episodes.

In the years after
The Shield
and
Rescue Me
and
Damages
, FX had turned the testosterone dial even further up on its dramatic series—most notably in
Sons of Anarchy
and
Justified
, a neo-western adapted from the work of Elmore Leonard. The subversive, boundary-pushing, devil-may-care spirit of the network’s early shows was funneled more into comedies—a gleefully profane string of them, from the cerebral shocks of
Louie
and
Wilfred
to the raucous vulgarity of
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
and
The League
. Louis C.K.’s
Louie
, which the comedian wrote, directed, edited, and starred in, suggested yet another model of auteurship, in which creative freedom was granted in exchange for tiny budgets. The approach was not without its risks, as
BrandX with Russell Brand
, also on FX, proved.

By 2013, the small group of executives who had brought
Mad Men
and
Breaking Bad
to AMC had all moved on, largely because of friction with new management. Rob Sorcher ran the Cartoon Network; Jeremy Elice and Christina Wayne were both on the producing side of the development table. The network would retreat into brandable genres and have by far its biggest ratings hit with
The Walking Dead
, a zombie horror show created by Frank Darabont, based on a comic book, and later run by
The Shield
alum Glen Mazzara. Despite the show’s overwhelming success, Mazzara, too, would leave after two seasons, the network citing “a difference of opinion about where the show should go moving forward.” Combined with the ouster of the creator of one of its other original series,
Hell on Wheels
, about the building of the transcontinental railroad, and its very public contract battles with Matthew Weiner, the network that had given the world
Mad Men
and
Breaking Bad
had developed a reputation for, of all things, having trouble playing well with showrunners.