Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (34 page)

And what of their revolution? In 2012, no Emmy nominee for Outstanding Drama Series was from a traditional broadcast network. (Except for PBS’s
Downton Abbey,
all appeared on cable.) Nobody evinced much surprise at this development. Where once the broadcast networks had reserved a spot on their schedules for prestige, quality drama, even if just as award bait, they had long since ceded that niche to cable. Even when acting with the best of intentions—trying to keep alive a show like
Friday Night Lights
, whose only crime was not having been a cable show—the networks proved time and again that, when it came to one-hour drama, they were simply out of the quality business.

To judge by the torrent of film people lining up to work in television, the same was true of the movie business. There might have been no more emblematic moment than when Martin Scorsese, hero of the seventies New Cinema, signed on to be an executive producer of
Boardwalk Empire
and to direct its pilot. Soon afterward, Dustin Hoffman was starring in
Luck
.
Steven Soderbergh, a Scorsese of the indie film movement, was right behind them. After directing thirty-three movies, large and small, he told the Associated Press, he was giving up and switching to television. “American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative,” he said. “I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.”

• • •

S
o, could we pull the
Six Feet Under
trick from
its
finale
and slide forward—see where we’ll all be in two, five, ten years’ time?

The artistic triumphs of the Third Golden Age were the product of creative opportunism in the face of dislocation, confusion, and low stakes. The men and women who took advantage of the moment were working below the radar, without a map, and with all the incentive in the world to take wild risks. Of course, the very things those circumstances allow—success and innovation—are the very things all but guaranteed to change them. Thus we’ve seen the locus of TV’s best work hopscotch across the dial: from HBO to FX to AMC to wherever it lands next. All had brilliant first acts in the Third Golden Age, and although they certainly produced quality work afterward, none was equal to its first, thrilling wave. By the evidence, this is a structural problem, perhaps never to be overcome.

The good news is that there is seemingly no end to the number of places for quality to alight next. By 2012, the drive toward original programming was ubiquitous, not only among cable networks but with all the other ever-multiplying, ever more fragmented platforms and systems used to deliver media. There was a new profusion of innovative deals from entities not previously thought of as content producers. Netflix had original programming. So did Hulu. DirecTV believed it was in its best interest to get involved directly with the resuscitation of shows no longer considered viable on either cable (
Damages
)
or network (
Frida
y Night Lights
). It had become clear, in a landscape of infinite choice, that content was the only identity any “channel” could claim.

The other, related, cause for hope was the new economic reality that “success” no longer requires a huge, or even very large, audience. As long as there is no true consensus audience for anything—or at least as long as the chase for one is relegated to the broadcast networks and the multiplexes—quality storytelling, fresh voices, challenging ideas, all the hallmarks of the Third Golden Age, may be able to remain another brand, a niche, right alongside home improvement, cute puppies, and weather disasters.

Shawn Ryan, surprisingly, had the bleakest view of what might be to come. He looked at the bland, populist, nominally “quirky” shows on more family-friendly cable networks and imagined executives getting spoiled by their relative success. He invoked the blockbuster films of the late seventies that Peter Biskind, in his seminal
Easy Rider
and
Raging Bull
,
blamed for the downfall of the New Hollywood. “I’m saying USA shows are the equivalent of
Jaws
and
Star Wars
,” he said.

David Milch had a different take. “I think we’re in such a state of fluidity in terms of the changing of the market and form that in five years this conversation is gonna seem childish,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what the new paradigm is gonna be, but something absolutely different is gonna be going on.”

• • •

A
s for David Chase: He would not have approved of this exercise. He had already made his views on endings perfectly clear.

The final scene of
The Sopranos
had begun to take shape two years before it was written, when Albrecht approached Chase, asking him to start thinking of a way to end the series. “He wanted us to write toward something, have a definitive ending, so that the last episode was like the end of a movie or a book,” Chase said. He had never considered the luxury of constructing an ending to be a foregone conclusion. Shows, most of them, just disappeared one day, resolution or not. And it was both in Chase’s temperament and crucial to his ongoing creativity to assume that the same would be true of
The Sopranos
, regardless of how successful it had been. Nevertheless, he said, “Chris asked, ‘Are you up for that?’ I thought about it, and I was.”

The notion of an ending presented a problem, however. Mob story convention suggested a limited number of options for a boss: Tony in jail, Tony becoming a rat and going into hiding, Tony killed. None felt right to Chase.

“The object of all these shows in the past had always been, the protagonist pays for his sins. Crime doesn’t pay. Well, that’s false. Crime
does
pay. Having done the show for all that time, I knew that crime paid,” he said.

For five and a half seasons, the show had been distinguished and animated by a worldview and storytelling philosophy that rejected easy endings, dismissed cheap catharsis, insisted that life was more complicated than that. If this insistence sometimes drove the audience crazy—what the
hell
ever happened to the Russian whom Christopher and Paulie shot in “Pine Barrens”?—it was also inseparable from what had made the series great.

As Chase described it, the answer came impressionistically. One early idea was that Tony would be last seen heading off into Manhattan for a meeting with New York boss Johnny Sack (who would have been left alive, rather than felled by cancer). As the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time” played, Tony would descend into the same Lincoln Tunnel from which we had seen him emerge at the very beginning, on his way to who-knew-what fate.

Soon afterward, though, other images began coming to Chase. “I saw this diner. Actually, the diner I pictured was a diner across from the Santa Monica Airport. Why it would be there, I don’t know. But the spark was
Nighthawks
, the Edward Hopper painting. Like everybody else, I’ve always been taken with that painting. I always thought it would have made a good series, about those four people in the diner.”

The painting had been the subject of an argument between Chase and his wife. Denise, like many, saw it as the embodiment of loneliness. “But I don’t see it that way,” he said. “Because it’s in the light. In the middle of all this darkness, they’re in the light. And they’re talking to each other. There’s a little community in there. If you were walking along that street at night, and you saw that place, you’d want to go in.”

This had been a recurring image in
The Sopranos
, ever since the family (small “f”) had gathered at Vesuvio during a storm in the final scene of season one. “What does the ending mean?” Chase said. “I don’t know if it means this, but a lot of it had to do with people huddled against the cold. It was a repeat of that scene: there’s a storm outside and they’re in a place where there’s food, and light, and warmth, and human companionship.”

Now, though, as the family gathered over onion rings at a Jersey diner called Holsten’s, there was also something else: menace, in the person of a mysterious “Man in Members Only Jacket.” Though perhaps the point was that it was always there, lurking on the periphery. In any event, the answer was not forthcoming. Instead—to the strains of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”—we got one last look at Tony’s quizzical face, no closer to an answer than he had been when we first met, and then . . . darkness. Ten long seconds of it. Millions across the country believed their cable systems had gone out at the worst possible moment.

Chase remembered telling Carolyn Strauss about the plan, which was originally to sustain the black screen throughout the entire length of what would have been the credits. (That was scratched after the Directors Guild objected.) “I think she was like, ‘Oookaaay . . . ,’” he said. “I don’t remember if she asked, ‘What does it mean?’ But what I would have said was, ‘It’s not what you think. It’s what you
feel
.’ That’s what I was always trying to go for.”

At the cast’s final table read, the last page of the script was met with stunned silence. “Nobody moved. It was like none of us wanted to leave,” Chase said. Then Falco began to cry softly. Chase looked at Gandolfini, to gauge his reaction. It was the same as it had been at eighty-five previous such readings: He closed his script. He stared into space for several long moments. And then he pushed his chair back and got up from the table.

Three days after the final episode aired, Chase was in France while a small maelstrom over the finale raged at home. Talking by phone, he came as close as he ever would to saying that Tony Soprano met his end in that diner booth. “Everything that pertains to that episode was in that episode. And it was in the episode before that and the one before that and seasons before this one and so on,” he said. “There had been indications of what the end is like. That’s the way things happen: it’s already going on by the time you even notice it.”

“Are you saying . . . ?” came the question.

“I’m not saying anything,” he said. “And I’m not trying to be coy. It’s just that I think that to explain it would diminish it.”

Which was not to say that, for all his dim view of human nature and the course of history, he did not believe in happy endings—or at least progress:

People have said that the Soprano family’s whole life goes in the toilet in the last episode. That the parents’ whole twisted lifestyle is visited on the children. And that’s true—to a certain extent. But look at it: A.J.’s not going to become a citizen-soldier or join the Peace Corps to try to help the world; he’ll probably be a low-level movie producer. But he’s not going to be a killer like his father, is he? Meadow may not become a pediatrician or even a lawyer, but she’s not going to be a housewife-whore like her mother. She’ll learn to operate in the world in a way that Carmela never did. It’s not ideal. It’s not what the parents dreamed of. But it’s better than it was. Tiny, little bits of progress—that’s how it works.

“Go look at Albert Camus’s
Myth of Sisyphus
,” the supposed misanthrope went on. “Life seems to have no purpose, but we have to go on behaving as though it does. We have to go on behaving toward each other like people who would try to love.”

• • •

H
alf a decade later, now sixty-seven, he sat in the study of his huge apartment in a historic building on the Upper East Side. He had just, finally, completed his first feature film—a music-filled New Jersey coming-of-age story, originally called
Twylight Zones
. As with
The Sopranos
, there had been pressure to change the title; this time, however, Chase had agreed to the change. The film, which would open the 2012 New York Film Festival, would do so under the name
Not Fade Away
.

It had been a difficult experience—physically exhausting and, he said, artistically challenging. After years of working on
The Sopranos
, he had grown used to a certain way of telling stories. “I had gotten used to the idea that things could be taken back and fixed. Or that we could go take a little excursion, check out Patsy Parisi’s wife or something. I thought I had cut all that out, but I really hadn’t. The script was too discursive. So we had a lot of film that had to be cut,” he said.

The voices of
The Sopranos
characters
rarely popped into his head anymore, he said. Occasionally, he or Denise would quote a line to each other: “Oh, poor you,” or, “You go about in pity for yourself.” The much-speculated-on idea of a
Sopranos
movie, picking up where the series had left off, was a nonstarter—the end was the end—but the idea of a prequel, or expanding a tangential story, had occurred to him. “Maybe Johnny Boy”—Tony’s father—“and that period. That’s interesting to me. Or something you saw hints of during
The Sopranos
. Like, ‘What was production like on
Cleaver
[Christopher’s fictional pulp mobster/horror movie]?’”

Despite the rigors of
Not Fade Away
, and the fact that he was writing a miniseries about the history of Hollywood for HBO, he was still insistent on focusing on feature films: “Someone once said that movies are a cathedral, and I still do feel that. A cathedral is big. It’s epic. It’s intense.”

And another series wasn’t in the cards. “The chances of me doing it as well again are almost nil. Plus, I’m not a kid anymore, I don’t have that much time to keep fucking around, giving five years to a TV series,” he said. Then he added, “But it’s not because movies are a more creative place. Not at all.”

As concessions went, it was the equivalent of his view of progress—incremental, but not insignificant. And it would have to do—paired, perhaps, with something he had said in an optimistic moment toward the end of
The Sopranos
:
“Look, I can’t argue with destiny. This is what happened. And I’m very lucky that as I lie on my deathbed I won’t have to say, ‘I accomplished nothing.’ I did something, you know?”