Miller and I leafed through their wedding album while Murphy watched Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory with Logan. When Murphy reemerged, I proposed that we look at his father’s letter, something he’d suggested doing a few days earlier. “This will be so good for your story,” he said, walking to the kitchen.
At first, he couldn’t find it—the envelope was buried deep in the drawer. He riffled through old photographs and DVDs as he and Miller apologized, mortified by what seemed to be the only disorganized thing in the house. Finally, Murphy pulled it out: two pages that his father had typed while in the final stages of prostate cancer.
Murphy had me read it first and describe it to him. It was a distressing experience. The letter was certainly apologetic, expressing sorrow about the distance between them, but the tone was abstract—with strange inaccuracies, like a rebuke for skipping a family wedding that Ryan said he did attend. His father thanked him for the financial help that he had provided during his illness. He expressed disappointment at having not been informed when Ryan had visited Chicago, to appear on Oprah. He didn’t mention beating Ryan as a child, but he said that he regretted not understanding Ryan’s dreams, for responding to them with anger, perceiving them as personal insults.
“That’s true,” Murphy said. He told me a story about one of those vacation trips to Florida. While the nun snoozed in the back seat, his father asked the boys what they wanted to be when they grew up. Darren said that he wanted to be a firefighter, stay in Indiana, and always live near his mom and dad. (This came to pass, in part: Darren works as a magistrate judge in Indiana, and lives, with his family, three miles from their mother.) Ryan said that he wanted to go to Hollywood and be a star and have a mansion and never return to Indiana. His father pulled the car over and slapped him, horrifying his mother and embarrassing her in front of the nun.
Murphy looked down at the letter, as if gazing off a cliff. “If I ever had to write a letter like this to my child, I would honestly die,” he said, glancing up. He had hoped that it would be a “true mea culpa,” but it only made him sad: “It’s all just a tragedy and a mystery.” He had struggled to view his parents with compassion—as flawed people, like him, who did their best. He’d tried to maintain ties with his mother, too, to let her be a doting grandmother to his children, as Myrtle had been to him. But not all wounds heal. “It’s very weird when your own parent thinks of you this way,” he marveled, putting the letter down. “As if an unapproachable celebrity.”
* * *
—
Last August, Murphy was working at home on a script for Pose when the news broke that Shonda Rhimes, the creator of Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy, had signed a hundred-million-dollar, four-year deal with Netflix. Murphy recalled, “And my agent wrote and said, ‘It is now the wild, wild West, and you have the biggest gun in town.’ ”
Murphy’s contract at Fox was scheduled to expire this July. But, in December, Disney announced plans to buy Fox and its subsidiaries, including FX. Various corporate suitors, including Netflix and Amazon, began offering him creative freedom and riches unheard of in TV. CAA’s Bryan Lourd and Joe Cohen handled the negotiations.
He chose Netflix, in part, because he was impressed by the company’s vision for the medium: data-driven, global, immediate, funded by subscriptions, not ads. There was history there, too. Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, told me that Nip/Tuck was the first show the service had streamed while it was still airing.
Netflix is coy about ratings, but Sarandos said that sizable “taste-based clusters” enjoyed Murphy’s brand of “humor and sexiness and danger.” “We’re not going to ask him to round off his edges,” he said. When the news broke, Twitter began to speculate. Would there be greater consistency to a Ryan Murphy series released all at once? A new pacing to a show unbroken by ads? Some questioned why his deal was three times as big as Rhimes’s. I texted Murphy my congratulations. “Thank u,” he texted back. “Nerve wracking and weepy.” He and Miller had been celebrating at a restaurant, but he got very emotional and worried that it looked as if they were having an argument, so they left. In an email, he joked, “My Velvet Rage has suddenly been monetized.”
Later, in New York, on the set of Pose, he told me about his tentative programming plans. Netflix needed more LGBTQ content, he said, like a glossy gay soap opera, a show in the tradition of The L Word but “aspirational”—“not poor people eating pad thai.” He would make movies, too: He’d been talking to Julianne Moore. He was interested in documentaries, and was considering collaborating with Paltrow in “the wellness space.” He said, “I would watch an entire hour about adrenal collapse.” He’d be getting his own row on the Netflix home page, as if he were a genre: “Sci-Fi Thrillers,” “Cerebral Indies,” “Ryan Murphy.” He’d spent enough years in the writers’ room, he told me. He loved the idea of expressing an even grander kind of creativity, like a studio head—or the pope.
A few weeks after the deal was made, Murphy, on a private plane from Los Angeles to New York, was cuddled up in a gray boiled-cashmere sweater immense enough to qualify as a trench coat, accessorized with a Georgian mourning necklace. Miller was also on the plane, sitting across the aisle; he was wearing a jaunty fisherman’s cap and watching Pose on a laptop. Murphy kept stealing glances at him. “I’m watching him watching it,” he said.
“He’s up to the end of the first act,” Murphy told me, as we chatted about Olivia de Havilland, who was suing him for the gossipy portrayal of her on Feud. (She lost the case.) He admitted that it hadn’t been fun when The Good Wife satirized him, in an episode about the copyright-infringement case brought by Jonathan Coulton. We were returning from a momentous occasion: a staged interview with Barbra Streisand, an experience that he had found more nerve-racking than the Emmys. When Miller finished Pose, he told Murphy that he liked it, especially the way that the pilot dealt with the characters’ vulnerability. Murphy smiled mischievously at Miller, who was lounging, his cap tipped low. “I can’t take you seriously when you look like Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter,” he told him.
Murphy’s upcoming roster had changed. The scripts for Katrina had been abandoned, the writers laid off; the season would now be based on Sheri Fink’s book Five Days at Memorial. After running into Monica Lewinsky at an Oscars party, he was having second thoughts about doing her story. (Later, he had second thoughts about his second thoughts.)
A new idea had bubbled up, however, as he absorbed the #MeToo crisis. The show would be called Consent—potentially, a new American Crime Story. It would follow a Black Mirror model: Every episode would explore a different story, starting with an insidery account of the Weinstein Company. There would be an episode about Kevin Spacey, one about an ambiguous he-said-she-said encounter. Each episode could have a different creator. The project sounded fascinating, but it had emerged at a liminal moment: Murphy was no longer fully at FX but not yet set up at Netflix. The Netflix deal would officially begin in July. “That’s the great thing about popes,” he said later, when we talked about who would run his old shows. “When one dies, you get a new pope.” Pose—a sweet experiment in releasing control, in opening the door to new voices, new kinds of creators—would be his final series for FX, whether it turned out to be a hit or a flop.
In the meanwhile, Murphy had scored a ratings bonanza with Fox’s 9-1-1, a wackadoo procedural featuring stories like one about a baby caught in a plumbing pipe. It was his parting gift to Dana Walden. Versace had been, by certain standards, a flop: lower ratings, mixed reviews. Artistically, though, it was one of Murphy’s boldest shows, with a backward chronology and a moving performance by Criss as Cunanan, a panicked dandy hollowed out by self-hatred. After the finale aired, a new set of reviews emerged. Matt Brennan, on Paste, argued that Versace had been subjected to “the straight glance”—a critical gaze that skims queer art, denying its depths. “Even critics sympathetic to the series seem as uncomfortab
le with its central subject as the Miami cops were with those South Beach fags,” Brennan wrote.
Murphy was reading a new oral history of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, in which, in one scene, Roy Cohn denies being gay because, he barks, homosexuals lack power: They are “men who know nobody and who nobody knows.” The line echoes one in Versace. A homeless junkie dying of AIDS tells the cops, bitterly, why gay men couldn’t stop talking about the designer: “We all imagined what it would be like to be so rich and so powerful that it doesn’t matter that you’re gay.”
In Miami, Murphy said that he disliked being labeled a gay showrunner: “I don’t think that, in the halls of Fox, I’m ever thought of as a gay person. I’m thought of as a whole, a person with responsibilities who is a businessperson and a leader and a creator.” In late May, Murphy is scheduled to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—the ultimate gratification for the boy who turned his bedroom into Studio 54. At last, he knew everybody and everybody knew him.
As the plane began a turbulent descent, a flight attendant walked down the aisle to reassure us. I made sick jokes about the plane crashing, and the kinds of headlines that would result. “Please, please, don’t talk about it,” Murphy said. He looked out the window, watching New York’s glittering surfaces tilt back into view. He reached across the aisle, searching for Miller’s hand.
Dedicated to my husband, Clive Thompson, and my sons, Gabriel and Zev, the world’s biggest fans of Jane the Virgin and Parks and Recreation
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to my editor at The New Yorker, the redoubtable Willing Davidson, who kills self-indulgent adjectives on two coasts. To David Remnick, a perfect boss and a mensch. To Daniel Zalewski, Alumni Hall’s greatest Madonna stan and also the editor of the three profiles in this anthology—not to mention the person I called when I was watching “The Pack.”
A big thank-you to my book editor, Ben Greenberg, my guide to the insanity of publishing a book. To my agent, Suzanne Gluck, who cuts to the heart of the matter. To the whole team at Random House—Jess Bonet, Maria Braeckel, Gina Centrello, Barbara Fillon, Susan Kamil, Leigh Marchant, my publicist Dhara Parikh, Tom Perry, Molly Turpin, Andy Ward, Theresa Zoro—and especially to production editor Loren Noveck. To Adam Moss, a culture vulture mastermind. To Sue Dominus, my ally, boss, and inspiration at Nerve; to Jodi Kantor, who encouraged me to write about television at Slate and The New York Times; to Jared Hohlt, Hugo Lindgren, Mary Kaye Schilling, Raha Naddaf, and Lauren Kern, my editors at New York magazine; and to Adam Sternbergh, who is wrong about Scrubs. A special thank-you to the team of fact-checkers and copy editors at The New Yorker, whose labors save me, improve me, and keep me honest every week (and a particular shout-out to Fergus McIntosh and Rob Liguori, who fact-checked the two new essays in this book).
To my inspiring colleagues at The New Yorker, among them Hilton Als, Jelani Cobb, Masha Gessen, David Grann, Patrick Radden Keefe, Ariel Levy, Kathryn Schultz, and Paige Williams. Special thanks to the wonderful Laura Miller, who gave me invaluable early feedback on “Confessions of the Human Shield,” as well as A. O. Scott, Wesley Morris, Andrew Marantz, Willa Paskin, and Jia Tolentino, who questioned my assumptions in useful ways. I owe my life to Margaret Lyons, who called me out on some pretentious narishkeit in “The Big Picture.” To Taffy Akner, Selina Alko, Christine Connor, Kirsten Danis, Tyler Foggatt, Michelle Goldberg, David Gutman, James Hannaham and the Office Hours gang, Karen Hill, Anna Holmes, Bob Kolker, Sasha Nemecek, Katha Pollitt, Lydia Polgreen, Sean Qualls, Claire Raymond, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Rebecca Traister, Ellen Umansky, and Nancy Young, all of whom listened to me whine. To Twitter, same. To my extended family, including my father, Bernie, who loves Outlander, and my late mother, Toby, who helpfully observed of M*A*S*H’s Hawkeye Pierce, “That guy’s an asshole.” And to my fellow TV critics, including but not limited to Matt Brennan, Dave Fear, Mark Harris, Linda Holmes, Laurie Penny, Troy Patterson, James Poniewozik, Joy Press, Alyssa Rosenberg, Mo Ryan, Matt Zoller Seitz, Alan Sepinwall, Millicent Somer, Sonia Soraiya, June Thomas, Alissa Wilkinson, Jason Zinoman, and my friendly neighborhood auteurist nemesis, Richard Brody. (And to anyone I accidentally left out, my apologies!)
To my amazing husband, Clive Thompson, who brought me coffee and Advil and saw me through multiple brainstorms and breakdowns. He is extremely metal in all senses.
A final acknowledgment to Maria Salazar, who I wish was around to see what’s on TV today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Nussbaum is the television critic for The New Yorker. In 2016, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Previously, she wrote for The New York Times, New York magazine, Slate, Lingua Franca, and Nerve. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Clive Thompson; her two sons, Gabriel and Zev; and a variety of screens.
emilynussbaum.com
Twitter: @emilynussbaum
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