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

by Brett Martin

  “Okay, let’s roll,” says Conrad, setting up the show’s most famous recurring line: “Hey, let’s be careful out there.” Whereupon the cops matter-of-factly collect their weapons and begin their day.

  Little in the scene would seem out of place on an episode of The Wire or The Shield. Likewise the rest of the episode, which includes the Mad Men–like coy reveal of the police captain’s ongoing affair with the public defender and the possibly fatal shooting of two cops who, until that moment, have appeared to be around primarily for comic relief.

  Unsurprisingly, NBC was perturbed. An internal memo from May 1980 provided a neat accounting of their concerns. It cited focus group testing: “The most prevalent audience reaction indicated that the program was depressing, violent and confusing. . . .” “Too much was crammed into this story. . . .” “The main characters were perceived as being not capable and having flawed personalities. Professionally, they were never completely successful in doing their jobs and personally their lives were in a mess. . . .” “Audiences found the ending unsatisfying. There are too many loose ends. . . .”

  In other words, it was an entirely unwitting blueprint not only for what made Hill Street Blues such a historic program, but for all the shows that make up the Third Golden Age.

  • • •

  Bochco was never shy about invoking his autonomy, often threatening to walk rather than follow a network note. That the creation of a television show is largely a state of outright scorched-earth warfare with the very people paying for said creation was an item of faith for Bochco, and he pursued it with the zest of Sun Tzu.

  “I probably did come off as an arrogant asshole,” he said. “But you had to be. We were bucking a system. And the reason I slept fine at night, despite having all these terrible wars and knowing how resentful they must have been, was that it was in the show’s best interest and, ultimately, the network’s best interest. I always felt that part of my job was protecting them from themselves.”

  That position wasn’t the only legacy Bochco left for the next generation of showrunners. He and his team wound up producing thirty-eight hour-long episodes in Hill Street’s first year and a half. That breakneck pace might have been common for shows with contained episodes, but this show’s sprawling canvas demanded the invention of new systems.

  Traditionally, TV dramas had been either written by a small group of producer-writers or farmed out to a network of freelancers. The idea of a writers’ room was mostly a comedy phenomenon. Hill Street’s ongoing story lines necessitated an institutional memory, so Bochco assembled a full-time staff that included Jeffrey Lewis, Michael Wagner, and, for season three, an old Yale roommate of Lewis’s, David Milch. (Kozoll left the show after its second season.) Together, steeped in the world of the show, they became responsible for a sprawling saga.

  Since he was spending so much time with the writers, Bochco deputized an executive producer whose job it was to oversee shooting on set and all other production issues, leaving him free to concentrate on scripts. And since no director popping in to direct a single episode could be expected to know the full backstory, or what might be important three or four or more episodes down the line, he instituted what would later come to be known as “tone meetings.” These are conferences at which the writers, director, and production staff all come together to pore over the complexities of each script in fastidious detail. The meetings are also, implicitly, displays of obeisance on the part of the rest of the production staff to the writer. Bit by bit, Bochco was institutionalizing the role of the autocratic writer-showrunner.

  • • •

  It wasn’t just Tinker’s support or the quality of Hill Street’s writing that made this possible. For starters, NBC was in terrible shape. The network had but one show in the Nielsen ratings top ten (the seventh season of Little House on the Prairie, tied for ninth place) and was the object of much ridicule for a prime-time lineup that included both B.J. and the Bear, about a trucker and his chimpanzee, and its spin-off, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. Fred Silverman had a hopeless man’s incentive to run in the opposite direction and take a risk. In this case, that meant sticking with Hill Street Blues even after it debuted to dismal ratings. “If NBC had been flush,” said Bochco, “I don’t think we would have seen the light of day.”

  The television business was also changing. By 1980, nearly a fifth of American homes were hooked up to cable TV, a growing portion of those paying even more for premium stations such as the newly born HBO. Cable not only cannibalized network viewers’ time and attention, it trained them to seek out different kinds of programming on different parts of the dial—sports on ESPN, news on CNN, and so on. Television was becoming a kind of food court—made up of many kiosks selling individual cuisines—rather than a one-size-fits-all cafeteria pumping out a slurry of least objectionable grub. “Quality,” it seemed, could be another niche.

  Meanwhile, the explosive rise of VCRs—from 1.1 percent of TV households in 1980 to 20 percent in 1985—encouraged viewers to accept more serialized stories, since they could now catch up at their leisure. It also began the process of importing film, and the expectation of filmic production values, onto the blocky screen in the living room. And it sliced the number of viewers any one show could expect ever thinner.

  As a result, the numbers that had defined success in a three-network world were being drastically reduced downward; a show could succeed with many fewer eyeballs. More important, networks were becoming ever more sophisticated at measuring the quality of those eyeballs rather than simply their quantity. Instead of aiming to attract one-third of all viewers (which was becoming increasingly impossible in any event), networks now targeted specific demographics—rich, young, educated, male, and so on. The fragmentation of the American audience had begun. And, as it would again twenty years later, that meant good things for quality TV.

  • • •

  To be young, talented, and well compensated at MTM in those years was a beautiful thing. It became even more so when Bruce Paltrow began producing St. Elsewhere, which transplanted much of the Hill Street formula to a Boston teaching hospital. The show’s offices were one floor below Hill Street’s. “There was great excitement,” said Milch. “It was as if everyone felt as if he or she had been caught doing something wrong.”

  “We were just a group of guys, all in our mid- to late thirties, and suddenly, because of the power Grant had given us, we were changing the business. We were becoming the business,” Bochco said. “It was very, very thrilling. To suddenly have the sense that you could be proud of what you were doing, that you could begin to use the word art. We began to tentatively say, ‘We’re artists.’ In this maligned medium.”

  Across Hollywood and New York, TV writers stood up and took notice. As important, so did those in MFA programs, theater workshops, journalism programs, and elsewhere. “Look at what else was on the air that season,” said Andrew Schneider, who was a producer on the The Incredible Hulk at the time. “Go watch an episode of Simon & Simon. We were toiling along on shows like that, and then Hill Street came out and said, ‘This is possible.’ I remember coming to work the day after the pilot aired and everybody was like, ‘We’re going to get to do stuff like this!’”

  And yet, the window that MTM had thrown open would remain so only briefly. Grant Tinker would leave the studio in 1981 to become head of NBC. Bochco was fired from his own show by MTM’s new regime, for chronic cost overruns. He’d continue his career with LA Law, NYPD Blue, and a host of variously successful shows at 20th Century Fox Television. The regulations and incentives of Fin-Syn would be eroded in the early 1990s and finally abolished in 1995, drastically sliding power away from independent producers and toward the networks while at the same time spurring the proliferation of new, smaller networks like the WB and UPN. Cable would march inexorably forward, along with video games, the Internet, and more, exploding the audience into ever smaller fragments. Network TV, on the whole, wo
uld remain a dismal landscape. Indeed, the networks would run in the other direction from the new writer monarchy the first moment they had the chance, seizing instead on programming that dispensed with writers altogether in favor of “reality.”

  Yet before long, strikingly similar circumstances would conspire to continue what Tinker and his writers had started: new, disruptive technology, an anxious, shifting industry, a network with little to lose, and men who had labored long and hard in the Wasteland, sniffing the air hungrily for the chance to call themselves “artists.”

  Two

  Which Films?

  David Chase never liked Hill Street Blues. Or St. Elsewhere. The rest of the world may have been thinking that television was rising from the muck, but not him. “I thought it was getting worse,” he said. “It was just more cops and doctors.”

  But then, David Chase liked almost nothing about television—not even the paychecks, each one of which reminded him that he was a sellout, too weak and compromised, he imagined, to follow the path of the renegade filmmakers he’d come of age idolizing. If ever a man who spent his entire career in television could claim intellectual, emotional kinship with Jerry Mander and his campaign to eliminate the medium itself, Chase was that man.

  “Look, I do not care about television. I don’t care about where television is going or anything else about it,” he said three years after the finale of The Sopranos became one of the signal cultural events of the decade. “I’m a man who wanted to make movies. Period.” Even the title showrunner annoyed him: “It sounds like some kind of Jet-Ski,” he said.

  In a generally triumphant story, this is one of the small tragedies: that the Reluctant Moses of the Third Golden Age, the man who, by example, opened the door for so many writers, directors, actors, and producers to work in television gloriously free of shame, was unable himself to enter the Promised Land.

  • • •

  Gloom, pessimism, anxiety, paranoia, grudge holding, misanthropy—such were the highlights of most David Chase stories, including those he told about himself. Which is why it was so flummoxing to hear his own self-assessment, so difficult to tell whether he was being coy, oblivious, or simply pugnacious in yet another iteration.

  “Maybe I come off as a depressed, morose guy,” he said, complaining about a 2007 Vanity Fair cover profile that quoted a constellation of colleagues and acquaintances on his negativity. Despite calling The Sopranos “one of the masterpieces of American popular culture, on a par with the first two Godfathers, Mean Streets, and GoodFellas . . . or even European epics such as Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard,” the piece continued to irk Chase. “Maybe people find me that negative. I just don’t see it,” he said. “Because the truth is, in my experience, when I’m in a room, I hear a lot of laughter.”

  As a child, he dreamed of nuclear apocalypse under the suburban stars of Passaic and Morris and Essex counties. Perhaps this was reasonable for someone born August 22, 1945, sixteen days after Hiroshima, a charter baby boomer. He was the only child of second-generation Italians—family name DeCesare—who had more or less made the journey he would later replicate in The Sopranos’ opening credits. His father, Henry, owned a store, Wright Hardware, in Verona. His mother, Norma, well, you’ve met her: insecure, passive-aggressive, fearful, domineering. As embodied by the actress Nancy Marchand, she would become one of the more idiosyncratically terrifying and funny characters to ever appear in American living rooms: Livia Soprano.

  Norma was one of ten daughters of an Italian leftist who, family lore had it, once jumped out a window at a Eugene Debs rally when the cops busted in. Henry came from a line of Italian religious reformists called the Waldensians. The Chases were secular Protestants in the land of Catholics. Having escaped Newark, they had WASPy ambitions. They played tennis and golf, vacationed in the Poconos. The wiseguys and guidos from down Bloomfield Avenue were referred to around the dinner table as cafoni—peasants. “My mother aspired to a kind of genteel life, I think,” says Chase. “Although her home life was not genteel at all.”

  Norma, who had left high school after her freshman year, had the almost absurdist job of proofreading the New Jersey Bell phone book. She ruled the house by threat of filibuster: you did what she wanted because it was easier than hearing her complain. “The tyranny of the weak,” Chase called it. This played into Henry’s sense of thwarted ambition. He radiated frustration in a way that would later find expression in Tony Soprano.

  “He was a disappointed man. A frustrated man,” Chase said. “He would make her out to be the heavy. If something couldn’t happen, for whatever reason, he would blame it on her: ‘Look what I have to deal with.’ But he was the one who had picked her. He got what he wanted.”

  It was a cramped, suffocating home, with both parents intimately involved in their only child’s comings and goings. Chase suffered adolescent bouts of anxiety and depression that a generation later would likely have been identified as clinical. Outside, he and his friends engaged in the kind of petty vandalism that makes obedient sons feel rebellious: knocking over mailboxes, breaking into the local country club and throwing furniture into the pool. “It was a time when you could just run wild,” he said. “Outside the home, it was really an idyllic American boyhood.” Chase developed a fierce love of rock and roll and took up the drums. And he began learning the trick of alchemizing family psychodrama into mordant humor. Long before Livia came to life in America’s living rooms, stories about Norma would entertain a generation of procrastinating writers’ rooms.

  Senior year, he fell in love with Denise Kelly, whose reserved French Irish family was everything the Chases were not. Still, for college Chase fled to Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was an ROTC student and thought seriously about the prospect of staying in the army after graduation—the brewing conflict in faraway Vietnam perhaps seeming preferable to a return to the Chase household.

  Northern Jersey to Winston-Salem constituted about as large a cultural leap as it was possible to make in 1964 America. “There were cross burnings still going on in North Carolina. You had to go to chapel twice a week, and if it was before a big football game, they’d play ‘Dixie’ and everybody had to stand,” Chase said. “It was awful. Really terrible. Not only were you not allowed to drink on campus, you weren’t allowed to dance or play cards.”

  There was, however, against all odds, a Friday night European film series, part of the great flowering of film appreciation on campuses and in downtowns across the country. “I wasn’t hip enough to know that I was seeing new film techniques in a film like Breathless,” Chase said. “But it sure seemed different. Godard said all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. I certainly got that part of it. I was into it.”

  In particular, he fell for Fellini—starting with the director’s contribution to Boccaccio ’70, a lurid anthology of shorts inspired by the Renaissance poet. Fellini’s segment featured a woman afflicted by visions of saints. “It was my first glimpse of Italy,” Chase remembered. “I thought, ‘This is the kind of nonsense that goes on in my house. The melodrama and the self-pity and the obsessiveness and the craziness: This is my DNA.’”

  Soon he began dabbling in photography, taking still pictures of 8½ and Stanley Kubrick films on his television. After two years, he transferred to NYU to be closer to Denise and to immerse himself in Greenwich Village’s film scene. As they would for scores of others, the art films of that period presented Chase with a new creative model. Leaving a screening of Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac in 1966, he had a revelation. “Before, I thought films just arrived from the factory, like they were Chevys or Fords. Leaving that theater, I remember thinking, ‘These films are personal, they’re made by a person.’ It crystallized for me that it was something one could do.”

  After college, Chase and Denise married and the couple headed west, ending up at Stanford University, where Chase took film classes. There, Chase became close friends with a f
ellow student and teaching assistant, John Patterson. He was dashing: ruddy, bearded, an ex-navigator for the Strategic Air Command that had spent twenty-four-hour shifts airborne during the Cuban missile crisis. On the surface, Patterson, who would go on to be the most prolific director of The Sopranos’ early seasons, couldn’t have been more different from Chase, who had left Norma behind, but not her legacies of fearfulness and depression. But the men bonded over film and drugs and rock and roll. On one memorable night, the Chases and Patterson and his girlfriend dropped acid and headed into San Francisco to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. “It was the best time of my life,” Chase recalled. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of trying to go back to the well—tripping once again for a Palo Alto screening of Fellini’s Satyricon, a disturbing grotesquerie under even the most sober of circumstances. The trip turned bad.

  “I was sitting in the theater thinking, ‘I don’t feel so good . . . I feel pretty bad. I wish I was dead. I’m going to die,’” he remembered. At some point, he began to believe that the Zodiac serial killer, then at large in the Bay Area, was out to get him. “The more I thought about it, the more my brain waves would attract his attention. So I needed to stop thinking about it, which of course made me think about it more,” he said. “It was a long twelve hours.”

  That passage, from joy to despair, became characteristic of Chase’s work, in which characters—Tony tripping on mescaline in the Nevada desert, Carmela Soprano musing on the “cold stones” of Paris, Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri seeing the Virgin Mary in the back of the Bada Bing! strip club—are constantly glimpsing various kinds of transcendence, only to feel them slip away.

  “I would always go like that, in a circle: ‘Oh, this is so cool, this is amazing, this is really threatening, oh God, oh God . . . ,’” said Chase. “Experiences like that trip showed me the pattern very concisely: ‘This is the way you are. You get all excited, and then too excited, and then you start to worry and go into this slew of despond until something else distracts you and you go back up.’”