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

by Brett Martin

  Live sports broadcasts, largely controlled by local networks and afflicted by blackouts, were an equally rare commodity in 1972. In its first decade, a significant chunk of HBO’s programming included out-of-market NHL, NBA, and New York Yankees games, in addition to boxing, which would remain an important franchise for years to come. Any honest HBO executive past or present would also allow that two other programming elements made possible by its premium status did as much as anything else to distinguish the network’s identity: breasts and curse words.

  The mix worked. By 1981, HBO was carried on one thousand local cable systems across the country and boasted some four million subscribers. (Dolan had quickly departed the company and would go on to create Cablevision, which owned Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and Rangers, Radio City Music Hall, and AMC Networks.) In the ensuing decade, under the stewardship of Jerry Levin and Michael Fuchs, who took over as chairman and CEO in 1984, that number would grow fivefold. At the same time, certain fundamental problems marked those years, chief among them the difficulty of finding enough content to fill the 168 hours per week that a full-time network demanded. HBO’s constant repetition of its stable of movies became a well-known joke. (“Show me a Home Box Office patron, and I’ll show you someone who has seen The Great Santini fifteen times,” Jack Curry wrote in the Daily News.) The more subscribers felt they had seen all HBO had to offer, the more vulnerable the network was to the scourge of pay TV: so-called churning, in which consumers repeatedly pick up and then drop cable services.

  The all-consuming thirst for content also made HBO, for as long as it was primarily a movie station, dangerously dependent on Hollywood studios. These had started out dubious of the network and grown increasingly hostile. In 1980, it took a federal antitrust case to prevent 20th Century Fox, Universal, Columbia, and Paramount from banding together to start their own pay network, called Premiere, as a direct challenge. With the rise of VCRs and competition from networks like Showtime and The Movie Channel, all strategic roads began to lead toward the same destination: original programming.

  • • •

  Movie and TV production wasn’t totally alien to HBO. In 1982, the network had joined with CBS and Columbia Studios to form Tri-Star Pictures, which produced such films as The Natural and Birdy. (HBO left the partnership in 1987.) In 1986, the first Comic Relief concert was aired, a fund-raiser that would eventually have eleven installments. The network also had varying degrees of success with sketch comedy (Kids in the Hall, Not Necessarily the News), miniseries (Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88), and oddball children’s programming like Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock. Meanwhile, as the nineties dawned, its documentary division, under the direction of Sheila Nevins, began developing a strong reputation with films ranging from Emmy-winning investigations such as Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel to the titillations of Real Sex and Taxicab Confessions.

  For the most part, though, the network had declined to challenge the networks with ongoing scripted series. There were a few exceptions: 1st & Ten was a football sitcom costarring O. J. Simpson. Arli$$ chronicled the adventures of a big-time sports agent. To the extent that these shows drew on HBO’s nascent brand, they were primarily the easiest, and crudest, expressions of what it could do and most networks couldn’t. Nearly every episode of the sitcom Dream On, from David Crane and Marta Kauffman, who would later birth Friends, featured at least one sex scene so outrageously gratuitous that it almost felt like an inside joke on the nature of pay TV.

  Which is not to say that self-reflexive irony, if indeed there was any on Dream On, did anything to diminish the appeal to teenage boys, especially in those pre-Internet days. In that way, an otherwise forgettable show intimated a canny strategy that continued to work for HBO long after it moved on to more upmarket fare. Rare is the episode of any HBO show that doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity to remind you that “adult entertainment” means more than sophisticated storytelling. And if one watched The Sopranos more for the Bada Bing! and the blood than for the existential musings, well, who was to know? Any more than it could be proven that you weren’t reading Playboy for the articles.

  The most important premonition of what HBO would soon become came in 1992, with the debut of The Larry Sanders Show. Just as The Sopranos would be nearly as funny as it was dramatic, The Larry Sanders Show was a half-hour comedy as cruelly dark as anything TV had seen before. A behind-the-scenes look at the making of a late-night talk show, it starred Garry Shandling as Larry, the neurotic, narcissistic host. If Shandling and his supporting cast, including Rip Torn and Jeffrey Tambor, weren’t exactly playing mobsters or murderers, they were a good deal less likable than any characters you could find on network TV—much less on a sitcom. That went equally for the celebrities who soon lined up to play exaggerated, usually ugly versions of themselves. To appear on Larry Sanders was to show yourself as not only a good sport, but savvy enough to lampoon Hollywood while participating in it. And the audience was flattered by its knowing inclusion in that world, the same way it later felt intimately connected to the jargon of Baltimore homicide cops on The Wire or the economics of running a funeral home on Six Feet Under. The pleasure came less from the putative glimpse into how a late-night talk show worked than from imagining how one could convince Michael Bolton to appear as himself in an episode in which he was described as “a pair of lungs with a dick.”

  In raw numbers, not all that many people watched. “I used to get the numbers every week, and Def Comedy Jam”—the African American comedy showcase that debuted the same year—“had like four times the ratings of Larry Sanders,” said Kevin Reilly, then the head of television at Brillstein-Grey, the influential management company that produced both shows and would later develop The Sopranos. But volume of viewers really didn’t matter. Buzz did: among critics, among loyal, chattering viewers on the coasts, and among other Hollywood creatives.

  “The Larry Sanders Show manifestly revealed to everyone that you could do something totally original, get noticed for it, and that it could have a cultural impact,” said Richard Plepler, who later became HBO’s CEO. “And I believe that that show opened up the imagination of a lot of creative people who said, ‘You know what, you go over there, you can do some interesting stuff.’”

  • • •

  By most normal standards, David Chase was doing interesting stuff himself in the early 1990s—working for a pair of young writer-producers who would likely have found themselves working on cable had they started ten years later. Josh Brand and John Falsey had been barely thirty when they created St. Elsewhere for MTM. They departed the show soon after its debut, thanks to an ugly struggle for control between Brand and executive producer Bruce Paltrow. At Universal, they had created a miniseries called A Year in the Life for NBC, which was then picked up for one critically acclaimed season. They then struck improbable gold, or at least fairy dust, with an eight-episode summer replacement called Northern Exposure, about a neurotic New York doctor stranded in an eccentric Alaskan town. With its blend of comedy, soap opera, and a kind of hip, literary sensibility (Falsey and several of the writers he recruited had studied fiction at the University of Iowa), the show was an immediate hit with critics.

  “They were very conscious of wanting to do something that was not like television,” staffer Barbara Hall remembered. “There were constant references to short-story writers and playwrights, not TV episodes.” Robin Green, also a writer for the show, was sent home the first week with a collection of John Updike stories to study. Surprisingly, the show was also a ratings hit, which bought Brand and Falsey something approaching a free pass on whatever they wanted to do next.

  “Back then, before HBO and cable were players, the networks would set aside an hour or two a week for a show that wasn’t going to be a ratings winner but that they could be proud of,” said Falsey. “With Northern, Josh and I had reached that niche.”

  What they filled it with was I’ll Fly Away. Set in the late 19
50s and early 1960s, the show centered around Sam Waterston as a southern district attorney navigating the moral and legal displacements of the civil rights movement, and on Regina Taylor as his African American maid, Lilly, caught in the same currents. Brand said the show’s inspiration was a scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Atticus Finch asks his black housekeeper to stay at his house while he attends to business: “I thought, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be interesting to see it from her point of view.’”

  Brand had admired Almost Grown, so when James Garner sang David Chase’s praises one day over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air, he and Falsey brought him in for a meeting.

  “He was David,” Brand said. “You know, not the most cheery person you can meet. When he left, we looked at each other and one of us said, ‘He’s an odd duck, man. But he’s a really talented writer.’ So we hired him. Frankly, we didn’t give a shit about his personality.”

  Henry Bromell and Hall rounded out the small writing staff, though Chase emerged as the star. “I remember we each went off to write our first scripts and then passed them around,” said Bromell. “Mine was pretty good. I remember reading Barbara’s and thinking it was really good. But David’s . . . David’s was like Chekhov.”

  In “The Hat,” which became the second episode of I’ll Fly Away’s first season, Lilly retrieves and fixes a cowboy hat that her young white charge, John Morgan, has lost out a car window. Before she can return it, though, Lilly’s daughter falls in love with the hat, forcing Lilly to pry it away from her to give it back. In the final scene, as Chase wrote it, John Morgan cavalierly discards the hat again.

  “It said everything,” said Bromell. “About the two families. About money. About power. About how Lilly couldn’t say ‘Fuck you’ to her boss. I said, ‘David, that’s really good. In any medium.’ And he said, ‘Eh. I don’t know.’”

  Brand said, “If you came to see David in his office, he’d kind of look at you like you were trying to pick his pocket. You’d say, ‘David, it’s nothing! I’m just trying to have a conversation!’ He’d be, ‘What? What?’ Just very suspicious. But I really liked him. I thought he was funny, because he was so intense.” Brand paused and smiled. “Though, you know, I always thought Richard Nixon was hysterically funny, too.”

  Chase was proud of his work on I’ll Fly Away, but that hardly meant he was happy. His battles with enemies both internal and external continued—the latter camp represented largely by the powers at NBC, on which the series aired. Network commercials for the show featured Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World.” The spots drove Chase crazy.

  “If I’d had a gun, I would’ve killed somebody,” he said, as worked up about it in 2010 as he was in 1992. “What fucking wonderful world? Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi civil rights workers being murdered, housewives from Detroit being gunned down in their car, black kids being lynched? They were trying to sell a series about human pain as a cute story about some cute little boy and his nanny. And it fucking made me want to puke.”

  Hall remembered Chase bringing a woman in the network’s standards and practices office to tears over the number of times the word nigger would be allowed in an episode. (“What kind of person does your job?” he asked her over and over.) Another time, a young staffer gushed about how important their work was. “It’s not TV, it’s art,” she said. Chase fixed her with his hooded eyes: “You’re here for two things: selling Buicks and making Americans feel cozy. That’s your job.”

  Some of Chase’s worst opprobrium was reserved for the show being produced right across the hall. “The people who worked on Northern Exposure thought they were curing cancer and reinventing drama,” he said. “The premise of the show, as I found out later, was that it was a, quote, ‘nonjudgmental universe.’ Huh? That’s something I couldn’t understand. To me it was so precious, so self-congratulatory. It strained so hard for its whimsy. We’d go to the Emmys every year and they’d get these awards and we’d get nothing. It wasn’t that we really wanted the Emmys, but that show was being celebrated to the hilt and I felt it was a fraud at its core.”

  By the end of 1993, Chase had taken over Northern Exposure as showrunner.

  • • •

  That bizarre turn of events had been immediately precipitated by the cancellation of I’ll Fly Away after just two seasons. PBS subsequently rebroadcast the series, along with a ninety-minute coda, I’ll Fly Away: Then and Now—an early intimation of how alternatives to the traditional networks might be better suited for serious storytelling.

  After their meteoric rise, Brand and Falsey’s partnership was faltering. Brand had stayed in day-to-day control of Northern Exposure while Falsey concentrated mainly on I’ll Fly Away. While both shows were on the air, Falsey had pushed Brand to start yet another, Going to Extremes, a somewhat transparent copy of Northern Exposure’s fish-out-of-water formula, this time about med students on a tropical island. Falsey’s dream was to be the first producer with three shows nominated for an Emmy in the same category, but shortly after the show launched, in September 1992, he began to fall apart. Soon, he would withdraw completely into a decades-long battle with alcoholism, during which he and Brand had no contact for nearly twenty years. Brand, burned out by his partner’s life dramas as well as increasing conflicts with Northern Exposure star Rob Morrow over his contract, decided to leave the show after its fourth season.

  Universal handed the reins to Chase along with husband-and-wife writing partners Andrew Schneider and Diane Frolov. Predictably, given Chase’s feelings and the odd three-headed showrunner structure, things didn’t go well. Northern Exposure left the air two seasons later.

  “The studio asked me, ‘Who can run this thing? David?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m sure he could. He’s a great writer. But I don’t see David having any affinity for this stuff whatsoever,’” said Brand. “Only he would have the answer to why he said yes.”

  Indeed, Chase did. “I did it for the money,” he said. “The only time I ever did that.”

  • • •

  Meanwhile, at HBO there had been a changing of the guard. Michael Fuchs had been fired and Jeff Bewkes, previously the CFO and president, became CEO. With his ascendancy came that of his head of programming, an executive who would have as much influence over the Third Golden Age as any writer or producer: Chris Albrecht.

  In the early 1990s, the comedy troupe the State performed a sketch on MTV called “Doug & Dad.” Michael Showalter played Doug, a teenager intent on rebellion despite being afflicted with a cool father. (Sample dialogue: “I’m Doug. And I’m not going to stop having sex in the parking lot behind the supermarket just ’cause you said that I can do it in my own bed!”) Similarly, the showrunners of the Third Golden Age ritually railed and fumed against the destructive influence of network “suits” in a way that suggested mere habit or a kind of Kabuki ritual, since they generally enjoyed the most simpatico talent-executive relationships in the history of the medium. Albrecht, himself as big a personality as the artists he empowered, would eventually prove to have serious problems and idiosyncrasies of his own. But he, along with his right-hand woman, Carolyn Strauss, set the template for the generation’s enlightened executives.

  The Queens-born Albrecht had started as an aspiring comic. He quickly ended up employing them instead. In 1975, he became manager and eventually part owner of the Improv, New York’s premier comedy club, where he developed a reputation as a smart spotter of talent and a hard partyer with the likes of Robin Williams. Albrecht’s comedy pedigree, like that of Bernie Brillstein of Brillstein-Grey, seems important to his eventual role in the TV revolution. If there is any true, pure auteur art form, rising and falling entirely on the voice of one performer alone onstage, it’s stand-up. The value of those voices could not have been lost on anyone spending night after night in a comedy club, nor could the recognition of how the new, genuine, and unexpected could affect a crowd.

  “The way I learned it in the clubs,” s
aid Albrecht, “was that the highest form of stand-up was someone who had a point of view. Having a point of view was a necessary element of original voices.”

  In 1980, Albrecht became an agent at International Creative Management (ICM), representing Billy Crystal, Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and Eddie Murphy, among others. In 1985, he joined HBO as the West Coast senior vice president for original programming.

  At that time, HBO’s center of gravity was still very much its New York City headquarters—and it would remain so as long as Fuchs, a volcanic figure in his own right (Esquire once dubbed him “the most potent, feared and hated man in Hollywood”), was in power. “I think there was an ingrained suspicion from a lot of the New York folks to the people in L.A.: ‘Those Hollywood people,’” said Albrecht, who spent the first half of the 1990s developing projects that HBO produced for other outlets, Ray Romano’s sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond the most successful among them.

  It was frustrating, too, to those in the network’s fledgling original series department, which Albrecht oversaw. “You were always struggling to make the case that this was the way to keep subscribers,” said Susie Fitzgerald, who worked there at the time. “In order to eke out money, we were saying, ‘We need continuing characters for the audience to fall in love with, so when they move or something, they don’t just disconnect.’”