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

by Brett Martin

  Wright, on his first TV job after a successful career in Minneapolis, was equally taken with the atmosphere: “I had thought Hollywood was just highly competitive and deeply venal, and that everybody was a jerk,” he said. “But at Six Feet Under, I found exactly the opposite. Everybody was so open and friendly, I never laughed more in my life than I laughed that first day.”

  Ball maintained final word on all design and production decisions, but he tended to leave such details to his writer-producers. “I understand being passionate about your work, but I’m not a person who wants to control every element. I don’t feel like I have to write every word. Nothing makes me happier than watching a show come together in a way that surprises me. Or getting a script where I don’t have to do anything to it. I want this to be fun,” he said, then added. “Maybe I’m just lazier than most people.”

  For much of its five-season run, Six Feet Under’s writers’ room could lay plausible claim to being the happiest in TV—a marked contrast to many of the rooms that produced the Third Golden Age, which at the very least were tense and competitive. For the final three seasons, the membership of the room remained exactly the same, an almost unheard-of distinction.

  But if Ball wasn’t a despot, he was still the king. And it was possible to get on his bad side. The eleventh episode of Six Feet Under’s first season, “The Trip,” revolved around the death of an infant, depicted in the usual format in the opening credits. One of the writing staff objected, protesting that you couldn’t kill a baby on TV without losing your audience. In its way, it was a “College” moment, one in which the very nature of the show came up against the traditional boundaries of the medium. Ball pressed forward, ignoring the objection. At the end of the season, he fired the writer.

  As the show moved into its later seasons, there was also increasing friction between the show’s producers and its stars, Krause and Griffiths. It’s difficult for actors to live for years on end in the head of any character, much less, as James Gandolfini had amply demonstrated, one who keeps making the same mistakes season after season.

  “To be trapped in a role week after week, for multiple years, when you don’t know how long it’s going to go on . . . it takes its toll. Especially for a committed actor who is emotionally invested, who wants to feel the pain the character is feeling,” said Poul. “So, on any long-running show, it’s almost a guessing game: Who’s going to be the problem?”

  In this case, the strains of being on her first series, and so far from her home in Australia, weighed heavily on Griffiths, as did the difficulty of following Brenda on her DSJ. Griffiths began demanding private rehearsals before each of her scenes, while the rest of the production waited on expensive hold. Equally troubling, she would often expend herself emotionally in these run-throughs, nailing the scene in private but leaving little for when the cameras were actually rolling.

  Krause had a more common but less forgivable complex. As the years of playing Nate wore on, the lines between him and his character appeared, to many observers, to blur. He complained about Nate’s being placed in unflattering situations or appearing unlikable. Sometimes the issue would be petty—like refusing to wear an unflattering hairpiece in a flashback scene—but other times they got to the heart of what distinguished the show. As Ball put it, “Like Nate himself, I think he wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be liked.”

  • • •

  Nate has good intentions, but he’s an amateur jerk. He’s a selfish narcissist. And the tragedy is that he never transcends that. He never grows up,” Ball said.

  That inability is another defining theme of TV’s Golden Age. If man’s battle with his inner demons defined The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and their descendants, they also drew a crucial dose of their realism from the tenacity of that battle—the way their characters stubbornly refused to change in any substantive way, despite constantly resolving to do so. As Nick Lowe warned:

  Sometimes it tries to kid me

  That it’s just a teddy bear

  Or even somehow managed to vanish in the air

  And that is when I must beware

  Of the beast in me . . .

  It’s no coincidence that addiction is one of the major tropes of the Third Golden Age. Likewise psychotherapy, with its looping fits and starts of progress and regression. Recidivism and failure stalked these shows: Tony Soprano searches for something to fill the gnawing void he feels; he fails to find it. Jimmy McNulty swears off the twin compulsions of booze and police work; he goes back to both, while the rest of The Wire’s most zealous reformers find themselves corrupted. The specter of Don Draper’s past infidelities comes to him in a fever dream, in the person of an old conquest. And though he literally chokes the Beast to death, we, and he, know she will be back.

  Here again, what may have been a vague millennial undercurrent when The Sopranos debuted was given concrete form in the zeitgeist just a few years later. There have been few pronouncements more widely repeated and less genuinely experienced than “Everything changed” after 9/11.

  “‘I’m going to be different. I’m so lucky to be alive. I’m going to value things more, do things differently. . . .’ That’s what it was all about,” said Chase of the period immediately following the terrorist attacks. “But then it sort of faded away.” Or as Tony Soprano morosely put it, “Every day is a gift. It’s just . . . does it have to be a pair of socks?”

  That Chase was temperamentally suited to this gloomy view of human progress made him the perfect avatar of the kinds of stories Americans responded to in those years. But the formal and commercial demands of TV itself also had a hand in guaranteeing that it was the medium through which they should be told. After all, the goal of a TV show, unlike that of a movie or novel, no matter how ambiguous, is to never end. One way to address that basic economic mandate is to create a world in which there is no forward progress or story arc at all, just a series of discrete, repetitive episodes—in other words, the procedural. But if you’re interested in telling an ongoing story while remaining true to your own sense of the world, it helps for that worldview to be of an endless series of variations in which people repeatedly play out the same patterns of behavior, exhibiting only the most incremental signs of real change or progress.

  In this regard, the common cocktail party quip “You know, The Sopranos [or some other show] is just a soap opera” is absolutely correct—if you ignore such incidentals as realism, intelligence, emotional acuity, humor, cinematography, production values, actors who have memorized lines, outdoor locations, and so on.

  Rescue Me poked fun at its own soap operatic tendencies in a season four scene in which Denis Leary’s Tommy Gavin and his on-again-off-again wife, Janet, decide to visit a marriage counselor. The poor therapist asks for a recent family history:

  Janet: So . . . we split up and then he rented the place across the street from us so he could be near the kids and also to keep an eye on me to see who I was dating.

  Tommy: You should have seen that group of guys—that guy Roger.

  Janet: Yeah, who swore you tried to burn his face off on your stove.

  Tommy: I don’t even cook! So, she takes the kids, the furniture, the money, everything, goes to Ohio. I tracked her down.

  Janet: Yes, and I came back and then he decided to start dating the widow of his cousin who died in 9/11. And then she got pregnant.

  Tommy: Okay, I didn’t decide, it just happened, okay? She either had a miscarriage or an abortion, I don’t know which. Anyway, she didn’t have the baby, but then she got pregnant because she was sleeping with my brother, but I’m pretty sure that’s my baby because we were having an affair while she was having an affair with my now dead brother. . . .

  Janet: Then our son was killed by a drunk driver. . . .

  Tommy: Who my uncle then shot. You might have read about that. It was in the papers and stuff. And then there was the “rape.” . . .

 
Janet: So we’ve been through a lot. . . .

  Tommy: But you know, we feel like there’s still some passion left.

  Janet: So, what do you think?

  What the therapist thinks, of course, is that somebody’s playing a prank on him.

  But births, deaths, illnesses, fights, betrayals, rapprochements, new jobs, new houses, people falling out of view, new people arriving, small heartaches, small joys, none of them lasting very long before the next thing is suddenly upon us—that’s what our lives are actually made of. More so, anyway, than discrete, cathartic episodes with tidy endings.

  “Heroes are much better suited for the movies,” Alan Ball said. “I’m more interested in real people. And real people are fucked up.”

  It’s worth noting, anyway, that soap opera is also the only TV genre to exist uninterrupted for the entire life of the medium.

  • • •

  Six Feet Under never had a season as perfectly constructed as its first, but it was an important chapter in the transformation of television. Nobody watching it could fail to see in it a vivid illustration of how much more of human life could be dissected over the course of thirteen or twenty-six or fifty-two open-ended hours, rather than a mere two-hour stretch freighted with the need for easy answers and tidy resolution; indeed, there could be no better counterexample to choose than American Beauty itself, which would come to seem facile and reductive next to its younger television sibling. For the next decade, when a particular type of film wanted to signify that it was serious, un-Hollywood, concerned with the quirky, dark corners of family life—Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, The Descendants, to name just a few—it would do its level best to look like one thing, and that was Six Feet Under.

  Ball would go on to become HBO’s savior. After a period in which it lost ground to basic cable and a string of unremarkable shows, his next series, True Blood, drew some of the network’s highest ratings since The Sopranos. Based very loosely on a series of novels by Charlaine Harris, the show was a frothy, sexy vampire drama that piled on twists and supernatural beings like sprinkles on a sundae. It was about as far, superficially, from The Sopranos or Six Feet Under as one could get. Nevertheless, it featured, in the character of Bill Compton, a particular, familiar type of hero: a man (albeit a dead man) trying to get by in the modern world, negotiating relationships, rivalries, and the demands of an undead bureaucracy as elaborate as the living one. Most of all, he would struggle, with varying degrees of success, to overcome his (very literal) bloodlust.

  God help the beast in we.

  Six

  The Arguer

  It was a cold day in December 2009, and the Baltimore Police Department had staged what appeared to be a full-scale invasion of the 1800 block of Frederick Avenue, on the edge of the Western District. Parked on one end of the street was an enormous mobile stage on which was placed a podium, a row of dignitaries’ seats, and a cluster of flags representing the United States, Maryland, Baltimore, and various wings of law enforcement. It was a short block of brick-and-Formstone row houses, two of them vacant, two others painted a bright pink and blue, which, like the ground-floor window displaying a white china pitcher filled with fake flowers, served only to poignantly highlight the barren surroundings.

  In the street in front of the stage was arrayed an army of cops of every conceivable stripe: macho SWAT dudes, motorcycle cops in big boots, DEA guys in windbreakers, young traffic officers—a gallery of badges and medals and insignia as varied and esoteric as hats in Jerusalem. A scrawny tabby cat wove its way unnoticed through a forest of blue pant legs and disappeared into one of the vacant buildings.

  There was an older group in the crowd, greeting one another with particular affection and catching up. The ones still on the force wore black ribbons over their badges; they ribbed one another about having to squeeze into their dress blues. These were veterans of the hardest days of the war on drugs, and they were here to commemorate one of the Baltimore front’s signal casualties. In 1984, Marcellus Ward, known as Marty, was assigned to a DEA task force. The thirty-six-year-old, thirteen-year BPD veteran was working undercover, investigating a twenty-six-year-old heroin dealer named Lascell Simmons. On the night of December 3, he had come to Simmons’s headquarters on Frederick Avenue, a third-floor apartment over a front called Kandy Kitchen, to get Simmons to admit to the killing of another dealer. Under his shirt was a wire. After an hour and a half of conversation, Simmons incriminated himself and Ward gave a signal to his partners listening in a van outside. Then, as the officers advanced up the stairs, something went wrong. When the tape was later played in court, Simmons’s jury could hear a scuffle, shots fired, and finally Ward’s dying breaths. Twenty-five years later, the block was officially being renamed Detective Marty Ward Way.

  The killing had had a devastating ripple effect. For many, it was proof of the intractability of the enemy in the War on Drugs and of the battle’s unwinnability. More immediately, the killing of a cop threw the BPD into disarray. The powers that be wanted high-profile busts to counteract the negative publicity—“drugs on the table”—and no longer had patience for subtler or more penetrating strategies. That included a year-old innovative wiretapping investigation of the drug lord “Little” Melvin Williams that had been spearheaded by an arrogant young cop named Ed Burns.

  Burns was at the memorial service, too, Irish beyond all measure, his once red hair now white, pale face inflamed by the cold. Burns wore a leather jacket and tan pants and stood calmly alone with a small smile on his face, avoided by the other old dogs. Long off the police force and now on hiatus from the television career that had occupied much of his past ten years, he had come in from his home in rural West Virginia.

  He spotted a woman who had been a newly minted prosecutor assigned to work on his wiretap. The two embraced warmly.

  “I remember showing up for work the first day,” she said. “Ed looked at me like, ‘What kind of Twinkies are they hiring now?’ But he was good. I like people who say what they mean, mean what they say, and do what they say they’re going to do. As a prosecutor, that’s all you want.”

  “That and a case,” Burns said with a rueful smile.

  The actual citizens of Frederick Avenue were notably absent, though some watched silently from house windows. The exception was a skinny black man with a puffy face who stood fidgeting on his stoop alongside a friend in a wheelchair. He was making noise, taunting the policemen and complaining about the inconvenience of the ceremony just getting under way. Whenever a cop would head up the street to shut him up, he’d pop into his house and then pop back out again, cuckoo clock style, as soon as the officer retreated.

  Occasionally, the proceedings would be drowned out by passing police sirens. The BPD’s head of the Homicide Unit, Terrence McLarney, who had worked closely with Ward, was absent. He was on the scene of Baltimore’s 218th murder of the year: a teenage girl who had been bludgeoned to death beside her double amputee mother.

  All of this actually happened. In the completely real, flesh-and-blood city of Baltimore. Yet to an outside observer, one who had spent much of the past decade learning about the city and its intricate, interlocking bureaucracies via a fictional HBO show, the details were startlingly, almost giddily, familiar. The confusion was only heightened by some of the names in the crowd: the big detective they called “the Bunk”; another named Jay Landsman, and another named Marvin Sydnor; the Baltimore Sun journalist William Zorzi. The whole scene was, in one word, Simonian.

  And there, in the crowd, was the man himself: David Simon, fifty-six years old, flown up for the day from New Orleans, where he was in the middle of shooting the first season of his new HBO series, Treme. He took a place beside Landsman, who, to make matters more confusing, had lent his name to one character in The Wire while playing another, minor character on-screen. This made him one of the army of men and women across the Baltimore area who opened their mailboxes each month to f
ind envelopes containing royalty checks for their work on the show—sometimes a few pennies, sometimes more than a hundred bucks. The Wire royalty day had become something of a local civic holiday.

  Simon was wearing a baggy black suit over an almost ludicrously ugly purple striped shirt. He stood slightly hunched with his hands grasped rabbinically behind him, chin jutted forward in a gesture of attentive listening. He had covered the Ward killing as a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Sun. Now, the master of ceremonies apologized that the next scheduled speaker, Mayor Sheila Dixon, was unable to attend, and Simon looked up with an expression of majestic bemusement. Two days before, Mayor Dixon had been convicted of an embezzlement scheme involving gift cards.

  After the ceremony, Simon mingled, catching up with Burns and the other vets in front of the onetime Kandy Kitchen. “The thing is, remember what a terrible front it was?” he said. “They had like four bags of potato chips on the shelves.” He gave no impression of having become a famous showrunner in the intervening years, or a multimillionaire, or someone who, in coming months, would have his commonly used descriptor genius given a capital G by the imprimatur of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

  All of which underscored two things: that The Wire and its world took place about as far from Hollywood as it is possible to imagine; and that its story was in many ways about an elaborate, intimate dance between fact and fiction.

  • • •

  There are plenty of points of comparison to be made between the two Davids—Chase and Simon—the two showrunners who defined the potential of the Third Golden Age’s early years. Chase came to the possibilities of this new art form as a creature, however unwilling, of television itself—the consummate industry pro. Simon had more than dipped his toe in television by the time of The Wire, but it was clear from watching him in Baltimore that he was a genuine outsider. Neither suffered a shortage of ego, but where Chase’s could manifest as angry and insecure, Simon was bluff, pugnacious, seemingly without neuroses. Even their faces fit a classic Don Quixote/Sancho Panza, Laurel/Hardy, Bert/Ernie dichotomy: Chase, vertically hawkish and old-world European; Simon, fleshy and horizontal, with the prominent brow and jutting jaw of a brawling Jewish gangster.