Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (25 page)

He called Ryan and said, “We’re going to make it.”

“What do you mean?” Ryan said.

“We’ll make it.”

Ryan began to form the opinion that a friend was playing a prank on him. “Who is this?” he asked. And then: “
That
script?”

“We’re going to make
your
script.”

Reilly did worry whether the pilot’s ending was a step too far.
The Sopranos
“College” episode may have aired two years earlier, but this was asking the audience to accept something of a different magnitude: a protagonist murdering a fellow police officer in cold blood. More important, it was asking advertisers to place their products next to the protagonist doing so.

“You’ve got to realize, this is what we’re going forward with,
forever
,” a worried Reilly told Liguori. “This is a guy who killed his partner. This is going to live forever.”

Liguori played the Bronx card. He pointed out that, as in “College,” the victim was a snitch. “I said, ‘Kevin, you’re from Port Washington’”—on Long Island’s affluent north shore—“‘I’m from the Bronx. In the Bronx, rats lose. And I think there are more people out there with the mind-set of the Bronx than of Port Washington.’”

• • •

T
he pilot was shot fast and cheap, under the supervision of Scott Brazil, whom Reilly had brought in to assist and mentor the novice Ryan. Brazil was a veteran of network fare good and bad, going all the way back to
Hill Street Blues
.
Clark Johnson was hired to direct and instituted a spontaneous run-and-gun style, shooting in Super 16 mm and relying heavily on handheld camera work and Steadicam. Spotting a pack of stray dogs near the location of one scene, he grabbed a piece of salami off the craft services table and tossed it into the frame. “Shoot the dog! Shoot the fucking dog!” he yelled as the strays came running. “Shoot the dog” became on-set shorthand for a style that came to define the show for the length of its run. In the third season, writer Charles “Chic” Eglee was shocked to show up on set and see its Emmy-nominated star, Michael Chiklis, shooting a scene in which he plunged into real-life East L.A. traffic, a Steadicam operator in dogged pursuit.

“It was very much a ‘knock the bullshit off of it’ attitude that we had to shooting. There was a sheen to a lot of shows that we didn’t want,” said Ryan. “I would always talk to the directors about that: ‘Go for the most truthful moment.’ There are lots of shows where if you don’t get certain shots of coverage, they’ll fire you. One of the first things I’d say is, ‘I’m not going to get upset if there’s some piece of coverage we don’t have, as long as the moment feels real.’”

Chiklis had hardly been the obvious choice to play Mackey. He was well-known to TV audiences as the genial dad/cop of
The Commish
, a network show that went a long way toward making
Nash Bridges
look edgy. Nevertheless, he and his wife were friendly with Ryan and his wife, and he had read the pilot. “If this gets made,” he told Ryan, “I want to play that role.”

Ryan was dubious, as was Liguori. “All Kevin and I were thinking was, ‘The fat guy from
The Commish
is
not
this guy,” Liguori said. “But he kept calling. I said, ‘Michael, you’re a star. I’m not going to insult you by asking you to come in and audition.’ Meaning, I guess, ‘I don’t want to have to tell you no.’” Chiklis’s own agents were in agreement, for different reasons. “The agencies were not being supportive at all,” said Ryan. “They certainly didn’t view it as an opportunity. We had tons of actors who either wouldn’t consider it for a moment or took the position, ‘If you want to offer me the role, maybe I’ll think about it.’”

Chiklis, though, could not be dissuaded. An audition was finally arranged in FX’s green-wallpapered conference room. On his way in, Liguori passed a bald, buff guy in a skintight black T-shirt. “Where’s Chiklis?” he asked the room. “You just passed him,” was the answer. The actor came in, gnawing on a mouthful of Nicorette, and proceeded to blow the room away.

“He scared the crap out of all of us,” was how Liguori remembered it. “He leaves and there’s no oxygen left in the room. No one’s saying anything. Finally, I break the ice and I go, ‘I don’t think he just won the role, I think he
is
the role.’ The only question left was whether we were going to have the balls to put the future of this show in the hands of a guy known for comedy.”

The rest of the cast came together in almost as guerrilla a style as the shooting. Johnson had worked with the actress CCH Pounder on his first movie and pushed for the black detective, Charles, to become “Claudette” instead. For her partner, Ryan tapped one of his best friends, Jay Karnes, whom he had met at a college playwriting retreat. With the main characters cast, there was almost no money left to secure actors long-term, in case the show actually went to series. So Ryan dipped even deeper into his personal Rolodex. He persuaded another friend, Dave Rees Snell, to work for extra’s wages, $85 per day, with the promise that he’d get more lines in later episodes. Snell’s character, Ronnie Gardocki, went on to be an enigmatic central figure for seasons to come. For Mackey’s wife, meanwhile, Ryan turned to his own wife, Cathy. “I know I can get
you
back,” he told her.

The most spectacular casting story, however, involved a forgettable role and an actor who didn’t win it. The part was for a young dealer who taunts Mackey that he’s too late to catch him with drugs. Mackey chases him, knocks him down, pulls down his pants to reveal a bag taped to his crotch, and delivers the line: “Too late, huh?” Clark Johnson described the audition tape:

The kid comes in, stands at the mark. The casting associate says, ‘Okay. State your name. Are you ready to go? Whenever you’re ready.’ And all of a sudden the kid takes off running! You can hear his footsteps receding down the hall. She’s in there by herself, going, ‘What the fuck?’ She starts to go toward the door and you hear the kid run back in. The kid runs back to his mark. He punches himself in the stomach. He pulls his
own
pants down, and he’s got no underwear. There’s his dick hanging there. He yanks the drugs from his crotch. And then he says Chiklis’s line: ‘Too late, huh?’”

Johnson paused, grinning, for the kicker.

“And then he stands there, smiling, and goes, ‘Scene.’”

Once the pilot was shot, a screening for Chernin was arranged. For Reilly, it was a flashback to showing
The Sopranos
to Chris Albrecht. “The reaction was just silence. You thought, ‘Okay. . . .’” After some consideration, Chernin gave the go-ahead. “I don’t think it’s going to work,” he said. “But go for it.”

The troops inside FX’s offices were more fired up. Only weeks before, twenty-four-year-old Jeremy Elice had taken a temp job in the public relations department, thinking he’d work for a brief spell and then return to New York, where he was interviewing for a position in features producer Scott Rudin’s office. One night, the head of the department, John Solberg, sent him home with a VHS copy of the pilot. “I just thought, ‘They can’t do this.’ I didn’t know much about the place, but one thing I did know was that they had advertisers,” he said.

“Hell, yeah, we’re putting this on fucking TV!” cackled Solberg, a large, excitable Texan, when Elice approached him the next day. “We’re gonna shove it up HBO’s ass!” But where was the good guy? Elice wanted to know. “He
is
the good guy!” Solberg hooted.

Elice called Rudin’s office and withdrew his name from the job search. (“Can you spell that?” the features people asked when he told them where he was going. “F,” Elice explained patiently, “X.”) A few years later, he would be a key part of bringing
Breaking Bad
to the air.

It remained, crucially, for Reilly and Liguori to get advertisers on board. The men flew to New York to host a screening. Before it started, Liguori tried to prepare the audience. “I want to show you a show that I think is going to represent where FX is going, and I want to talk to you about it,” he said. “But while you’re watching this, think of one thing. If you could put an ad in
The Sopranos
, would you do it?”

“The room was stone silent when the lights came up,” said Reilly. “People’s faces were like peeled back. A couple of guys slinked out the back door, looking at their shoes.”

“How many of you liked the show?” Liguori asked those who remained. Most hands went up. Liguori nodded and asked the more important question. How many would buy advertising for their clients during the program? Every hand went down.

“I said, ‘Guys, I could bring you this kind of programming,’” Liguori recalled. “‘You think it’s good. I think it’s great. But I can’t put this on unless I have you. I would expect 95 percent of your clients would never come within a hundred miles of this, but there’s 5 percent that will. Think about that 5 percent. Video game companies. Beer companies. Fashion companies. Guy-type things. Just please support the show.’ And that’s what they did.”

One more major hurdle remained.
The Shield
was officially green-lighted on August 30, 2001. Had the powers that be waited another twelve days, it’s likely the show would never have gone forward. Even then, in the aftermath of September 11, there was enormous doubt about whether they could proceed. All the conviction that the network had about people’s willingness to accept the show was thrown into question anew. This was a time, the common wisdom went, when the public would be craving hero-heroes, not antiheroes—and certainly not a
cop
antihero.

What became clear, once
The Shield
debuted exactly six months and a day after the terrorist attacks, was that it now resonated in ways that its creators could never have anticipated. The moral heart of the show was the question of to what degree Mackey’s behavior was justified by the results he got. The Farm, his character would argue, was in a state of war, demanding extraordinary measures. As Claudette put it in the pilot, after the captain has compared Mackey to Al Capone:

Al Capone made money by giving people what they wanted. What people want these days is to make it to their cars without getting mugged. Come home from work and see their stereo is still there. Hear about some murder in the barrio, find out the next day the police caught the guy. If having all those things means some cop roughed up some nigger or some spic in the ghetto . . . well, as far as most people are concerned, it’s don’t ask, don’t tell.

In Ryan’s original conception
,
the question of exactly what behavior one might be willing to tolerate in the name of security was focused on Aceveda, whom he envisioned struggling with how much he should or should not lean on Mackey to get what he wanted. Making Mackey himself the main character posed a more direct and discomfiting challenge to an audience that would soon be grappling with myriad real-life versions of the same quandary, from Guantánamo Bay to Abu Ghraib to domestic surveillance.

Still, as the debut approached, Liguori had little idea what to expect of the show on which he may well have bet his network presidency. The night before, he called a company-wide meeting and spoke passionately about how proud they should be about the risky work they had done together, regardless of what the ratings turned out to be. Privately, he was praying to at least double the network’s baseline prime-time rating of .8. A 1, he figured, would represent a raging success.

“The ratings come in at four forty-five a.m. on the West Coast. My home phone was ringing. At that point I still had a pager and it was going off. My cell phone was ringing. I knew it was the rating, one way or the other, but I didn’t want to give the impression that it was all about the rating for me. I needed to walk the walk,” he said. Finally, he arrived at the office, deliberately late. Every person at the network was waiting. He checked the number: it was 4.1, the highest-rated basic cable debut of all time.

“Soon people started writing, ‘This is HBO, but free,’ and we were like, ‘Holy shit. They’re putting it in the reviews now!’” said Reilly.

That fall,
The Shield
was nominated for three Emmys—Chiklis for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and Ryan and Johnson for writing and directing the pilot. Liguori and Reilly were so convinced that there was no chance of winning that they didn’t buy tickets for the traditional postceremony Governor’s Ball. “They were like $2,000 apiece,” said Reilly. “We went to the show, but, fuck it, we’ll go out after and get drunk. We’re not paying $4,000 to eat bad breadsticks at the Governor’s Ball.”

When Chiklis unexpectedly won—beating out the two leads of
Six Feet Under
, Martin Sheen of
The West Wing
, and Kiefer Sutherland as another compromised, post-9/11 cop in
24—
the FX team was stuck on the outside, trying to crash. “It was me and Chiklis, trying to scam our way in,” Reilly said. “He got busted. They stopped him at the door. He’s just too guilty looking.”

• • •

T
he Shield
debuted three months before
The Wire
. (This was also the era of
The Job
,
The Unit
,
The District
,
The Practice
,
and others; “People love articles,” Liguori said.) The proximity, name similarity, and broad overlap of subject matter guaranteed a certain amount of comparison between the two shows, at least among a passionate fan base with a new medium—the Internet—on which to express their loyalties. “It was the same old argument: ‘I love the Beatles, so the Rolling Stones have to suck,’” Ryan said. Fans of
The Shield
complained about how boring and slow-moving HBO’s show
was, while
The Wire
partisans attacked
The Shield
for being unrealistic.

Both assessments suited each show’s creators just fine. Ed Burns was sent a screener of
The Shield
pilot: “In the first half hour, the guy yelled at his superior officer in the squad room, which you never do. Even
I
wouldn’t do that. Then he has this hooker who’s an informant and he gives her dope and then money so she can buy something for her baby. And then he killed a cop. So I said, ‘We don’t have to worry. This show is going nowhere.’”