Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (9 page)

Because HBO had no real prime-time schedule and nobody was waiting on the show’s debut, Chase and team had the luxury of filming, editing, and finalizing all thirteen episodes long before a single one aired. At the conclusion of shooting, in November, Chase was his usual self. “Jim, Edie, all of us were like, ‘This was fun. It was an interesting challenge. We enjoyed ourselves.’ Which of course meant that we weren’t going to be able to continue, because TV is never about enjoying yourself.”

As the January premiere approached, there were positive rumblings from critics and a handful of private screenings, but nobody knew what to expect. “We were really living in a bubble: It was a pilot that had been passed on. Cast with unknowns and shooting in New Jersey. For HBO. Who was paying attention?” Fitzgerald said.

On January 10, while a snowstorm rolled up the East Coast,
The Sopranos
made its debut.

And then, as one cast member would later put it, “all hell broke loose.”

Difficult Men

T
he opening theme of
The Sopranos
was a remix of a 1997 song by a mostly unknown, America-obsessed band from Brixton, London, called Alabama 3—or, in the United States, A3, to avoid legal complications involving the band Alabama. At first listen, it seemed an odd, almost perverse choice for a show so steeped in its particular social world—even less “Italian” and “Jersey” than David Chase’s other top choice of song, Elvis Costello’s “Complicated Shadows.” But Chase, early on, was shy of being too straightforward with his musical choices; it would be a while before he considered Springsteen or Sinatra. And the discordant, driving “Woke Up This Morning” quickly became inseparable from the show, so intrinsic to its effect that it was soon unclear whether it had been the perfect choice all along or had simply been transformed by the material it introduced.

In any event, the most important song in
The Sopranos
pilot played not over the main title, but in the closing credits: Nick Lowe’s “The Beast in Me.” It could be the theme song for the entire Third Golden Age.

The beast in me

Is caged b
y
frail and fragile bonds

Restless b
y
day

And b
y
night, rants and rages at the stars

God help the beast in me

Men alternately setting loose and struggling to cage their wildest natures has always been the great American story, the one found in whatever happens to be the ascendant medium at the time. Our favorite genres—the western; the gangster saga; the lonesome but dogged private eye operating outside the comforts of normal, domestic life; the superhero with his double identities—have all been literalizations of that inner struggle, just as Huckleberry Finn striking out for the territories was, or Ishmael taking to the sea.

It should have been no surprise, then, that the Third Golden Age of TV began by revisiting those genres. The same had been true of sixties and seventies cinema, with its retelling of the flight to the frontier (
Easy Rider
), the detective story (
The Long Goodbye
), the western (
The Wild Bunch
,
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
), and so on. Above all, no genre suited the baby boomers’ dueling impulses of attraction and guilt toward American capitalism as well as the Mob drama. The notion that the American dream might at its core be a criminal enterprise lay at the center of the era’s signature works, from
Bonnie and Clyde
and
Chinatown
to
The Godfather
and
Mean Streets
.

The Sopranos
yoked that story to one of postwar literature’s most potent tropes: horror of the suburbs, which in novels from Richard Yates’s
Revolutionary Road
to Joseph Heller’s
Something Happened
to John Updike’s Rabbit series
had come to represent everything crushing and confining to man’s essential nature. In his self-absorption, his horniness, his alternating cruelty and regret, his gnawing unease, Tony was, give or take Prozac and one or two murders, a direct descendant of Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom. In other words, the American Everyman. (He was also a twisted version of yet another archetype, the “TV dad”; as Chase said, “It was
Father Knows Best
 . . . how to kill people.”)

Out of the two traditions came a very modern, very relatable hybrid: an old-school man—blunt, physical, taking whatever he wanted, a seductive if uncomfortable fantasy for men and women alike—in a postfeminist world.
Rescue Me
’s Tommy Gavin and
The Shield
’s
Vic Mackey were versions of the same thing: men in the most macho of professions—fireman and policeman—undone by women the moment they stepped off duty. And Don Draper, of course, was swept up, head-on, in the revolution of gender roles and expectations.

“Here’s a guy with all that power, yet completely emasculated by his mom and wife,” FX executive, and later head of Fox Broadcasting, Peter Liguori said of Tony. “Guys watched and thought, ‘I’d like to be the boss, I’d like to have big balls. I’d like to make all the calls and do things according to my rules.’ But also, ‘Man, he’s a lot like me, because even when I am the boss, the second I go home, I’m Hazel.’”

For all that, Tony was also precisely the kind of character that conventional wisdom had long held viewers might embrace in the safety of a movie theater, or in the pages of a book, but would reject if he appeared on-screen in their own homes. If that was ever true, what had changed?

In part, by the late 1990s those traditional boundaries between art consumed outside and inside the home had long since started to blur, thanks to cable, video games, home video, and the nascent Internet. This process would vastly accelerate over the next ten years, until children coming to media consciousness in 2012 would make no meaningful distinction between “movie,” “TV,” “YouTube,” “podcast,” and so on.

At the same time, shifting economics revealed that maybe it had always been advertisers, rather than audiences, who were so averse to difficult characters—a throwback to the time when individual advertisers produced and sponsored their own shows and exercised a chilling effect on the shows’ content. Generally, that meant rejecting anything that threatened too directly the warm feelings and consumerist status quo that viewers would carry over into the commercial break.

HBO, of course, had no such sponsors to worry about. Its concern was building the sense that a culturally aware person could not afford not to have a subscription, even if he or she watched only an hour per week. And basic cable was quick to catch up, for reasons more similar than immediately apparent. Advertising, to which ratings matter so much, is only one of two revenue streams vital to a basic cable network’s bottom line. The other comes from carriage fees, which are what cable operators (Time Warner, Cablevision, Cox) pay for the right to include the network in its cable packages. Even as operators expanded to thousands of stations, the sheer number of networks fighting for space introduced a fear more pressing than the hoary Grendel of low ratings—being dropped and disappearing altogether.

John Landgraf, who became president of FX Entertainment in 2004, explained the value of having original shows like
The Shield
and
Rescue Me
: “There is a group of consumers out there, in the tens of millions”—way more than watch any individual FX show—“that would really be bothered if they couldn’t get FX. They would either change cable providers or bitch to their cable provider. I’m not sure that would happen if all we had was
Two and a Half Men
repeats and a really good lineup of Hollywood movies.”

With success also comes leverage, in particular for the ability to “bundle” a media company’s other stations alongside a popular one. So, for instance, AMC Networks (pointedly renamed that, from Rainbow Media, after the success of AMC’s original programming) could insist that a carrier take on IFC, Sundance Channel, and WE tv if it wanted also to show
Mad Men
and
Breaking Bad
. And when the satellite provider Dish Network refused, it could wage a public relations war, appealing directly to subscribers.

At the same time, the era in which Stephen J. Cannell could have a show canceled while pulling a 32 share—that is, over a third of the entire viewing audience (
Black Sheep Squadron
,
in 1978)—was obviously long gone. In its place was a collection of niches that could be targeted more directly. In magazines,
The
New Yorker
versus
Parade
is a good analogy: the former may have thirty million
fewer subscribers than the latter, but theirs are the readers a certain type of lucrative advertiser most wants to reach.

Somewhere, of course, the vectors meet; a show needs viewers. But for all the reasons above, raw ratings ceased to be the most sacred of all TV metrics. They were replaced by something far less quantifiable: Brand. Buzz. David Milch, who had created an early version of TV’s difficult man in Detective Andy Sipowicz of
NYPD Blue
and would go on to expand the type in
Deadwood
, saw in this shift nothing less than a radical creative liberation.

“For the first twenty-five years of television, commercials were the church—which is to say, you couldn’t offend the sponsor. Therefore, certain values had to be underscored in the subject matter.” The new realities of cable, he went on, stripped away that stricture, leaving a world ripe for exploring “the antiversions of all forms,” a place where “the Story” was free to “declare itself on its own terms, with no preexisting expectations.”

“All the conventions have been hollowed out and revealed as barren,” he said. “In fact, the expectations are there to be deconstructed.”

• • •

A
nd so came the antiheroes. Long before David Simon proposed that
The Wire
would document “an America at every level at war with itself” or
The Shield
spent an entire season playing out an L.A. allegory of the Iraq War, it was clear that the cultural climate of the 2000s would be propitious for such characters. America, as
The Sopranos
debuted, was well on its way to becoming a bitterly divided country. Just how divided would become vividly clear in the 2000 presidential election. After it, Americans on the losing side were left groping to come to terms with the Beast lurking in their own body politic and—as the decade rolled on with two wars, secret prisons, torture scandals, and more—with what things it might be doing in their name.

That side happened to track very closely with the viewership of networks like AMC, FX, and HBO: coastal, liberal, educated, “blue state.” And what the Third Golden Age brought them was a humanized red state: cops, firemen, Mormons, even Nixon-supporting Don Draper and, crime of all crimes, nonvoting Jimmy McNulty. This was different from previous “working-class” shows, such as
Roseanne,
pitched at attracting a large audience who related to its financially struggling characters, or even
All in the Family,
which invited each side to laugh equally at the other. This was the ascendant Right being presented to the disempowered Left—as if to reassure it that those in charge were still recognizably human.

“A show like
The Sopranos
has a soothing quality because ultimately there’s an unspoken assumption behind it that even the most monstrous people are haunted by the same concerns we’re haunted by,” said Craig Wright, a playwright who wrote for
Six Feet Under
and others. Such, he went on, has always been the case during conservative pendulum swings: the Left articulates a critique through the arts. “But the funny part is that masked by, or nested within, that critique is a kind of helpless eroticization of the power of the Right. They’re still in love with Big Daddy, even though they hate him.”

That was certainly true for the women who made Tony Soprano an unlikely sex symbol—and for the men who found him no less seductive. Wish fulfillment has always been at the queasy heart of the mobster genre, the longing for a life outside the bounds of convention, mingled with the conflicted desire to see the perpetrator punished for the same transgression. So it was for the fictional men of the straight world on
The Sopranos
, who were
drawn to Tony’s flame with consistently disastrous results. (Davey Scatino loses his sporting goods store after joining the gang’s poker game; Artie Bucco, the longest-standing member of the outside-looking-in crowd, suffers a never-ending series of painful humiliations.) Likewise for viewers, for whom a life of taking, killing, and sleeping with whomever and whatever one wants had an undeniable, if conflict-laden, appeal.

• • •

A
nd likewise, most importantly, for TV’s creators themselves. It should come as no surprise that the job of showrunner—with its power to summon worlds to life, move characters around the universe, commit unspeakable acts, at least by proxy—attracts men not totally unfamiliar with the most primitive impulses of the characters they create.

Certainly David Chase understood. “When I watch Mob movies, part of me is like, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!’” he said, quoting the proto-punk band MC5.

Or, more to the point, there was the day the writer Todd Kessler found himself alone with Chase in the Silvercup writers’ offices. The showrunner had been late for a meeting to stitch together the two men’s halves of the final episode of the second season, “Funhouse.” Now, he distractedly sat down across from Kessler and announced that he’d had an epiphany.

“‘Is it something you want to talk about?’ I asked. We were sitting across a table that was probably two and a half feet wide,” Kessler said. “He said, ‘Well . . . I realized . . . that I’ll never be truly happy in life . . . until I kill a man.’ And then he leaned across the table and said, ‘Not just kill a man’—and he raised his hands right on either side of my head—‘but
with my bare hands
.’”

The two sat there silently for a long moment. And then Chase broke the spell. “I’m going to get a coffee,” he said, getting up from the table. “You want a coffee?”

• • •

I
n a sense, of course, Chase had already done exactly what he said he needed to do.

If there was a single moment that signaled the new TV reality, it came only a handful of weeks after
The Sopranos
debuted. By that time, audiences had already begun to feel affection for this new, unusual hero. True, they had seen him involved in beating a man up; plotting insurance fraud, extortion, and arson; and committing adultery. On the other hand, he seemed to come by such behavior honestly, what with the crazy mother. And if you were accustomed to traditional TV narratives, there were signs that this might be a straightforward one about a man reforming himself through therapy and the love of his family. After all, the first episode began with what could have been a saint’s conversionary vision of the beauty and vulnerability of the world, contained in a flock of baby ducks. It was plausible, too, given the slightly exaggerated cinematography and design of the first few episodes, not to mention the repartee between Paulie Walnuts, Silvio, and the other gangsters, that the show would ultimately turn out to be a comedy more than anything else. Chase often said, quite seriously, that he was never 100 percent sure that wasn’t true.