Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Omar Little glower from the
cover of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution,” Brett
Martin’s canon-codifying 2013 book about the prestige TV boom of the 2000s. But
as difficult and revolutionary as those fictional antiheroes were, the title
just as well describes their brilliant, gnomic, sometimes cruel creators, such
as David Chase (“The Sopranos”), David Simon (“The Wire”) and Matthew Weiner
(“Mad Men”).
اضافة اعلان
“Difficult Men,” whose 10th-anniversary edition was
published in paperback this summer, is a history of the remarkable moment,
starting nearly 25 years ago, when business imperatives and risk-taking
executives empowered ornery writers with network experience and chips on their
shoulders to create era-defining, artistically lasting programs.
One of the book’s through lines was that these shows tended
to revolve around men who resembled the way their creators saw themselves: as
mavericks taking arms against bureaucratic inertia. It’s a theme that Martin, a
New Orleans-based journalist, said he might deemphasize today in favor of
delving into the depth and richness of the characters.
“The artistic triumph the original shows allowed,” Martin
said this month, “was to create all these real human stories and specific,
idiosyncratic characters — which is more important than the easy antihero
formulation.”
The past decade has seen a societal reckoning with
misconduct in the culture industries, including television. Some of the
showrunner behavior Martin chronicled in his book — icing out disfavored
writers, halting entire productions for petty personal whims, throwing tantrums
— looks different now.
In a new preface for the anniversary edition, Martin says
that if he were writing “Difficult Men” now, he would focus more on “the knotty
question of how the same men who provided, in many ways, the most astute
critiques of toxic male power that mainstream culture had ever seen could
nevertheless end up confirming and recapitulating precisely the same dynamics
in their own workplaces.”
Even in 2013, Martin held up counterexamples like
showrunners Alan Ball (“Six Feet Under”) and Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”),
who ran artistically successful programs while being, by all accounts, nice
guys and good bosses.
In other respects, 2013 turned out to be a convenient year
for a book about this Golden Age of television. It was the year “Breaking Bad”
ended and James Gandolfini, the “Sopranos” star, died. And it was the year that
“House of Cards,” the first original series commissioned by Netflix, debuted.
In a phone interview, Martin discussed why the shows he wrote about still hold
up and how the emergence of streaming has affected prestige TV. These are
edited excerpts from the conversation.
Was there one show that provoked you to write the book?
It was “The Sopranos,” in both an abstract and a literal
sense. I had been hired to write the official coffee table companion during the
final season. I maybe outstayed my welcome, treated it like a real reporting
job, was there for quite a long time and got a chance to peek behind the
scenes. It was a revelation to me: the size of the operation, the ambition, the
way people talked about their work — the sense of something very big being
made. The number of times I had to explain what a showrunner was back then is,
in and of itself, an indicator of what an alien world that was.
It’s such a funny term.
It just occurs to me what kind of a technical term
“showrunner” is, how unromantic. It really is something that, like, the
Teamsters would come up with. It’s so literal and so nonartistic: You keep
things running. The term betrays the kind of factory mentality that applied to
television at the time.
Did you think of yourself as establishing a canon?
It was very obvious
what at least three of the four main shows that I was going to write about
were, and most of the peripheral ones as well. In my original proposal, the
fourth show was, actually, “Rescue Me” — which is a show whose first few
seasons had been perhaps unfairly forgotten but felt very much in keeping with
these other shows. It felt extremely daring in being one of the first shows
where 9/11 was being treated in a fully rounded way. My first editor pushed me
to include “Battlestar Galactica,” but it just really wasn’t my bag. And then
“Breaking Bad” asserted itself as the book was being written and became very
obviously the ending place. There were the other HBO shows, and “The Shield”
was an important step as well, but there weren’t many examples I left out.
Have any of the shows in the book not stood up as much as
you expected?
Quite the opposite: The shows you think might have been
dated have proven riveting in ways they maybe weren’t even when they were on.
The America of Tony Soprano, the America of Walter White, and very much the
America of “The Wire” has proved itself to be the dominant America in the past
20 years. “The Sopranos” became this huge pandemic rewatch, and I think it’s
because it’s so recognizable: The themes — the rot at the center of America,
the grift of American life, the anxiety Tony Soprano has — are all super
familiar to us now.
Younger generations have adopted “The Sopranos”; it
appears in countless memes.
It’s great entertainment. It had to be: It had to resemble
entertaining network television in many ways. It was still operating as a
Trojan horse. It had to be funny and human, and it had to be consumable because
the high-art part, the ambition part, was something nobody was looking for.
How did the men you wrote about respond to your book?
I never heard a word from any of them except for Vince
Gilligan, who wrote me a beautiful blurb on the back of the new edition. Not
surprisingly, because the book ends making the point that one doesn’t have to
be that difficult to create these wonderful shows.
Few would be interested in defending some of the behavior
you document. But does the fact that it happened during the creation of these
really great series make any of it easier to accept?
It’s hard for me to see how a lack of empathy for people who
work for you is a necessary part of the creative process. I do think people’s
feelings could get hurt in a very intense workplace, and I don’t think every
hurt feeling is avoidable. But I do think one can maintain a basic level of
decency — let alone avoid using your power destructively — and still create
quality work. I believe it because I’ve seen the shows that prove it, and
because I’m optimistic.
There are female characters and characters of color in
these shows, but the protagonists and the creators behind them are all white
men. Does that taint the legacy of that era?
It wasn’t a huge surprise that white men writing about white
men dominated the first phase of this new world. But the door had been opened.
“Orange Is the New Black” came out something like three weeks after my book.
“Transparent” was soon after as well. What came after delivered on the promise,
which is that all these other kinds of stories were going to be able to be
told, and all these other kinds of voices were going to be empowered. “Atlanta”
and “Reservation Dogs” are other deliveries on that promise.
What effect did the rise of streaming platforms, with
their hundreds of millions of subscribers, have on Hollywood’s appetite for
ambitious TV?
When the book was published, it was more important (to the
producers of these early prestige series) to stand out and find the right kinds
of viewers than to have the most. It made sense that that attitude moved from
subscription cable to basic — in my book, it’s HBO to FX and AMC — and
streaming seemed it would be another step in that. But it does seem as though
every piece that I identified as being crucial to the invention of this new TV
is now a flashpoint in the writers’ strike: shorter seasons, writer-producers,
writers’ rooms. And it’s depressing. With all the stuff that looked great, the
streamers saw there were opportunities for cost savings.
Are there ways streaming made TV better for viewers?
Oh, my God. Look how much work we got! So much that I can’t
keep up — that I feel a constant sense of anxiety about missing things. Look
how many new voices we got. That’s been the trade-off.
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