We used to turn on the television to see people who were happier, funnier, prettier versions of ourselves — people like Mary Tyler Moore, or Ashton Kutcher. But at the turn of the century, something fundamental changed and we began to see scarier, crazier, darker forms of the American way of life.
Pinning down a realignment in the zeitgeist is dicey business, but more than a few people might point to Feb. 7, 1999. On that night on HBO, a character named Tony Soprano went with his daughter, Meadow, to inspect a college. It’s an oft-deployed television trope, but this time it came with a mind-altering twist. While at the college in Maine, Tony spotted a former associate who had become an F.B.I. informant and entered witness protection. In between the quotidian tasks of touring the campus, Tony hunted the man down and used his bare hands to kill him.
Rather than being revolted, audiences and critics began to chatter, and the episode, the fifth in the first season of “The Sopranos,” won an Emmy for outstanding writing in a dramatic series. The rest was television history.
It was not only a profound shift, but a highly lucrative one as well. Built on lush portraits of human pathology, subscription- and ad-supported cable channels gradually became hotbeds of quality and profits, even as broadcast networks withered.
Click on ambitious cable channels now, and you will find a high school science teacher who makes meth when he is not dissolving his enemies in vats of acid (“Breaking Bad”); a successful Madison Avenue advertising executive whose entire life is a lie (“Mad Men”); a forensics investigator who is a serial killer on the side (“Dexter”); and another New Jersey gangster, this one in Atlantic City, who is also very much the family man (“Boardwalk Empire”).
It has been a winning formula, but the execution risk is high. In “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution,” to be published in July by Penguin Press, the author, Brett Martin, suggests that the manic and dark shows, which were so riveting for audiences, were produced by men — and they were mostly men — who were as tortured and often as despotic as the antiheroes they hung their plots on.
Mr. Martin suggests that there is a fundamental lesson about where greatness comes from. If you want to create original programming, you are going to have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of some very original characters. Artists, and that’s what they were, require a wide berth, even when tens of millions of dollars is at stake.
Writers suddenly became directors and filled their writing rooms with talented cronies, few of whom had television experience. Crews would stand by for days while the creators mulled details and handed out freshly printed pages of entire new scenes. Directors, studio executives, even the actors themselves became game pieces in the creator’s effort to build a television version of the universe he saw in his head.
“This isn’t like publishing some lunatic’s novel or letting him direct a movie. This is handing a lunatic a division of General Motors,” one television executive told Mr. Martin, remaining anonymous presumably because he or she hoped to make more television — and more money — with said lunatics.
What becomes remarkable in retrospect is not just the rise of a new kind of storytelling, but the realization that an entire industry was built and controlled by writer-producers, men who typed for a living. Among others, Mr. Martin recounts the rise of David Chase, the creator of “The Sopranos”; David Milch, who came out of “NYPD Blue” to create “Deadwood”; David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun who created “The Wire”; and Matthew Weiner, a “Sopranos” alumnus who conjured “Mad Men.”
That cohort and several others produced a small-screen equivalent to the revolution in American cinema during the 1970s, led by Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola. The most remarkable narrative ambitions are now defined by a television season more often than a film, and show runners like Mr. Chase became all-powerful overlords of the worlds they created.
“It was necessary for me to always take the point of view that I was obligated to no one and nothing,” Mr. Chase told Mr. Martin.
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Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/media/cable-tvs-shift-to-darker-dramas-proves-lucrative.html?partner=rss&emc=rss