Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (20 page)

A few years later, Kessler wrote the pilot for a new series of his own, to appear on FX. Rather than assume an autocratic role, he would share the duties of showrunner with his brother, Glenn, and a writer named Daniel Zelman. The series wound up running for five seasons and winning four Emmys and sixteen additional nominations; along with
Mad Men
, it was one of the first two basic cable series to be nominated as Outstanding Drama Series. The plot revolved around a terrible boss—brilliant but manipulative, vain, imperious, unpredictable—and a young, talented, but impressionable employee who finds herself seduced, repelled, and ultimately both matured and corrupted by coming into her orbit. It was, he said, based in no small part on his experiences working on
The Sopranos
.
The show was called
Damages
.

• • •

C
hase’s announcement at the MoMA panel was only the first of several false stops for
The Sopranos
.
Chase compared the show with Russia’s
Mir
space station, left up in orbit long past its originally intended expiration date. At the end of each season, spent and exhausted, he considered leaving it to drift off into space. “David always said that when we have an episode about Meadow getting her driver’s license, you know that we’ve jumped the shark,” said costume designer Juliet Polcsa.

“You do all the easy ideas the first season, the first ones that come to you,” Chase said. “The second season you do the next best ideas. Each time it becomes harder and harder not to repeat yourself and to come up with something fresh that feels different.”

Eventually, during each hiatus, ideas would start to flow, and Chase would come back to the writers’ room with a long strip of taped-together 8.5-by-10-inch pieces of paper, a miniature version of the whiteboard, on which each character’s fate was plotted. Still, the process of turning that outline into episodes could be grueling.

“It became a running joke at the beginning of every year,” Winter said. “We would be trying to break stories and there’d be a certain amount of despair, David going, ‘Ah, it’s taking so long.’ I’d say, ‘David, it’s not taking any longer than it has any other year.’” Winter would pull out the calendar from the previous year and point out that the first outline had not been done until after another two weeks of meetings. “I’d say, ‘David, we are not gonna leave this room until you’re satisfied and it’s great. It’s okay. It will not go on the air until we think it really works.’”

The closest Chase came to actually pulling the plug was in early 2003, shortly after season four had ended. Without warning, he summoned Winter, Burgess, Green, and his wife, Denise, to his office one Sunday. HBO was asking him to commit to two more seasons. Season four had ended with the devastating episode “Whitecaps,” in which Tony moves out of the Soprano house. It would go on to win Emmys for Gandolfini and Falco and Chase, Burgess, and Green. It would, Chase thought, be an honorable place to end. “He really didn’t know, creatively, if he was going to be able to do it,” Green said.

Winter, in particular, argued strenuously that they should go on. Eventually, Chase agreed, though he decided to take an inordinately long break. The result, over a year later, was the best of the later
Sopranos
seasons. The pattern, as the seasons had gone on, had become to sustain the plot by introducing a new adversary for Tony—first the coldly menacing Richie Aprile and then volatile, psychopathic Ralphie Cifaretto, both men who posed a physical, existential threat to our protagonist. Season five also began with the introduction of a new thorn in the Soprano side, only this time it was more complicated. Tony Blundetto (played by Steve Buscemi, who also directed several
Sopranos
episodes) was Tony Soprano’s cousin, and he wreaked his havoc by messing with the Soprano gang’s New York partners. This pitted Tony’s loyalty and affection against his sense of business and the Mafia code—ultimately forcing him to kill Blundetto to preserve his own way of life.

• • •

I
wanted out,” said Robin Green of that Sunday meeting in Chase’s office. “But I would never have said that. He wanted us to say yes.”

By this time, the relationship between Chase and Green had long since begun to sour. The two had worked together, on and off, since
Almost Grown
.
Now, with Renzulli long gone, she and Burgess were the only writers left from the original
Sopranos
staff. Long ago, she and Chase had bonded over stories about their mothers. Coming into season five, Green noticed that Chase had moved her chair around the writers’ room conference table. “It was so he didn’t have to look at me,” she said.

As Chase told it, the problem began and ended with the pair’s writing output. “From the beginning, there was something about
The Sopranos
they didn’t get. They either could not, or didn’t want to, understand the through-the-looking-glass quality of the wiseguy mentality. I sat there in a room while Robin argued with Terry all afternoon about whether Tony would have to kill Tony Blundetto.” The result, he said, was that he ended up doing more rewriting. “And the strange thing was that, as time went on, I was having to rewrite them more. They had like a reverse learning curve.”

Still, the relationship was obviously charged with long-standing emotions. “She became more and more truculent and obnoxious in the room,” Chase said. “What she was good at was asking, ‘Why? Why would that happen?
Why?
’”

“David’s a guy who . . . you kind of hold your breath around him. There’s a physical feeling of discomfort,” Green said.

Things only got worse in the first half of season six, when Green and Burgess worked on a script—about Tony, convalescing from his gunshot wound, trying to relocate to a better floor of the hospital—that ended up getting killed outright, the only time that had happened. Finally, Burgess came up from covering set one day to find Green in Chase’s office, getting fired. (“Nobody ever wants to fire Mitch,” Green said, patting her husband’s hand.)

“He had a list of infractions, some of them going back twenty years,” she remembered. “He could cite the time when I drank too much at a party and interrupted a conversation he was having.”

Chase agreed to give them one more chance to finish a draft of the script they were working on, but the writing was on the wall. Two weeks later, neither argued when Chase told them the arrangement was over. Burgess placed his pencil down on Chase’s desk. “Well, shit, David, if you don’t think the work is any good, then fuck it,” he said.

The conflict didn’t end there. Chase was furious when a story in the WGA’s magazine,
Written By
, seemed to suggest that Burgess and Green had quit because they disapproved of the show’s direction, rather than been fired—even more so when their next series, a traditional CBS cop show called
Blue Bloods
, was initially marketed as being “from the executive producers of
The Sopranos
.” (The writers said that neither incident was under their control.)

For Green, the hurt feelings lingered. “I think about it all the time,” she said. But not to the exclusion of remembering what it had meant to be in that particular room at that particular moment in television history.

“I have every reason to say horrible things about David,” she said. “And yet, when I think back, I had more fun than I’ve ever had in my life writing for
The Sopranos
. What happened on that show, how it changed our lives, the excitement of it, the fun of the first season, where we didn’t know it was going to happen . . . it was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.”

A Big Piece of Equipment

I
n Chase, Ball, and Simon, the new TV revolution had found its Moses, its Mensch, and its Mencken. It remained only to find its Magus. Which is where the third David of the Third Golden Age came in.

David Milch’s success—indeed, the very fact of his continued, albeit intermittent, employment—was, in some ways, the most unlikely story of the TV revolution, the extreme edge of what the moment’s confluence of creative and economic forces allowed to take place.

By the time the revolution dawned, Milch had already had by far the most successful tenure in network TV of all the showrunners it would elevate. He had started his career at MTM, the modern cradle of quality television, and had been a critical figure at
Hill Street Blues
, that company’s signature show. From there, he’d gone on to co-create and run
NYPD Blue
, which ran for twelve seasons and provided a crucial link to the Third Golden Age. He’d won four Emmys and been nominated for eighteen more. On paper, there was nobody better positioned to usher in, and reap the benefits of, the ascension of TV as an art form.

But on paper, the record could hardly do justice to what, with vast understatement, could be called the uniqueness of Milch’s modus operandi, or to the challenges it presented. In a world that valued predictability, he was, by design and by compulsion, wildly unpredictable. In a business in which time equals money, it was one resource with which he could be amazingly profligate. The unlikely result: In a society of men loath to put value on intellectual distinction, much less give other men credit for having it, he was all but automatically referred to as a “genius.”

The Milch story was no less a piece of mythology for being largely true: Born in Buffalo in March 1945, five months before David Chase, he was the son of an eminent but volatile, hard-drinking, and horseplaying surgeon. He once described himself as a “Jewish country day-school boy.” In 1962, he left home for Yale and “never went back.” Hailed in New Haven as a charismatic prodigy, he was taken under the wing of the critic R. W. B. Lewis and Robert Penn Warren—referred to decades later, at every possible opportunity, as “Mr. Warren.” Post-graduation, Milch was tapped to assist his mentors, and Cleanth Brooks, on a landmark anthology of American literature.

He also developed several obsessive-compulsive conditions. These included addictions to alcohol and heroin, though they were not as immediately crippling to his ambitions to become a novelist as were such habits as rewriting the same thirteen pages of prose over and over again, word for word in longhand, for a year. Television proved a salvation, though not one of which the mandarins of Yale approved. Mr. Warren, Milch said, “refused to have a television set in his home, as though it was some crouching beast.” Nevertheless, TV’s “coercions of circumstance,” as Milch called them—speed, deadlines, the constraints of genre, the necessity of collaboration—would prove to be precisely what he needed to emulate his mentor and become an author.

It was coincidence that brought him there. A Yale roommate, Jeffrey Lewis, had joined
Hill Street Blues
in its second season. Lewis introduced Milch to Steven Bochco, without mentioning any of his friend’s eccentricities. “He was an English professor, and that’s what walked into my office: tweed jacket, glasses, I think he was wearing a tie,” Bochco said. “We started talking and he was very smart, very charming. Clearly a big piece of equipment.”

Bochco assigned Milch a freelance episode centered on the rape and murder of a nun that incites a mob response in the city. The first draft was a dud. “I told him, ‘David, that’s not your fault, that’s our fault. We didn’t solve this problem in the writers’ room,’” said Bochco. The two were about to break for the day when they hit on the idea of juxtaposing the nun’s murder, and the police’s handling of it, with that of a Latino store owner, which the department would deem all but unnecessary to solve. The story was little more than a “D” plot, a nagging, half-remembered presence at the periphery of the main action, but it underscored the rest of the proceedings and lent them a very different, more complicated tone.

“The lightbulb went off over David’s head, and fifteen minutes later we had it,” Bochco said.

The episode, “Trial by Fury,” aired as the first of season three and won Milch his first Emmy. Bochco deemed it “maybe the best episode of
Hill Street
we ever did.” Milch’s voice is most evident in the ritual opening roll call officiated by Michael Conrad as Sergeant Esterhaus—a man whose playfully ornate language bears more than a little resemblance to that of
Deadwood
’s Al Swearengen. At roll call, Esterhaus addresses an issue that would be of particular interest to Milch throughout his career: Police brass, the sergeant says, has demanded that Hill Street station’s officers employ more linguistic discretion in their dealings with the public. On the blackboard, he has written a list of acceptable terms—“shucks,” “drat,” “fudge,” and so on—and he offers a piece of literary advice Milch might have done well to heed himself on
Deadwood
: “Now [these] won’t come trippingly to your tongue at first, but with time and usage, you could find them becoming second nature. Your recourse to obscenity will then be fresh and vital when you encounter those situations and individuals for whom only obscenity will suffice.”

After Milch’s second draft of “Trial by Fury,” Bochco offered him a staff position in the
Hill Street Blues
writers’ room. Stable employment did not exactly prove a stabilizing force. Whether he was loaded or temporarily sober, Milch’s behavior became legendary. Eric Overmyer arrived at MTM for his first day as a writer on
St. Elsewhere
to see a man in the second-floor window peeing on the flowers below. “Oh, must be Milch,” the receptionist told him.

“He had a drawer full of money and he liked to whip his dick out,” said Robin Green, who worked with Milch on a post–
Hill Street
project,
Capital News
. “He’s a wild man.” At one point, Bochco told
The New Yorker
in a 2005 profile, he learned that his friend and employee had begun commuting from Las Vegas every morning, the better to spend long nights gambling.

None of this was enough to prevent Milch from staying employed. On the contrary: For executive-producing the last three seasons of
Hill Street Blues
, he received a $12 million contract. At least in retrospect, Bochco seemed to regard Milch’s habits as the antics of a mischievous child: “He’s nuts. He’s just crazy. He had a recklessness about him that to this day thrills me.” Still, the two could butt heads—not always a pleasant experience: “David can be very intimidating. He’s almost always the smartest person in the room, and he will not hesitate to bully. He’s so observant about people, he’ll scope out how you’re vulnerable and he can attack you.”

It helped that Milch was able to remain almost demonically productive, churning out high-quality scripts at a breakneck pace. The demands of creating twenty-two episodes a season were both a creative liberation—leaving him no time to succumb to his various blocks—and, as long as he produced, a kind of insurance policy against unemployment. The train, after all, had to keep rolling. From the vantage of 2012, he said the pace of working on a hit network drama was grueling: “I’ve written 300 scripts in my life and I couldn’t do the first 250 again,” he said. “It’s a younger man’s game.”

When
Hill Street Blues
ended its seven-season run in 1987, Milch was in a position to create his own shows. The first was an ill-fated experiment called
Beverly Hills Buntz
,
in which Dennis Franz reprised a role from
Hill Street Blues
, this time in a half-hour comedy format set in Los Angeles.
Capital News
was even shorter lived. Steven Bochco had had a similar run of failures with dramas since following up
Hill Street Blues
with
LA Law
(most legendarily, the musical-drama hybrid
Cop Rock
).
In 1993, the two decided to rejoin forces and created
NYPD Blue
.

The show was at least nominally based on the experiences of a tough, battle-tested New York City cop named Bill Clark, who was to Milch much the way Ed Burns was to David Simon, a kind of kindred spirit, even spiritual twin, from the other, tougher side of manhood’s tracks.
NYPD Blue
announced in no uncertain terms its intention to push
Hill Street Blues
’s
commitment to dramatic realism to the edge of what network TV would tolerate. Even before airing, it drew an organized protest from the conservative American Family Association, which succeeded in convincing more than fifty ABC affiliates to black out the premiere episode because of its language and partial nudity.

Part of Bochco’s pitch to ABC had been the prescient notion that network TV needed to adjust its standards to compete with the coming threat of cable programming. Indeed, the series’s traditionally handsome leading men—first David Caruso, who left after season one in search of success in films, and then, for five seasons, Jimmy Smits—proved hardly as important as the figure of Detective Andy Sipowicz. Played by Franz, Sipowicz—with his temper, his crankiness, his struggling back-and-forth with addiction, even his dumpy body type—heralded far more about the generation of complicated antiheroes to come than any number of bare buttocks or instances of the word
asshole
.

From the beginning, Milch fully indulged the modern showrunner’s autocratic prerogative. He never convened a writers’ room, instead meeting one-on-one with writers and giving vague notes for scripts that he would then almost completely rewrite. “One thing you had to come to terms with, you knew you could never get it to where he would be pleased,” said David Mills, who joined
NYPD Blue
after collaborating with David Simon on their
Homicide
script
.
“When it came to writing on that show, that was the biggest thing to deal with. You can’t outwrite him, which means that you can’t even win an argument with him on a story point, so why argue?”

(In one of the great near misses of TV history, Mills arranged for Simon to write an
NYPD Blue
spec script and brought him out to Los Angeles to meet with Milch. The two got along well, and Milch offered Simon a full-time job on the show the same week that Tom Fontana did the same on
Homicide
. “It was more money, a bigger hit, but Tom said, ‘Listen, I might not be able to pay you as much, but I’ll teach you how to produce,’” Simon said. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be a producer.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you do. In this game, the only way you protect your writing is to produce.’” He added, “I think I would’ve learned to really like David Milch.”)

Mills found the experience of working with such a volatile leader exhilarating. Not everybody agreed. In her book
Free Fire Zone
, playwright turned screenwriter Theresa Rebeck wrote an essay that appeared to be a thinly veiled account of her time on the
NYPD Blue
staff. She nicknamed the Milch character Caligula.

“Caligula’s stories were fantastic—I mean he was a terrific storyteller—and he could really write,” Rebeck wrote. “He was also, often, a terrible human being.” She described bullying acts of cruelty and professional intimidation, alternating with ostentatious generosity; Milch was famous for randomly handing out hundred-dollar bills and running a weekly lottery for the entire cast and crew in which he gave away thousands of his own dollars.

“When he wasn’t being a completely abusive, chaotic nightmare, Caligula was exquisitely charming. He was funny and compelling, kind, alert, and at times deeply compassionate,” Rebeck wrote. “He had a prodigious hunger to believe that not only was he a good writer, he was a
great
writer, and it was pretty much understood around the building that anything he wrote, casually, on a napkin, say, was vastly more brilliant than anything the rest of the writing staff could ever hope to accomplish even with thirty years of sweat and hard work.” (Rebeck also charged that “Caligula” once hired a prostitute to service himself and his friends and then attempted to expense her fee as show payroll.)

However you cared to analyze Milch’s behavior,
NYPD Blue
quickly became a very strange place to work. At some point, Milch stopped committing scripts to paper at all, preferring to come to set and extemporaneously dictate lines to the actors. “There was usually a draft he was working from, but those drafts bore no resemblance to what we ended up doing,” said Mark Tinker, one of Grant Tinker’s sons, who was an executive producer on the show. “You never knew what you were going to shoot the next day or where it fit. A lot of times the murderer would change in the course of his rewrite.”

This often forced the entire production to wait around without any idea of what to do. “We’d say, ‘Okay, David, we’re going to be done in an hour.’ He’d come down and act out a scene. Everybody would stand around and watch. He’d go up to get it transcribed while we guessed at what the staging would be, because the actors didn’t have any lines to go on yet. It was crazy,” said Tinker.

If there was a method to this madness, it seemed to be that of a fireman setting blazes only he is capable of putting out, thus ensuring his own heroic indispensability and heroism. “It was narcissistically brilliant, in that it essentially disempowered everybody else. Because nobody could do their job,” said Bochco. “Everybody became completely dependent on David showing up, David being so brilliant on his feet, he could make up a scene. And so he became the absolute center of a completely dysfunctional universe.”

Milch himself saw it in a slightly different light. “The entire television construct is organized around fear. Everyone feels expendable, so they try to make themselves necessary. And the reason they insist on punctuality is that they don’t know what the fuck
works
, so at least they’re not going to be vulnerable by being tardy,” he said. “In a way, that’s a liberation for people who are fear based, because they can say, ‘What are we going to do?’ I believe that deep down people who are governed by fear want to be governed by faith.”