Around the turn of the 21st century, television in the United States began to take two distinct, divergent courses. As network television started to hone and package dramas designed for global syndication (such as the CSI franchise), made up of self-contained episodes that could be watched in almost any order, something unexpected was starting to happen in cable television. Daring long-form dramas with conflicted, unheroic central characters were being given the green light, leading to an unbroken succession of classic television series, from HBO’s The Sopranos and The Wire, to AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
This creative revolution is documented in two new books, Viewing America by Christopher Bigsby and Difficult Men by Brett Martin. It would elevate television from a medium that in Martin’s words had “a reputation somewhere beneath comic strips and just above religious pamphlets” into the dominant narrative art form of its time. And as both books explore, it was brought about by a set of writers who saw themselves as playwrights, film-makers, even journalists (in the case of The Wire’s David Simon), and who had mixed feelings about the medium they transformed.
In Viewing America, Bigsby begins in 1999 with NBC’s The West Wing, which starred Martin Sheen in the role of the American president. It was written by Aaron Sorkin, whose roots were in theatre. Sorkin had wanted to be an actor, had become a playwright, and had written the first draft of The West Wing as a film. The draft, however, had run to 400 pages, so when a producer suggested he adapt it for television, the framework for a series was already in place.
That the intelligent, fast-moving, complex political drama had found a home on a traditional network was striking. But more revolutionary undercurrents were forming in cable television, where companies were beginning to experiment with original drama. Their paid-for subscription model had long relied on sporting events and movies to attract customers, but as they branched into drama it soon became clear that they were not tied by the traditional mores of middle America or the advertiser-pleasing fare of the networks. The only requirement was that the work was good enough to make customers return. Even so, as Martin makes clear, no one involved with the creation of the 1999 HBO pilot of The Sopranos expected it to be picked up as a series, with its casual violence, reliance on the f-word and mobster-with-a-mid-life-crisis central character, Tony Soprano (the late James Gandolfini).
Martin’s book starts from the tenet that this new golden age of American television was created by, and took as its basic subject matter, “difficult men”, and in both books, none flies off the page with quite the same force as The Sopranos’ creator David Chase. Chase was an Emmy-winning television writer, who had cut his teeth on The Rockford Files, but he was also a frustrated film-maker, who had little respect for television.
As Martin shows, it was his determination to make The Sopranos “as good as The Godfather. As good as Goodfellas” that raised the bar in television, along with a bloody-minded commitment to his vision that forced it through in its rawest, most truthful state.
He was gunning for The West Wing too, says Bigsby, when he objected that “so much of television nowadays is teaching and lecturing and hectoring and sermonising”. He wanted to create work that “didn’t provide you with all the answers, which didn’t give you arrows saying you’re supposed to feel this way now”. “I don’t have the answers for s---,” he went on. “But others think they do.” The Sopranos would stay true to these principles right up to its famous last scene.
While both books cover The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men, Viewing America also explores lesser but no-less-fascinating works such as Friday Night Lights, about American high-school football, with its difficult real-life backdrop of racial politics, and the science-fiction reboot Battlestar Galactica, about the terrifying conflict between mankind and the robot race it created, the Cylons, which Bigsby compares to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Martin’s book is more dynamic and accessible, as it traces the progression of a timeline of important works, keeping central the way that they came into being. It includes a glimpse inside the writers’ room run by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.