By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up!
“…shifting economics revealed that maybe it had always been advertisers, rather than audiences, who were so averse to difficult characters…”
-from Difficult Men by Brett Martin
Over the last decade there has been a changeover in prestige from the cinema to the small screen. Where television was once thought of as a sort of minor league in relation to the movies; a purgatory for those who could not make it on the big screen, a “vast wasteland” (as described by one-time chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Newton N. Minow in 1961. ***Trivia Time*** What TV show “honoured” Minow for making that statement? Answer at the bottom), it is now highly regarded, almost revered as a place for creativity and original storytelling with bold, three-dimensional anti-heroes and formerly taboo themes. How did this happen? That is the subject of Brett Martin’s Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.
In Difficult Men Martin traces the pedigree of what is often referred to as the Third Golden Age of television, (the first being the 1950’s when TV was in its infancy and broadcast mostly Shakespeare plays and operas for the educated, well-to-do crowd who could afford televisions; the Second Golden Age was during the 80’s with shows like Hill Street Blues, Cheers and St. Elsewhere), through the creators, producers, and writers of original cable series like The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men.
The book’s title refers to the behaviour and quirks of the individual showrunners, and how that effects the way each show is produced and how its content reflects their personalities, experiences and problems. I was surprised at how many of them had horrific parental issues that ended up being plot points and major story arcs of their respective series. (It is almost as if making the shows for them is a kind of therapy.)
Martin gives brief but excellent bios of the main geniuses behind the new wave of brilliant television and delves into how the shows were created, from inception to pitch to the networks to when they finally aired, all with great skill. He does not waste any words and each chapter reads like a well-written and researched magazine article, which comes as no surprise given Martin’s award-winning background as a writer for Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Martin focuses heavily on The Sopranos and some of the difficulties of TV production. Its showrunner and creator David Chase is typical of today’s modern TV writer/producer: Someone who looked down on the medium and preferred to work in films who brought cinematic subject matter and sensibility to and open-ended series, and are able to get away with more than the networks because they appear are on cable channels and thus not limited by FCC regulation and interference from sponsors.
Reading Difficult Men at one point became kind of surreal early in the book when Martin talks about how The Sopranos star James Gandolfini (who graces the cover along with Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad) walked off the set for several days and could not be found anywhere (he eventually turned up in a Brooklyn flower shop), leaving cast a crew to believe something terrible had happened to him, eerily foreshadowing recent events (the book was written and published before Gandolfini’s death).
If you are like me and find the new TV revolution overrated (to me these shows, although of excellent quality, are little more than soap operas with better production values, nudity, profanity and violence…none in my opinion are any better than Hill Street Blues, L.A Law, or St. Elsewhere…at least story-wise), Difficult Men would be a limited interest. But if you are really into it, the book is packed with interesting stories and delicious behind-the-scenes anecdotes (like a piece about how a room full of writers spent days debating and discussing a sequence in Breaking Bad that ultimately ended up taking a mere 82 seconds of time on the show) that will leave you wanting more.
***Trivia Answer*** Sherwood Schwartz, the creator and producer of the comedy series Gilligan’s Island named the ill-fated boat that carried the castaways to the island the S.S. Minnow (deliberately spelled differently) as an inside joke. Oddly enough Gilligan’s Island was probably the exact kind of show Minow was referring to.
