Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin

delegate and more committed to the idea that HBO’s future lay in original series. Crucially, satellite TV had been revolutionized by the introduction of light, easily mountable Ku-band receivers, which did away with the requirement for giant dishes seemingly more appropriate for searching the heavens for alien life. Through services like DirecTV and the Dish Network, this provided a new stream of revenue for Bewkes to play with. To the consternation of some in New York, the balance of power began to shift west toward Albrecht.
    Strauss, too, had started at HBO in the mid-1980s, as a temp, and cut her teeth producing comedy specials. In style and temperament, she was Albrecht’s polar opposite: shy to the point of seeming aloof, concerned with the kinds of details in a script or pitch that Albrecht found boring, herself allergic to his brand of charismatic glad-handing. Yet the two were equally sure of what they believed constituted the HBO brand.
    “I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to sit down and write four pages of notes,” said Albrecht. “I’m going to say, ‘Big picture: Here’s what I thought.’ So Carolyn and I had skills that fit well together. The great thing is that we didn’t necessarily agree on everything, but we always saw the same thing. I never looked at a show and went, ‘That’s red,’ and have Carolyn go, ‘No, that’s orange.’”
    Ironically, given the increasing power of the California office, the first two successful series of the Albrecht/Strauss regime were about as New York as it was possible to get. First came
Oz
. Set behind the walls of an open-floor prison and shot entirely indoors, the show had the feel of eighties downtown experimental theater, down to a dreadlocked, wheelchair-bound Nuyorican-style poet in fingerless gloves acting as chorus. The cast—stocked with actors who would populate later HBO shows—functioned like such a theater company, often decamping from the one-floor soundstage over the Chelsea Market on Manhattan’s West Side to La Nonna, a West Village restaurant of which showrunner Tom Fontana was part owner.
    “Tom is from Buffalo, but he likes to think he grew up in Little Italy,” said Seth Gilliam, who played an unstable corrections officer for seventeen episodes of
Oz
and later Sergeant Ellis Carver on
The Wire
.
“He curses profusely. More than anything, he likes to make fun of you and invite you to make fun of him.”
    Fontana had a policy of helping out his cash-strapped cast members with drinks and food at the restaurant, sometimes to the consternation of his chef and partner. He also supported his actors’ outside theater ventures, but instead of going to see them, he would make donations to the theater company. It was, he said, “worth $1,000 not to have to see a play.”
    Oz
ran for six seasons, well into the
The Sopranos
era
,
and it’s hard to imagine that
The Sopranos
could have existed without it. Aggressively artsy, filled with shocking violence, homoerotic sex, and a charismatic main character who happened also to be a gay, neo-Nazi psychopath, it expanded the definition of HBO’s brand in crucial ways.
    It remained, though, to prove that original series could create widespread buzz—and increased subscribers. That task fell to Strauss and Albrecht’s next show,
Sex and the City
,
which premiered June 6, 1998. For women (and plenty of men) across the country, the show, based on Candace Bushnell’s frank columns for the
New York Observer
, which had themselves been turned into a book,
was an aspirational fairy tale about friendship and glamour in New York. It might as well have been a tourism campaign for a post–Rudolph Giuliani, de-ethnicized Gotham awash in money. Its characters were types as familiar as those in
The
Golden Girls
:
the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, the Heroine. But they talked more explicitly, certainly about their bodies, but also about their desires and discontents outside the bedroom, than women