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

on TV ever had before.
    As it had been at MTM a generation prior, it was an exciting time to be at HBO. To be there was to feel suffused with a sense of mission, being outside the Hollywood mainstream (“in the ivory tower,” as Fitzgerald put it) and, increasingly, having an impact on it.
    “We took our jobs seriously, but we didn’t take
ourselves
too seriously. We didn’t put a lot of pressure on ourselves, because we hadn’t had some measure of success to hold ourselves up against,” Albrecht said. “I say to Jeff, ‘Hey, here’s this thing. What do you think about this?’ He’d go, ‘Looks pretty good, can you make it?’”
    Strauss said, “It was loose. It was fun. We were still very much in the shadows. The fear doesn’t creep in until you start winning Emmys.”
    All of which is to say that landing at HBO no longer seemed completely insane when Lloyd Braun, a former lawyer turned manager and executive at Brillstein-Grey, caught up with David Chase at the company’s elevator bank and asked, “Have you ever thought about doing
The Godfather
for TV?”

Four
    Should We Do This?
Can
We Do This?
    E very great TV show tells its whole story in its pilot. Often in just one line.
    Think of
The Wire
, in which a young black man explains why his group of friends would repeatedly let a serial (now dead) thief named Snot Boogie enter their crap game. “You got to,” the boy said, in a line borrowed from a real-life Baltimore homicide detective’s tale. “It’s America, man.”
    Or
Mad Men
, in which Don Draper and a potential conquest have this exchange:
    Don: The reason you haven’t felt [love] is because it doesn’t exist. What you call “love” was invented by guys like me to sell nylons. . . . You’re born alone and you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.
    Rachel: I don’t think I realized it until this moment, but it must be hard being a man, too.
    Or, shorter and sweeter,
Six Feet Under
: “No one escapes.”
    Or
The Shield
, shorter and not at all sweet: “Good cop and bad cop left for the day. I’m a different kind of cop.”
    A pilot is a strange beast. It must accomplish several things simultaneously. Foremost, of course, it must pack enough entertainment punch in its own right to convince, first, network executives that an entire season is worth making and, later, viewers that they should keep watching. At the same time, it must acquit itself of a hefty amount of scene-setting business—essentially calling a world into being—without becoming bogged down in exposition. (Given only a half hour to accomplish this, sitcom pilots have notoriously erred on the side of too much “sit,” not enough “com.”)
    The pilot for an ongoing serialized drama has yet another imperative. Through some combination of deliberate craft and something less easily defined, it must imply a future often not yet imagined even by its creators. Almost alone among the narrative arts, these shows are composed with no ending—indeed, with the hope that it will stay that way indefinitely. And, of course, there is no ability on the part of the author to go back and adjust once the story begins rolling. It is a unique and uniquely terrifying trapeze act, in which the creator goes swinging out into a narrative abyss, with the conviction that the story will continue to come. The leap of faith continues throughout the process; often, once a season gets rolling and the writers’ room, inevitably, falls behind, scripts are written, shot, and broadcast before the events of two or three episodes hence are even set in stone. Again, the serialized novel is the closest analogue, and Dickens didn’t have an army of bloggers and recappers waiting to pounce when a character suddenly disappeared or changed names midstory.
    Nor did he face the added task of investing an