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 B

executive with enough faith to spend millions of shareholder dollars, employ hundreds of people, put his or her reputation on the line, and essentially open a corporate division based on an hour of story.
    For all these reasons, a good pilot must engage in what’s known in network jargon as “universe building.” “You have to lay in enough DNA,” said James Manos Jr., a
Sopranos
veteran who went on to write the pilot for
Dexter
. “You have to give it legs so you can say, ‘Wow, I can see where that character may go over the next five years. I understand what that wink means, what that one line means.’ You’re not figuring out what’s going to happen in episode 309, but you’re putting enough in the Petri dish so that character can
be
there in 309.”
    By the same measure, every pilot that doesn’t either get made or get carried to series—which is to say, the vast, vast majority of them—is like a universe blinking out, along with its entire potential future. Occasionally, that world can miraculously spring back to life, at a different network or after a shift in regime. But in a business ruled by fear of risk and the eagerness to find easy reasons to say “no”—not to mention the mortal terror of seeing something you passed on succeed elsewhere—dead universes tend to stay dead.
    For a writer with a good reputation and a handful of awards—as David Chase was by the 1990s—writing failed pilots is a viable career path, even an upwardly mobile one. But even to someone who purports to disdain TV and shrinks from success in it, all those dead and discarded universes start to weigh on the mind. Since
Almost Grown
and his stints with Brand and Falsey, Chase had moved from one lucrative development deal to the next, without getting his own show on the air.
    “He’d come into my office, very pale, sit on my couch, and say, ‘I’ve got nothing,’” said Susie Fitzgerald, then in development at Brillstein-Grey, where Chase had signed a two-year deal in 1995. “I’d say, ‘Well, come on! Let’s talk about some ideas.’”
    One abortive effort from those years was an idea about a Miami Mob wife, to be played by Marg Helgenberger, who enters the witness protection program and moves back to New Jersey. It featured a character named Big Pussy—a fact that could scarcely have helped its chances at CBS.
    Another potential gig was unintentionally funny: ABC briefly considered handing Chase the reins of the sitcom
The Wonder Years
, hoping to add a little edge to the show’s gauzy nostalgic glow as its main character, Kevin, matured into high school age
.
In what must surely be considered one of the great lost scripts of history (or a
Saturday Night Live
sketch), Chase brought his usual sensibility to a trial run, having Kevin discover
The Catcher in the Rye
and start smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and conversing with the shade of Holden Caulfield. The powers that be quickly decided that perhaps they didn’t need quite so much edge.
    All of this, said Kevin Reilly, then of Brillstein-Grey, had the effect of hardening, rather than softening, Chase’s resistance to outside interference. “You could say to him, ‘I love everything you’ve done here. But you know how the character, at the end, lets the bad guy get away? And he’s really depressed? Can we just get the sense that he’s going to continue tirelessly, that he’s not going to give up? Even if the bad guy gets away?’ And David would say, ‘No. I just can’t see it that way.’ And sometimes you’d say, ‘Can we just move this comma over here?’ And he’d say, ‘I thought about it and I just can’t do it.’”
    Rejections, like punches, eventually start to hurt whether you respect the person giving them or not. “Some creative people are very volatile: up today, down tomorrow. David was down today,
more
down tomorrow,” Reilly said. “After CBS passed on that Helgenberger thing, he called me at home probably every Sunday. He