Pandora's Box, page 1
Dedication
To Betsy and Kate as always
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Broadcast Blues
Part I: “It’s Not Television. It’s HBO.” 1: Seeding the Wasteland
2: “Be a Good Catholic for 15 Fucking Minutes”
3: Deadwood and Its Discontents
4: HBO’s Annus Horribilis
Part II: Back to Basics 5: FX Flips Off HBO
6: AMC Chases Chase
7: Showtime’s Bad-Good Girls
8: Out of Luck and Off-Key, HBO Gets Game
Part III: Stream or Die 9: Netflix’s Albanian Army
10: Amazon’s Women in the High Castle
11: Disney’s Empire Strikes Back
12: Can WBD’s Kid Stay in the Picture?
Part IV: Back to the Future 13: Cash Is King
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction: Broadcast Blues
How the cable minnows swam circles around the network sharks, until the streaming whales swallowed them all.
“You couldn’t kill a dog,” recalls Sopranos writer Robin Green, reflecting on her years laboring in the vineyards of network television. “The character loses the sympathy of the audience.”1 Remember the outcry that greeted the scene in The Godfather where the horse’s head ends up in the bed of Jack Woltz, never mind the scores of humans garroted, shot, stabbed, or otherwise consigned to sleep with the fishes.
Cruelty to animals was just one of the many no-no’s viewers would never see on TV during the high tide of the broadcast era. Nor would they see extreme violence, nudity, or sex nor hear the infamous seven dirty words—“shit,” “piss,” fuck,” etc. Should two characters, invariably straight, exchange more than a peck on the cheek, the camera would discreetly pan away to, say, burning logs in a fireplace. The mantra was “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” The result was that TV had become a “vast wasteland,” as John F. Kennedy’s FCC chairman Newton Minow memorably put it in 1961.2 Why? Because of the sponsors who paid the bills, aided and abetted by the FCC.
Copying the sponsor-based business model used by radio in the 1920s and ’30s, their shows, analogous to the four quadrant blockbusters produced by the movie studios, were meant for everyone. The programming may have been free, but the not-so-hidden cost was high: terminal blandness. Fiercely protective of their brands, jittery advertisers whose primary goal was to sell Camels, Cheerios, and Chevrolets wanted TV’s doctors and lawyers happily married, not fighting in divorce court. They wanted their cops and cowboys delivering the bad guys to justice, not beating, framing, or otherwise abusing them.
Each network had a department called Broadcast Standards and Practices that made Hollywood’s old Production Code read like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It policed its shows, even preventing married couples from sleeping together in the same bed. Belly buttons were hidden, and Elvis Presley was never televised below the waist on The Ed Sullivan Show. The plainer the vanilla, the richer the ice cream, aka the profits. The networks competed with one another in a race to the bottom. The watchword that defined “the idiot box” was “lowest-common-denominator programming.”
Thus it was that the first golden age of live TV became a measureless tract of hard, cracked soil, inhospitable to intelligent life, populated solely by reruns of old movies, dumb and occasionally fixed quiz shows, as well as placid, family-friendly sitcoms with canned laugh tracks that, like flat stones skipping across the surface of a pond, rarely touched upon the issues that roiled the depths beneath it.
For most of its history, network television played defense rather than offense—that is, it was less interested in creating shows that gave viewers a reason to watch than in shows that gave them a reason not to watch. As allegation-prone Kevin Spacey explained back in 2014, providing the context for the unscrupulous character he played in House of Cards, “At that time, the most important thing was not to offend anybody and have characters that audiences would like.”3 If the result was ineffably dull shows whose Wonder Bread characters never swore; never expressed a political opinion; never entered a place of worship other than a church; never lusted after somebody else’s wife or husband or, worse, someone of the same sex; never had a baby out of wedlock or, gasp, an abortion—so be it. Kevin Reilly was a young executive managing creative affairs at NBC. “Network television had all these rules you were supposed to abide by, like, the good guy always wins,” he recalls, evoking the reaction to the pilot of Seinfeld: “‘Oh, that’s not what we do. It’s fun for us, but the real people will never get it.’”4
The umbrella of consensus that sheltered the network audience from the hard rain of reality was held aloft by a bipartisan coalition of moderate East Coast Eisenhower Republicans and conservative Midwestern Democrats that governed the country throughout the postwar era. So-called extremists—naysayers, rebels, dissidents, whatever—were unwelcome, and they appeared in network shows only as gangsters, juvenile delinquents, or “Injuns.” They were deprived of context—backstories that might make them other than two-dimensional bad guys.
When premium cable came along in the 1980s, thanks to Home Box Office (HBO), it replaced sponsors with subscribers. In contrast to the sponsor-driven networks that broadcast over public airways, cable companies built their own transmission systems; consequently, the FCC had little to no power over their content. By subscribing, viewers voluntarily invited cable programs into their homes. Moreover, the emergence of cable coincided with the breakdown of consensus culture that occurred in the Vietnam/Watergate era.
By 1977, to be exact, cable subscribers could see and hear George Carlin speaking those seven dirty words in their living rooms—a modest achievement, to be sure, but there was more to come. A lot more, a second golden age of TV that we are lucky enough to be more or less living in today, courtesy of the deluge of streaming services. “Golden age,” of course, is a tired cliché flung about with little discrimination, so we’ll call this second one the era of “Peak TV,” a phrase coined by John Landgraf, CEO of the cable channel FX, who estimated there were a record 559 scripted originals in 2022.
Maybe the complex relationship between network, cable, and streaming is best compared to a three-stage rocket, with network the first stage, cable the second, and streaming the third. It seemed to be well on its way to the stars.
Once upon a time, the reflexive response to a book about TV might have been a shrug, as in, “Ho-hum, it’s only TV.” The auteurism of the 1960s that elevated studio directors and commercial filmmaking to the level of high art might have played itself out, but it did succeed in cloaking movies with the mantle of respectability.
In the 1960s and 1970s, movies became “film” or even “cinema,” but thanks to today’s superhero monoculture, they have slid backward to where they started—just movies. Now, says director David Fincher, movies “have become physics porn. The feature business has no patience for characterization. They’re not so much about the people, they’re about ‘When does the entire city explode?’”5 Consequently, many high-profile American filmmakers, not only Fincher but Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Ava DuVernay, Jordan Peele, et al.—have fled to the small screen, sucking the lifeblood out of the studios, which are on their way to becoming no more than feeders for the streaming services.
Soderbergh was the ur-independent filmmaker of the ’90s, a gangly kid from Baton Rouge who tiptoed into Sundance in 1989 with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and emerged with a hit that won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes the same year, making him, at twenty-six, the youngest solo director to do so. Subsequently, he has been a prolific filmmaker working with nearly all the studios, cablers, and streamers, and has become a trenchant analyst of the business.
As early as 2013, Soderbergh announced his (short-lived) retirement from movies, explaining, “It’s become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen, to put it bluntly . . . When I was growing up, there was a sort of division: respect was accorded to people who made great movies and to people who made movies that made a lot of money. And that division doesn’t exist anymore: now it’s just the people who make a lot of money.” He added, “The audience for the kinds of movies I grew up liking has migrated to television. I just don’t think movies matter as much anymore.”6 Soderbergh went where the audience was. He made The Knick for Cinemax, a division of HBO.
The water cooler conversations of the prepandemic era have since become our only conversation, thanks to social media. Witness the blizzard of words devoted to analyzing, recapping, and speculating about the final season of Game of Thrones, the last episode of which boasted of 19.3 million viewers. Jon Snow, Daenarys Targaryen, and the Lannisters were household names, and the episodes were our bread and circuses.
Nor is this solely an American phenomenon. Other countries have made series that equal or surpass the best American productions, like Peaky Blinders, Line of Duty, The Crown, and Slow Horses from England; Spiral and A French Village from France; Money Heist from Spain; My Brilliant Friend from Italy; Fauda from Israel; Borgen from Denmark, as well as so-called Nordic noir like The Bridge, also from Denmark. Altogether, these shows have created the brave new world of Peak TV.
It is no exaggeration to say that the sweep and depth of HBO’s shows, followed by those of the basic cable channels, propelled T
Oh, and by the way, while shooting the pilot of FX’s The Shield, director Clark Johnson spotted a pack of stray dogs; he grabbed some salami from the craft services table, threw it into the frame, and yelled “Shoot the dog!” as the dogs ran to the food.9 Later, in the same show, a cop throttles a cat, and in House of Cards Spacey’s Frank Underwood kills a dog in the very first scene of the pilot. True, these animal slayers are not good-bad guys, like Tony Soprano or Raylan Givens in Justified, nor good-bad gals like Nancy Botwin in Weeds nor the entire cast of Orange Is the New Black; they’re just plain bad. And neither The Shield nor House of Cards endorses cruelty to animals, but neither are they afraid to use it to express their jaundiced view of human nature. As the Hound says to Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, “The world was built by killers, so you’d better get used to looking at them.”
Part I
“It’s Not Television. It’s HBO.”
1
Seeding the Wasteland
How HBO’s new business model enabled Michael Fuchs to build an anti-network that turned into a new template for TV.
The moment was ripe. A long time coming, network television was finally enjoying something of a renaissance at the century’s end, thanks to the likes of Norman Lear, Grant Tinker, Mary Tyler Moore, and others like them, who made shows like All in the Family, St. Elsewhere, Cheers, The Practice, and especially a handful of dark, innovative cop shows. Kevin Spacey saw a memo written by NBC executives after they aired the pilot of Steven Bochco’s Hill Street Blues. They complained that there were “too many characters, too many plot lines, characters who weren’t very good at their jobs, and their personal lives were a mess,” he recalls. “It was like a blueprint for what made every show successful since The Sopranos. If the NBC executives had had their way, the road from then to now would never have been paved.”1
Dreadful as network TV was, cable was originally devised not as an alternative, but as mother’s little helper, as it were, a way to bring The Red Skelton Show, say, and Lassie, to areas that had a hard time getting them—big cities like New York where the over-the-air signals bounced off skyscrapers like ping-pong balls, as well as the suburbs and small towns all over America where the signals were weak.
In 1971, Charles Dolan founded Sterling Manhattan Cable, which would deliver programming via cable. It could also provide sporting events and Hollywood movies to subscribers who would pay a monthly fee to see them uncut and commercial-free. Time Inc. acquired 20 percent of Dolan’s company in 1973, folded it into Time’s video group, and relaunched it as Home Box Office, but it bled money building expensive microwave relay towers across the country so that it could become a national service. Time’s chairman and CEO Andrew Heiskell quipped, “If I had finished Harvard Business School, I might have known enough never to start HBO at all.”2
In May 1972, Dolan hired Gerald Levin, a bright, hyperarticulate lawyer of thirty-three, to be his financial officer and then VP of programming. Levin came from humble enough origins, and his Time colleagues never let him forget them. His father ran A. Levin Butter & Eggs, in South Philadelphia. While Time’s Ivy League graduates strutted in their bespoke suits, he distinguished himself by conspicuous underconsumption, buying off-the-rack at a discount from Robert Hall.
Time was very much a white-shoe firm, and its executives derided their counterparts at HBO as money-grubbers, whereas they pursued a higher calling: handmaidens, as they saw it, to the public weal. Of course, “money-grubbers” was Fairfield County code for “Jews.” Despite his intellect and silver tongue, Levin’s ashes-and-sackcloth act didn’t play well at Time. With his diminutive stature, narrow shoulders, and receding chin, he couldn’t quite shrug off the stink of the shtetl. Heiskell, six five, handsome, and WASPy, once referred to Levin as “a snake-oil salesman.”3
Then, in 1975, Levin transformed the industry. He talked the Time board into dumping the towers, and instead forking over $6.5 million to hitch a ride on a satellite—in this case, RCA’s new SATCOM 1, which had just been launched—and broadcast the “Thrilla in Manila” heavyweight fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier from the Philippines. In the blink of an eye, it transformed HBO from a novelty to a national service, with three hundred thousand subscribers in sixteen states.
Beyond that, Levin’s move to satellite recast him as a legend within the company, paving the way for his eventual ascent to the top. “It was sort of a turning point for me and maybe Time Inc.,” observed a nonplussed Dick Munro, who succeeded Heiskell as CEO in 1980. He recalled a meeting with financial analysts at the Harvard Club: “Suddenly, the whole meeting began to be HBO-oriented. Magazines were ignored.”4 On the other hand, Time’s stock shot up, which was all that mattered.
If Time made a hire that transformed HBO, it was Michael Fuchs, who joined the company in September 1976. Fuchs was a tough kid raised on the streets of the Bronx. He had gone to law school to get out of the draft, but he lost his deferment and ended up in basic training, so basic there were no doors in the latrines. This would shape his attitude toward his future employer: “There were guys at HBO that had to go home to go to the bathroom. Me? I’m like, I could shit in the middle of Times Square.”5
Fuchs had zero experience, but the hire was not as dumb as it seemed. “I knew nothing,” he recalls. “But they knew nothing. ‘In the kingdom of the blind . . .’” He and Levin couldn’t have been more different. Where Fuchs was larger than life, Levin was smaller. Whereas Fuchs sucked up all the air in a room, Levin, in Fuchs’s words, was “like a stealth personality. He walked into a room and you didn’t feel a ripple.”6
At the time, HBO was, as Fuchs describes it, “barely alive. It had just gone up on satellite, but satellite hadn’t taken hold yet. We had no listings, no publicity, just a guide that went out once a month in the mail.” He saw his job as counterprogramming the networks. Fuchs felt they were “homogenized, fake. We were looking for stuff that the networks couldn’t go near.” Explaining why there was no original programming on his agenda, he says, “HBO was based on theatrical films initially, so people were used to seeing the most expensive pieces of entertainment in the world. I wasn’t going to dilute our programming with little pieces of shit.”7
Counterprogramming the networks with no money meant stand-up comedy (the young Steve Martin, Robin Williams, et al.), concerts, live sports, and documentaries, run by Sheila Nevins, whom Fuchs poached from CBS in 1979. Nevins eventually made something like 1,200 of them for HBO, and over the course of her career she won more than thirty Emmys and fifteen Peabodys.
Nevins was a red diaper baby who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side. “When I first met Michael, he was going to play tennis with somebody. He was wearing shorts, sneakers, and his feet were up on the desk and I could see into his crotch. I thought, This is the kind of job where people play tennis in the middle of the day. At CBS men wore ties and suits in the editing room.” Moreover, she liked him: “He was funny, said strange things, was anti-corporate and misbehaving.”8
“‘Documentary’ meant serious, intelligent, college, economics, Washington. It didn’t mean entertainment,” continues Nevins. She was commissioning films about gays, feminists, Osama bin Laden, medical curiosities, all sorts of things. And they were entertaining. “There was no competition,” she recalls. “I could have been doing crap, it wouldn’t have mattered.” Best of all, documentaries were cheap, which gave her total freedom. There was nobody to say, “No!” She made them; HBO aired them. “They just gave me the ball,” she says. “They were doing things that cost millions and millions of dollars. I was a $1.98.”9
