Pandora's Box, page 12
Comparing it to Sex and the City, which had been criticized for objectifying women and featuring characters who had to be “the right kind of girl,” Joey Soloway praises Dunham for playing a young woman who is “the worst kind of girl, somebody who walks around naked, saying ‘Here I am, here’s my body,’ and doesn’t care how I look, and has sex with the worst men. It was all about, ‘I’m the subject, men are the object.’ Dunham’s character, Hannah Horvath, was really an anti-heroine,” a good-bad girl.81
The first season of Girls collected nineteen Emmy nominations with two wins. The New York Times quoted Jemima Kirke, one of the actresses, saying, “It’s not Sex and the City. That’s four gay men sitting around talking.”82
At the time, Dunham was the target of criticism for the show’s lack of diversity and “hipster racism.” Ta-Nahisi Coates, for one, blamed HBO more than Dunham. “My question is not ‘Why are there no black women on Girls,’ but ‘How many black show-runners are employed by HBO?’ This is about systemic change, not individual attacks,” he wrote. “It is not so wrong to craft an exclusively white world—certainly a significant portion of America lives in one. What is wrong is for power-brokers to pretend that no other worlds exist.”83
Issa Rae, who a year later would make Insecure a hit on the cabler, agreed. “There could be more diversity, but I think that’s the fault of the network, HBO, rather than Lena’s.”84
HBO was not only all white, it was all, or mostly, male. Naegle complained that she had a hard time getting women promoted. She wanted to promote Gina Balian, who had been mentored by Strauss, to head of drama, and was a staunch supporter of Game of Thrones, but HBO blocked her, and instead hired Michael Ellenberg in 2011, who had a movie background but zero experience in programming TV. Says Strauss, “It was a boys’ club,”85 although Dunham insists that Plepler was very supportive.
With Lombardo, Naegle, Levine, Balian, and now Ellenberg in the mix, programming was divided into factions. Whitehead describes it as a “circular firing squad.”86 Says one executive, “Lombardo and Ellenberg would always tell the artists, ‘I don’t like this part. You need to write it this way.’ They both gave too many notes. That’s not how great development happens.”87
Eventually the backbiting rose to a fever pitch. Another executive, who does not wish to be named, says, “It was not a pleasant place to work. There wasn’t time to just be creative, because you literally were fighting for your life. People felt like you couldn’t be smarter than they were. I would have preferred feeling like I was working on the shows, instead of in the shows. I hated my colleagues. At one point I said to one of them, ‘I wish you’d stop trying to kill me. I wish you’d focus more on killing Showtime and Netflix.’”88 With regard to Naegle, Lombardo confessed, “I was always thinking, ‘You’re not Carolyn.’ It was still like dating a woman you aren’t in love with.”89
Finally Lombardo ousted Naegle. She told him, “You have to get out of my backyard. If you just are saying that you want to do my job, then that’s what you should do.” He responded, “I think I do,” giving her no choice but to resign.90 She exited with a production deal, in 2013.
In September 2012 Nelson retired, and Plepler succeeded him as CEO of HBO. The reaction was mixed, to say the least. “I think that if anybody had said that Richard Plepler was one day going to be the CEO, people would have said, ‘You’re crazy! No, no. Not going to happen,’ but it happened,” says a source who had a bird’s-eye view of the maneuvering.”91 Adds Fuchs, “I invented Plepler, who should never have been a CEO.”92
With Plepler at the top, Lombardo’s power was enhanced, but as he asserted himself, his relationship with his boss or partner—take your pick—deteriorated. The infighting that tore apart programming seemed to be built into the company’s DNA. Nothing was ever enough; from the beginning, everyone coveted, or was suspected of coveting, everyone else’s job. Fuchs had wanted Levin’s job, Plepler wanted Nelson’s job, while believing that Kary Antholis wanted his, and Lombardo wanted and took Naegle’s job. Says Kevin Reilly, “They had their own little sort of Game of Thrones over there.”93
After three Sopranos-starved years, HBO wanted its gangsters back. Terry Winter was one of the lead writers on Chase’s show. He was a walking and talking Emmy. He had eight Primetime Emmy nominations, with three wins. Strauss gave him a book, a history of Prohibition-era Atlantic City called Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson, published in 2002, and said, “See if there’s a series in there.” He was halfway out the door, when she added, almost as an afterthought, “Oh, by the way, Martin Scorsese’s attached.”94 Winter stopped dead in his tracks and said, “I don’t need to read the book. Yes, there’s a TV series in this, and I’m going to find it.’”95 Recall that Taxi Driver was the movie that turned him into a screenwriter. To work with Scorsese, Winter would have pulled a gangster series out of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Johnson’s history of Atlantic City was rich with characters and events. World War I had just ended, Prohibition had arrived, and the twenties were getting ready to roar. The show would zero in on the career of Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, aka Thompson in the series, Atlantic City’s Republican boss from 1911 to 1941, who ran its illicit trade in sex, drugs, and booze. Atlantic City was Deadwood-on-the-sea, a natural port of entry for bootlegged liquor, the sale of which created a high tide of money that washed over the town and floated its motley collection of clubs, speakeasies, and brothels. Says Winter, “I was kind of disheartened because I started to really get interested in doing this and I thought there’s no way we can afford to do this. I mean we—on a television budget we cannot afford a boardwalk or an empire.”96
Back in 2007, Mark Wahlberg, who was a producer on Entourage, convinced Scorsese (they had done The Departed together) to join him on the project, and who better to get HBO its gangsters back than the director of Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Casino?
Winter recalls, “HBO told me, ‘You’re going to have dinner at Martin Scorsese’s house to talk about it.’ I felt like a girl going to the prom. What should I wear? I got to his apartment twenty minutes early because I didn’t want to be late, and walked around the block until nine o’clock.”97
Winter pitched the book. He explains, “Prohibition was the single event that made organized crime possible—it made millionaires out of criminals overnight.”98 In his view, it bookended The Sopranos. Winter remembers that “Scorsese was excited, saying, ‘Wow, that’s the one era of gangster history I’ve not worked in. That’s fantastic. I think I’d like to direct this.’ I almost fell out of my chair. Originally, Marty was only supposed to produce the show. He said, ‘How do we make this happen?’ I said, ‘Well, there’s this guy named Richard Plepler at HBO.’ I said, ‘If you call him and tell him what you just told me, I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen pretty quickly.’ Within ten minutes, Richard texted me, all exclamation points. We were off to the races.” Winter liked Plepler. “A lot of times you get people hiring people they admire and then the very things they admire about them are the things they don’t want them to do. Plepler hired smart people and got out of the way.”
With Scorsese on board, the spigot opened. Scorsese told Winter, “Now you should go write the pilot.”
“And I did,” Winter says.
Strauss, who had not yet departed, told him with urgency in her voice, “This is important to us.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“No, look at me. This is really important.” Because they had passed on so many shows the shelves were empty.
Winter was officially the showrunner, used to telling everyone what to do, but, he says, “I knew this was Marty’s set. I was just there to watch.” During the first day of the shoot, he saw actor Michael Pitt walk through a roomful of women wearing a cap, a grievous affront to period manners. Winter wanted to alert Scorsese, but the first AD told him, “No one’s ever given Marty a note before.” Full of trepidation, Winter made his way over to the Great Man, calling it “the longest walk of my life,” and said, “It’s 1920. The cap.” Scorsese replied, “Oh my God, you’re right. He’s got to take his hat off. Look, anything you see at all, just come and tell me. Don’t be shy.”99
Winter was surprised to find his idol so ignorant of TV. He hadn’t even seen The Sopranos. After Scorsese read some of Winter’s scripts, he said, “This is great. You get to see what happens to the characters after the movie is over.”100 For him, the pilot was the movie, and everything that followed was TV.
Like most period pieces, Boardwalk Empire was indeed expensive to produce, but given the array of starry behind-the-camera names, and the expectation that it would be the next Sopranos, HBO was not about to pinch pennies, while Scorsese, at that point in this career, was not about to spare them. The network was hungry for certified auteurs, but these same auteurs were hungry for the largesse they expected in return. As The Wire’s David Simon was quoted in The Hollywood Reporter, “A lot of feature people have thought, ‘It’s HBO. The world is my oyster,’” and tossed budgets to the wind.101 Michael K. Williams, who plays Chalky White, recalls, “We shot The Wire for scraps. They threw a shitload of money at Boardwalk. They had to.”102 Adds producer Bob Greenblatt, HBO “started to buy these massive productions from Scorsese and other big auteurs and then just let them sort of run wild with budgets.”103
Jumping from writer and co-this and co-that to showrunner was impressive enough, but Winter’s career was really taking off. Scorsese liked his writing so much that he asked him to do the script for his next feature, The Wolf of Wall Street. Winter wrote it while he was writing the pilot of Boardwalk. During the same period, Scorsese and Winter, along with Mick Jagger, pitched HBO with Vinyl, a show set in the music business, circa 1973. Winter was to be head writer and showrunner on that series as well.
Despite being a worthy follow-up to The Sopranos, Boardwalk struggled to attract viewers. It premiered in 2010 to an audience of 4.8 million, the biggest opening in six years, about equal to the numbers for True Blood, but half the size of the Sopranos audience. In 2014, after five seasons, Lombardo pulled the plug. The viewership had plummeted by about 50 percent. Still riding the numbers of True Blood, then in its final season, and with Dustin Hoffman signed on to Milch’s Luck, Boardwalk seemed expendable.
Winter admired Albrecht for “pushing the envelope,” and felt the show was a victim of the aftermath of his departure. “There was such a huge transition in terms of the attitude,” he recalls. “Everything was being questioned and debated. By the end, it seemed like anything I did or I tried to do was met with pushback. The notes we were getting were risk-averse, not wanting to offend people. I think Lombardo hated the show.”104
Part II
Back to Basics
5
FX Flips Off HBO
When FX premiered The Shield in 2002, and followed it with a torrent of quality shows, it proved that basic TV could play in the premium sandbox.
When HBO launched The Sopranos in 1999, basic cable was little more than landfill piled high with old network series and second-, third-, or fourth-run Hollywood movies. It depended largely on local provider fees and the little advertising it managed to scrape together. FX and AMC realized that HBO had changed the rules of the game, and that they had better do something lest they shrivel up and die. But it was one thing to want to become the new HBO, and another to actually do it.
FX, owned by Fox, for lack of “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO” tagline, latched on to “TV Made Fresh Daily.” This belied its actual programming, which was reruns of Cops and The X-Files, peppered with NASCAR races at night. The few originals it did have were pale copies of the male-bait shows HBO aired in its adolescence: an ineffably dumb game program called Bobcat’s Big Ass Show, and a babes-in-bikinis parody of Baywatch called Son of the Beach, executive-produced by none other than Howard Stern.
In 1998, News Corp COO Peter Chernin hired Peter Liguori, who had been VP of consumer marketing at HBO in the Michael Fuchs era. He told him, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I’m giving you a network to run. The bad news is, it’s FX, it’s total garbage, you’re probably going to fail, and I’m going to have to fire you.”1 Liguori was part of the HBO diaspora that spread its DNA across the cable spectrum. In addition to the Six Feet Under gang, Albrecht was at Starz, Tina Balian went to FX, and Matthew Weiner to AMC. No fool, Liguori killed Bobcat’s Big Ass Show and Son of a Beach, and over the following two years increased the cabler’s penetration of the market from 35 million homes to 53 million homes.
Two years later, Liguori, who was pushing FX for better shows along the lines of HBO’s, hired Kevin Reilly from Brillstein-Grey as president of entertainment. FX was the other side of the tracks. Reilly, who took a big cut in pay, recalls, “I came from a place with museum-quality art, to a place where there was a giant stain on my carpet and a hole in the wall. I asked the office manager if I could have two chairs that matched. She said, ‘No, I’m sorry. We can’t do that for you.’”2
Liguori and Reilly’s mantra was, “Let’s do HBO for basic cable,” and they did. Reilly’s first stab at becoming the new HBO was The Shield, a long, long shot. Shawn Ryan, a large man with a polished dome who resembles an inflated version of Shield star Michael Chiklis, submitted it as a writing sample.
After Ryan arrived in Hollywood, a rube from Burlington, Vermont, he ended up writing for Nash Bridges, a police procedural created by Carlton Cuse that was picked up by CBS and ran for six seasons starting in 1996. He’d gone on ride-alongs with cops, where he saw things that CBS would never air. He wondered what would a cop show look like on HBO. He wrote and submitted a spec script to FX. David Madden was president of Fox TV Studios at the time. He liked Ryan’s pilot, despite the fact that the lead was a dirty cop. Says Madden, “We would have loved the show to go to HBO, but the impression was, unless you had big, fancy elements attached, a gigantic star or a star director attached to your project, you had very little chance of it getting made.” Reilly liked it, too, and told Ryan, “We want to make this.”
“What do you mean? Like, this actual show?”
“Yeah.”
“Where a dirty cop shoots another dirty cop through the eye at the end?”
“Yeah, we want to make that.”
Reilly recalls, “He couldn’t believe it. This was not a time when network executives did scripts where the lead guy’s a murderer.”3 Besides, the dirty cops of The Shield would go on the air less than a year after 9/11, when the police were national heroes for rescuing people from the World Trade Center. If “Nash Bridges was all rules, there were no rules on The Shield,” says Ryan.4 “My earliest memory working on The Shield was feeling like we were getting away with something criminal.”5
The Shield was based on a scandal that consumed the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1990s. Its elite CRASH unit was created to go after gangs, and the cops who comprised it were in effect granted license to kill. One CRASH squad worked out of the heavily Hispanic, crack-ridden Rampart district in East LA. Inevitably, it caused more than its share of collateral damage, wreaking havoc on the community it was supposed to protect. Seventy-odd officers were nailed for a laundry list of offenses, from murder to bank robbery. The Rampart scandal “got me thinking a lot about the balance of safety and civil liberties,” Ryan explains.6 He wondered how much of the latter people were willing to give up for the former.
Chiklis, then best known for playing the chubby lead in The Commish, lost weight and gained muscle for his role as Detective Vic Mackey, a dirty cop with a fuck-you sneer and the anger issues to go with it. A poster child for so-called toxic masculinity, he busted heads, trolled cop groupies (referred to as “badge suckers”), and developed a bevy of sleazy CIs he used to snitch on bad guys little better than himself. In one scene, he barges into a holding cell to interrogate a suspected pedophile after a good cop had gotten nowhere. The prisoner sneers, “Your turn to play bad cop?” Mackey responds, “Nah, the good cop and bad cop left for the day. I’m a different kind of cop.” He means that in The Shield, there are only bad cops and worse cops. Mackey beats the suspect until he divulges the whereabouts of a missing eight-year-old. Says Ryan, “He’s not a television cop whom we feel good about at the end of each episode. He doesn’t cuddle puppies.”7 Somebody or other observed that Mackey made “the Jack Bauers and Dirty Harrys . . . seem like hospital gift shop volunteers.”
Mackey’s CRASH unit, aka the Strike Team, spends as much energy committing crimes as solving them. In one scene, he gives a whole new meaning to the term “grilling.” He takes a suspect who has apparently raped a seven-year-old girl and presses his face, cheek down, onto the red-hot coil of an electric stove so long you can almost smell the burning flesh. There’s even a millisecond shot of the spiral seared into the sizzling skin. It’s a scene that might have been routine on The Sopranos, but not something anyone had ever seen on basic cable.
On the other hand, Mackey is yet another good-bad guy. The glimmers of “good” include a sense of humor, a family, and a code, as well as the fact that those he’s brutalizing are a lot worse than he is. As Black detective Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder) explains, Mackey is a hero to most of the law-abiding citizens of East LA because “what people want these days is to make it to their cars without getting mugged, come home from work, see their stereo’s still there . . . If having all those things means some cop roughs up some n-gger or some spic in the ghetto, hell, as far as most people are concerned, it’s Don’t ask, don’t tell.”8
Damon Lindelof, of Lost and Leftovers fame, recalled reading Ryan’s pilot and waiting for Mackey to reveal his heart of gold, but when he got to the end, he realized that Mackey didn’t have a heart of gold. He thought, Shawn Ryan will never get this . . . on the air.9 But basic cable was about to change, and Ryan’s show was the one that changed it.
