Pandora's Box, page 16
Kater Gordon, a former staff writer, one of several writers-in-training who were referred to as “babies,” and worked with him in the same room, nine hours a day for six months on the second season, came forward in November 2017 and accused him of telling her, while they were writing the finale for which they would jointly win Emmys in 2009, that “she owed it to him to see her naked.”33 Gordon added, “Matthew’s abuse of workplace power dynamics was rampant, and the comments he made should not be viewed as an isolated occurrence.”34
Noxon backed up Gordon, tweeting, “I believe Kater Gordon.” She went on to explain, “I was at work with her the day after what she described transpired. I remember clearly how shaken and subdued Kater was—and continued to be from that day on.”35 Noxon added that while Weiner is “devilishly clever and witty,” he is also, quoting a colleague, “an ‘emotional terrorist’ who will badger, seduce and even tantrum in an attempt to get his needs met.”36
With her long and distinguished track record, Noxon was financially secure. She explained the cost of blowing the whistle on a showrunner of a huge show like Mad Men, or any showrunner, for that matter: “Taking that action is one thing . . . if you have money in the bank and family to fall back on, but quite another . . . without a safety net.”37 Still, “Kater and I were shocked that no one else would stand up with us,” says Noxon.38
After Gordon’s accusations, Noxon recalls, “There was such a culture of fear. If he let people go or people quit, he would bad-mouth them to us and to other people outside of the show, and tell everybody how untalented they were. It felt like he could ruin our careers. I was still scared a little bit, like, ‘What’s he going to say about me?’ But I felt like I could withstand his shit talk. One of the women he was having something with to this day is like, ‘I thought he was in love with me.’ I was like, ‘Dude, if he was in love with you, he was in love with all these other women at the same time.’ I’ve had so many experiences like that throughout my career it’s not even funny.”39
Weiner initially denied Gordon’s charges. He said, “I never felt that way and I never acted that way towards Kater.” He told Jenji Kohan, a close friend, that Gordon’s charges were baseless, but he later conceded, “It’s not impossible that I said that, but I really don’t remember saying it.”40
On the other hand, according to a good friend, “Do I think he’s a difficult person? Absolutely. Do I think he doesn’t like the spotlight on anyone else and will punish anyone else who gets the spotlight because he’s an egomaniac? Absolutely, but do I think he did something that made him worthy of being fired? No.”41
Speaking of the spotlight, when Gordon and Weiner collected their Emmys for their script, called “Meditations in an Emergency,” in 2009, Noxon recalls, “He was giving his acceptance speech, and she took the statuette from his hand, and said something, and I thought to myself, ‘She’s dead.’”42 Adds Wolynetz, “My recollection is that he fired her because she’d gotten up to start talking at the Emmys after he’d told everyone that only he was going to give a speech.”43 Noxon continues, “He apparently turned on her, went from saying how important and valuable she was to being talentless, and he was just carrying her. It was ugly.”44 Gordon left the show right after the Emmys. It was the end of her career.
Noxon, with Gordon, wrote a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter recalling his behavior and attributing it in part to Hollywood’s love of the “difficult genius,” which excuses bad boys with phrases like ‘Everyone hates it, but they’re so talented.’”45
Weiner seems to have mixed feelings about his tenure as showrunner on Mad Men, alternately defending himself and admitting he treated his writers badly. He said, “I’m sad that I might have caused people anguish in the job, or made people unhappy. Might have? I did.”46
The cloud over Weiner persists to this day. He had a project in development at FX in 2020. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “FX quickly came under fire for working with Weiner after word of the development deal went public.”47 In February 2022, John Landgraf confirmed that Weiner’s project was not going forward.
Back in 2002, when Weiner was laboring in sitcom hell, and AMC was airing old movies and looking for its Sopranos, The X-Files was spawning some of the talent that would go on to create Peak TV. Among them was Vince Gilligan, who was ending his stint as a regular writer and then producer. Gilligan was a screenwriting prodigy, discovered in Virginia by producer Mark Johnson, who recalled, “I just felt I’d never read a voice so original.”48 He produced two scripts Gilligan had written right out of NYU film school, Home Fries and Wilder Napalm.
Gilligan was casting about for his next gig when a friend who also worked on X-Files mentioned that he had read about a guy who made meth in his RV. Gilligan promptly wrote a script about a guy who made meth in his RV. His guy is a brilliant, self-sabotaging chemist who fumbled a chance to make billions and finds himself juggling test tubes in front of glassy-eyed, pimply high school kids in Albuquerque. He’s so poorly paid that he has to moonlight at a car wash to support his pregnant wife and son afflicted with cerebral palsy. Going from bad to worse to worst, a routine checkup turns into his death sentence: a diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer. Untreatable.
Wouldn’t that turn you on to making meth if you could? It did Walter White in Breaking Bad. Bitter and depressed, with nothing left to lose, he does what he does best, employing his considerable skills to cooking the purest crystal meth the world has ever seen, dubbed “Blue Sky,” after its trademark color. He figures that selling it will earn him the money to pay for his treatment and leave a little nest egg for his family when he’s gone. Living in the shadow of the grim reaper as he does, we feel for him. Maybe we can even root for him. As Gilligan puts it, “You say ‘I don’t like what he’s doing, but I understand, and I’ll go with it for as far as it goes.’”49
Like Shawn Ryan, like Weisberg and Fields, like Murphy, Gilligan’s ambition was to take advantage of the series format to portray someone who changes. As he was fond of saying, he wanted to take Walter White from Mr. Chips to Scarface.
Johnson arranged a meeting with Sony TV, where he had a deal. Gilligan had a meal with executives Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht. He might have been desperate, but so were they because, according to Wolynetz, “Sony was going to shut the division down.”50
Sony TV agreed to produce Breaking Bad, but found it next to impossible to find a cable company to air it. Gilligan quipped to his agent, “Why don’t you send it to the Food Network? It is a show about cooking, after all.”51 Despite its troubles, HBO often remained the first port of call for unconventional scripts, especially if you were desperate. Gilligan met with Carolyn Strauss. “I couldn’t tell whether she was loving it or hating it or even listening,” Gilligan recalls. Echoing Weiner, he complained she wouldn’t even give him a no. He continued, “They were basically like, ‘Just get out of the office, please.’”52
With HBO off the list, Sony found it a home at FX, until Landgraf dropped it in favor of Damages. It was back to square one, namely AMC. Recalls Gilligan, “Breaking Bad was dead by the time AMC came into the picture. I was emotionally moving on to other things, thinking, Well, we fought the good fight, but this show was just too damn crazy.”53
Gilligan’s agent hit AMC in the wake of Mad Men madness. Wayne read it and was ecstatic, but Sony wasn’t convinced that AMC was actually in the series business, nor was AMC, despite Mad Men. It didn’t fit the brand, whatever that was. The naysayers felt, “We could be licensing more John Wayne movies and exploiting the blue chip advertisers that Mad Men had leveraged. We don’t need to do two shows.” But Sorcher’s gang argued, “Are you nuts? You’ll have the two biggest shows on TV, you’ll look brilliant.”54 The are-you-nutsers? won, and AMC did look brilliant.
Gilligan turned to X-Files for his cast. He remembered directing Brian Cranston in a hard-to-play episode wherein the actor somehow made an anti-Semitic redneck sympathetic, much like the effect Gilligan was striving for with bad boy Walt. When Gilligan’s agent sent Cranston the script for the pilot, the actor told him, “Actors are going to want to lift their leg on this. It’s like, ‘I want to mark it. I want to spray it with my scent.’”55
Cranston was born in Southern California to a broken, downwardly mobile, lower-middle-class family. He got his start doing commercials for Preparation H, Shield Deodorant, and Coffee-Mate. He did standup and became known for dumb, off-color patter. Example: Giving free advice to car dealers afflicted with falling sales, he liked to quip, “All you have to do is name the cars after female body parts. Like, ‘The perky little Ford Nipple.’” Or, “You’ll feel the difference once you climb inside a ‘Vulva.’”56 Occasionally he got bit parts, characters who even had a line or two, until he nailed Malcolm in the Middle, which made him if not a star then at least star-adjacent.
Anna Gunn, Sheriff Tim Olyphant’s wife in Deadwood, was now Walt’s wife, Skyler. Bob Odenkirk, who had a small role in The Larry Sanders Show, plays a sleazy lawyer named Saul Goodman. He prepared by listening to a CD of Paramount head, producer Robert Evans, a charming sociopath who produced Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather, and Chinatown, reading his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture. Aaron Paul plays his partner, Jesse Pinkman.
Gilligan delivered a letter-perfect pilot. He screened it for AMC at the IFC Center in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Executive Ed Carroll greenlit it on the spot. The AMC folks went to a bar around the corner on University Place to celebrate, until Carroll announced, “When I said that you have a green light, I apparently don’t have the power to do that!”57 The celebration turned into a wake. Sorcher and Collier, et al., had to drive out to Deathpage to screen the pilot for Tom Rutledge, one of Cablevision’s senior executives. When it was over, Rutledge said, “That was very interesting. Have you heard about our new cable set-top box technology?” Then he got up and left. Sorcher screamed, “Wait a minute! What about our fucking show!?” Sorcher and Collier chased his car down the Long Island Expressway and caught him at a helipad where he was about to take a chopper to the city. Collier jumped in with him, and by the time they landed, he had talked him into it.
That was it for Sorcher. “When I realized that the company could see something like that but didn’t have—that I was going to have to go through what I just went through on Mad Men again to get it done, I realized that it was just too difficult to work that way.”58
Gilligan’s new series premiered three months after Mad Men’s first season wrapped, on January 20, 2008, and just shy of two months before The Wire ended. It was indeed controversial. Cranston quipped, “This is Breaking Bad, not Breaking Good. So the likelihood of things staying good is bad.”59
Walt started as your typical good-bad guy, but as one season followed another and he wades up to his waist in blood money, it became harder to remember the good. After furnishing him with an inciting incident we can understand, Gilligan kicks the crutch out from under him. Walt goes into remission, yet he’s still cooking up a storm, which puts him in uncharted moral territory. Can we still root for him?
The lead character, formerly known as the “hero,” was a colorless milquetoast, depressed, passive, and, worst of all, the lowest of the low, someone who destroys the lives of others for his own gain. Even Tony Soprano drew the line at drugs.
Walt chokes a man with a bicycle lock. He crosses the line that protects children, in this case by poisoning a little boy. In one particularly damning scene, he watches Jesse’s girlfriend choke on her own vomit, without lifting a finger to help her. By one count, Walt is responsible for nearly two hundred deaths. Said Gilligan, “I’ve lost sympathy for Walter White, personally.” He explained, “We want to make people question who they’re pulling for, and why.”60 Good luck!
Gilligan tried and failed to make Walt impossible to root for. Like the fans of Vic Mackey, Raylan Givens, Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen, and the Jenningses, Walt’s fans didn’t care how bad he broke; they refused to break with him. According to Robin Weigert, “Anna Gunn got a lot of hate mail from viewers who wanted her character to be a more supportive wife.”61
Breaking Bad didn’t become the instant cultural phenomenon that was Mad Men, but the reviews were raves. Stephen King rated it better than Mad Men, writing, “Your uncle Stevie may not care much for Mad Men, but he has never seen anything like Breaking Bad.” Comparing it to The Shield and The Sopranos, he added, “Thank God for basic cable, if it can produce programming as strange and compelling as this.”62
Still, by the summer of 2010, AMC was ready to call it quits, telling Gilligan that Season 3 would be its last. Sony quickly found several services that offered to back two more seasons, and AMC reversed itself. Then something happened. The first half of Season 5 premiered in 2012 to 2.6 million, but the finale of the second half of Season 5 aired on September 29, 2013, and jumped to a remarkable 10.28 million viewers, despite going head to head with Sunday Night Football, Homeland, Boardwalk Empire, and premieres of the scripted network shows. That episode ranked third in the history of cable finales, behind The Sopranos and Sex and the City.
What happened? Netflix happened!
All in all, party crashers like FX and AMC were doing HBO’s job better than HBO was. Moreover, halfway into the first decade of the new century, the purveyors of DVDs—not only Blockbuster, but Walmart, and Amazon—were trying to impersonate Netflix by developing algorithms of their own to predict users’ viewing habits, but they were notoriously prone to error. A red-faced Walmart had to disable its proprietary algorithm when it pointed customers looking for content related to Black History Month to Planet of the Apes. Netflix had a brush with death when Viacom invested a billion dollars in Blockbuster. Hastings thought, Uh-oh, we’re dead. They’re going to take over streaming and kill us. Instead, they used the money to open new stores! The CEO quit, sold his stock, and invested in Netflix.
Hastings faced a daunting task. He had to build a library that took legacy studios decades to create, while at the same time producing a steady stream of originals. He also wanted to free his algorithm, Cinematch, from the crude ratings system by which customers made their preferences known. He was so obsessed by the viewing habits of those customers that one Christmas he sequestered himself in his Park City chalet with his algorithm during a skiing vacation, ignoring his children and deaf to his wife’s complaints.
Netflix found that individual film selection was a less reliable predictor of future purchases than groups of films selected, that is, “taste clusters.” Whatever they shared in common was what customers wanted. By 2005, Hastings had so refined its algorithms that he claimed they could predict within “a 10% range whether a movie will be a hit with a subscriber.”63 Tossing William Goldman’s old adage—“Nobody knows anything”—out the window, he replaced it with “Our algorithms know everything.”
Just as important, if not more so, than rating viewers’ tastes was coming up with the most effective way to deliver the films. Apple’s iTunes had been streaming music practically from Y2K, and Hastings had had streaming in his sights almost from the start, but was waiting for the moment when, as Ted Sarandos put it, “Streaming economics made more sense than the postal economics,” which is say, it was cheaper to stream than to mail. That moment came in 2007—the same year HBO said goodbye to The Sopranos and Albrecht, AMC premiered Mad Men, and about 50 percent of American households had broadband access. Netflix membership ballooned to 31 million. Hastings boasted to Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “We are to cable networks as cable networks were to broadcast networks.”64 To him, they were horse and buggies.
The pipeline was ready, but there was precious little to push through it. Netflix started its streaming service offering subscribers no more than a paltry six thousand titles. Initially, the old-line studios refused to license their wares to Netflix, invoking the specter of digital piracy. As they were at the dawn of TV in the 1950s, they were wary that the new technology would enable their golden goose to lay its eggs in baskets other than their own. Moreover, the premium cablers had already locked up the best of the new titles in long-term deals. Hastings found himself at the end of a lengthy queue.
The content dam finally broke in 2008 when Netflix paid Starz $25 million in licensing fees for 2,500 movies and series over four years that included Sony and Disney shows. One financial analyst called it one of the “dumbest deals ever.”65 In 2010, Netflix signed a deal with Epix, and then again in early 2011 with CBS and ABC, to stream TV hits like Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, and Desperate Housewives.
The Netflix formula was simple: spend its way to profit. As summarized by Sarandos, it was, “More shows, more watching; more watching, more subs; more subs, more revenue; more revenue, more content.”66
Netflix’s business model had always seemed wonky, so much so that many players, not just Bewkes, expected the company to collapse under its own weight. It borrowed $16 billion in fewer than ten years to create its content library. Says Soderbergh, “Netflix may end up being the Theranos of the entertainment industry.”67 Vulture’s Josef Adalian, a dedicated Netflix watcher, quoted one analyst saying, “A wise investor once remarked to us, ‘If Jesus were a stock, he’d be Netflix. You either believe or you don’t.’”68
Meanwhile, Albrecht, now at Starz, was convinced that he would be slitting his own throat by allowing Netflix members to see Starz’s shows without paying for a Starz subscription. He was one of the few who realized early on that Netflix was more likely to be an enemy than a friend. As that deal neared its end in 2011, Netflix upped its offer to renew. Albrecht, calling the previous deal “awful,” not only demanded ten times as much from the service, but also required that Netflix subscribers pay an add-on over and above the $8 per month subscription fee. Netflix refused, and the deal lapsed in 2012. As Bewkes predicted, the Albanian army didn’t have the resources to pony up $250 million to Starz, so in 2013 about 1,800 titles disappeared from the Netflix library.
