Pandora's Box, page 18
Kohan’s relationship with Showtime was fraught. Premium cable or not, it had its limits, and she chafed under them. Reminiscent of the network rule that allowed characters to utter “Jesus” and “Christ,” but not together, “We could show the dildo and we could show the lube,” she recalled, “but we couldn’t show her applying the lube to the dildo.”21 Kohan complains, “Executives, especially Bob Greenblatt,” were unhappy with the warp and woof of her characters, especially the warp, and sent Kohan countless script notes. She recalls, “I’d write back note by note for pages. Finally, he wrote back a terse email that said, ‘Fine, do what you want.’”22
Kohan and Parker were like oil and water. They rarely spoke to each other directly, but communicated through a “talent whisperer.” In an exchange Kohan might have written herself, Parker, having thrown a script at her, screamed, “My mother can’t watch this!” Kohan responded, “I don’t write for your mother.”23 In one scene that caused an uproar, Parker is taking a bath. She was quoted saying, “I didn’t think I needed to be naked, and I fought with the director about it, and now I’m bitter. I knew it was going to be on the Internet: ‘Mary-Louise shows off her big nipples.’ I wish I hadn’t done that. I was goaded into it.”24 Their relationship was so acrimonious that Greenblatt cc’d Kohan, probably by mistake, on an email saying he was going to have to fire her. Her response was characteristic: “Good luck with that,” and as the show grew and grew, all was forgotten.25
Unlike Chase and later Vince Gilligan, she didn’t aspire to make her show look like a movie. She wasn’t interested in 360-degree pans, or shots of leaves blowing in the breeze. All she cared about was mouths speaking her words. “This isn’t a director’s medium!” she said. “I’m the auteur in television.”26
Weeds unleashed a gusher of female-driven, bad-good girl shows, including Secret Diary of a Call Girl in 2007. At a screening, Matt Blank, Showtime CEO, made a joke at the expense of his erstwhile rival Albrecht, who was in the audience with Karla Jensen, the woman whose neck he troubled in Las Vegas: “I know it sounds like the secret diary of Chris Albrecht. But it isn’t!”27 Albrecht had no choice but to laugh. Call Girl was followed by United States of Tara, in which Toni Collette is afflicted with multiple personalities; Nurse Jackie, in which Edie Falco is afflicted with addiction; and The Big C, in which Laura Linney is afflicted with cancer.
In 2006, Greenblatt had aired Dexter, where Michael C. Hall—whom he featured in Six Feet Under—played yet another good-bad guy. He is a blood splatter analyst for the Miami PD by day and a serial killer by night. Unfulfilled by counting crimson stains on walls and windows, he kills killers who slip through the gaps in the loosely woven net cast by the criminal justice system. It turned into a hit.
Greenblatt’s accomplishments did not go unnoticed. NBC hired him away in 2010, and he was succeeded by David Nevins, late of NBC and Fox, and then Imagine Television, where he supervised Arrested Development, Friday Night Lights, and 24. Every new chief executive likes to put his or her (mostly his) stamp on the programming, and Nevins was no different. Greenblatt was known for shows that featured females with failings or, as Nevins put it, “psychological oddities.”28 Greenblatt says, “David wanted to take the programming into more of a male-appeal direction.” 29
Nevertheless, Nevins knew a good thing when he saw it, and when he inherited Weeds, which was then in its fifth season, he left Kohan alone, which made him, she says, “my favorite kind of executive.”30 Still, good as it was, there’s only so much dope you can sell in the Valley. Nevins pulled the plug after eight seasons in 2012.
HBO, meanwhile, was still stalled in a post-Albrecht midlife crisis. Almost lost amid its bloated development slate was an American version of the hit British show called Shameless, created by Paul Abbott and based on his own appalling childhood growing up poor (and bipolar) in Burnley, a town north of Manchester. When he became famous, he says a relative tried to sell his medical records to the press.31
John Wells, a megaproducer (ER, West Wing), took it to HBO, but even he got ground up by their ponderous process, and Greenblatt remembers him complaining, “I’ve had a very slow and frustrating development experience with this at HBO, and I’d love you to consider doing it.”32 Greenblatt snapped it up, and Nevins aired it in 2011.
Shameless is set in a seedy neighborhood in Chicago’s famously seedy South Side. It offers an all-you-can-eat buffet of social issues, not only same-sex relationships, but addiction, to both alcohol and drugs; poverty; broken homes; gentrification; racism; sexism; crime; you name it, all within the confines of a family, however dysfunctional, whose members actually care for one another. It features Emmy Rossum as Fiona, the moral center of the family, the eldest who raises a brood of kids in the absence of their feckless father, Frank Gallagher (Bill Macy), a drunken bum who uses the gutter as a bed.
Like Weeds, Shameless waged relentless war on middle-class proprieties. It telegraphed its bad attitude with its outrageous title sequence, set in the Gallagher bathroom that serves seven people. As “The Luck You Got” blares on the soundtrack, each Gallagher does his and her thing in turn: Frank is passed out in front of the toilet bowl and has to be dragged away by Fiona so that she can shimmy off her black panties, pee, and exit, to be replaced by Ian, who jerks off to porn, then makes way for toddler Liam to dip his toothbrush into the toilet before brushing. Next, somebody or other pees in the sink, and then another somebody or other pulls down his pants and fornicates with Fiona on said sink, which we observe from our ringside rearview shot. Nothing, in other words, is too, er, shameful to find a home on Shameless.
In The Atlantic, John Hendel called it “white-trash porn.”33 Indeed, poverty serves as a springboard for the clever scams the Gallaghers employ to stick it to the Man. Just as 007 has a license to kill, the Gallaghers have a license to steal, lie, and sucker the professionals and institutions of the bourgeois world—the cops, courts, doctors, hospitals, social workers, schools—that have been the traditional subjects of network veneration and to a lesser extent cable. In that sense the show breaks ground. It is anarchic and subversive, but the stakes aren’t real. When Frank needs a new liver and can’t afford it, he doesn’t die; his nurse falls in love with him, and he gets a new one. Poverty is portrayed as freedom, and freedom is fun. Although the characters are sometimes shown working at real jobs, they’re hardly the working poor. They are, to underline the obvious, the playing poor. Although unavoidable, given the premise, it’s poverty as entertainment.
Despite its faults, Shameless more than worked. Over the course of eleven seasons, according to one estimate, across all platforms, it averaged 6.14 million viewers per episode.
The first show Nevins greenlit when he succeeded Greenblatt at Showtime in 2011 was Homeland, the American incarnation of an Israeli series called Hatufim, aka Prisoners of War, a twisty, intricately wrought show about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Agent Rick Rosen, representing the Israeli production company Keshet, saw that Prisoners of War had potential for American audiences.
When Rosen got back to LA he called Howard Gordon, who co-wrote and executive-produced 24 and whom Nevins had supervised when he was at Imagine and Fox. 24 was just winding up. Rosen said, “I have your next show.”34 Gordon had hired Alex Gansa to work on the last two seasons of 24 and he recruited Gansa for the new show.
“There were a number of things about Hatufim that were appealing to us,” Gansa recalls. “24 was a fantasy show born in the wake of 9/11. And here we were, ten years later, with a completely different perspective about how America had responded to the towers coming down. There was no show on television about what was happening in Afghanistan or what was happening in Iraq. There was no show about returning soldiers, about the cost of those wars.”
24 was huge, and they were huge with it, but even they knew that if they submitted it to HBO, they would be competing for attention with the likes of Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Aaron Sorkin, Steven Soderbergh, et al. There was only so much love to go around.
“We just felt that our chances were going to be better at a place that was going to look at the material for what it was, rather than who was bringing the project,” explains Gansa. “I had been developing at HBO for a couple of years, and I knew the mountain that you had to climb there, the people that you were competing against, and frankly the star-fucking that goes on.”35 In other words, times had changed. The not-TV cabler was experiencing the aftershocks from the landmines it had planted beneath itself during its “schmuck insurance” days: angry writers who saw their projects languishing, and while they collected development fees, their take-home was nowhere near as much as it would have been had their scripts actually been produced.
Moreover, HBO didn’t play well with studios. “It used to be,” says HBO’s Quentin Schaffer, “we could get shows even if we didn’t offer the most money.”36 Now, agents like Rosen bypassed HBO. Not even getting a chance to bid on Homeland was a slap in the face. Plepler and Lombardo were pissed and puzzled. According to Schaffer, they asked Rosen, “Why didn’t you offer this to us? We loved 24.” Rosen responded, “You guys have this reputation of always wanting to own everything. And I’m in business with a studio, Fox, and they’re producing this, so you’re not going to own it, and I know Showtime doesn’t care.” Moreover, Gordon had a big, expensive long-term deal with Fox. He hadn’t come up with a show since 24, and as one insider puts it, it was like the gloves were off: “Dude, make a fucking show!”37
Nevins was in his first week at Showtime. “Rick Rosen called me up and said, ‘Hey, you know that show that Alex and Howard are working on? I think it could be good for Showtime,’”38 except that it was dark, troubling, and hard to watch—exactly what Nevins was looking for. Plus, he had developed 24 with Gordon at Imagine Television. He grabbed it. Despite his reputation and track record, he spent the first year and a half hearing unflattering comparisons between himself and his revered predecessor, Greenblatt.
“Twentieth wasn’t jumping up and down to be in business with Showtime because Showtime was notorious for spending as little money as possible,” says Nevins. He cleverly turned that to his advantage. “We didn’t have enough money to stockpile shows,” he explains, “so I always said, ‘We are hard to sell to, but once you sell to us, you’ve got a good chance of getting it made.’” He told Gordon and Gansa, “If you give me this show, I’ll order it to pilot right now,” something no cabler and certainly no network ever did.
It seemed that Homeland was falling into place. But there were two big problems. Americans were getting tired of the “forever war” in Afghanistan, while Bush’s adventure in Iraq had been a fiasco. And with Dick Cheney gone, CIA agents were no longer getting their jollies from waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation,” a signature sport of 24. Like Weisberg, Fields, and Yost on The Americans, explains Nevins, “Howard and Alex were very interested in differentiating from Jack Bauer.” The most obvious step was turning Jack Bauer into a woman, Carrie Mathison. The second was that they gave her a bipolar disorder. “We didn’t want to make Carrie a totally reliable narrator,” explains Nevins. “You don’t necessarily believe her, and she doesn’t necessarily trust herself. It turned out to be a very powerful idea for a thriller. Compared to 24, Homeland was on another level of psychological complexity.”
Carrie’s manic depression was an implausible conceit, but one that at least made metaphorical sense, reflecting “how the United States was of two minds about everything,” Gansa explains. “Our view of the counterterrorism endeavor was just much, much, much more critical than 24’s, which was just wish fulfillment. If Jack Bauer was a superhero, then Carrie Mathison was an anti-hero.”39
The second problem was that Gordon and Gansa had their hearts set on Claire Danes, so much so that when they wrote the first draft of the first episode of the pilot, the name of the character was Claire. Danes was uniquely suited to rendering a condition like bipolarity. Unlike a lot of pert-nosed Barbies who starred in most shows, her features aren’t fixed in plaster of paris. Emotions flicker across her face like the sun darting in and out of clouds. She is especially adept at rendering anguish, as she did in her breakthrough series, My So-Called Life, and would do again in the extraordinary seventh episode of the FX/Hulu series Fleishman Is in Trouble. But some commentators made fun of it—Fiona Sturges wrote in The Guardian that it “retains the stricken look of a woman who has 10 seconds to get to a bathroom.”40 Worse, Nevins didn’t want her.
“We’re doing this with Claire Danes,” retorted Gordon and Gansa, and that was that. Ben Salkin, president of the Fox 21 production company, didn’t want Damien Lewis, and said, “Never mention his name again.”41 But Lewis, too, was hired, proving what—lots of executives know nothing?
It was evident that unless they really screwed up, the pilot would go to series. Homeland premiered on October 2, 2011, attracting 2.8 million viewers, a record for Showtime. The show swept the 2012 Emmys, with an award for Best Drama, as well as trophies for Danes, Lewis, Gansa, and Gordon.
The writers were aided and abetted by “spy camp,” a periodic confab between them and fifty-odd CIA officers and journalists. The Homeland folks asked, “What keeps you up at night?”42 Gansa remembers, “The first thing we got was a litany of everything we got wrong: ‘We don’t talk on our cell phones. We don’t operate on American soil. Carrie would have to take blood tests, so the medication would come up.’”43
The meetings were surreal. Recalls Gansa, “We had [Bush’s CIA head] George Tenet coming up one stair, and Dana Priest, who wrote a bunch of books critical of the intelligence community, going down the other stair because you couldn’t have them meet since they just were at such odds with each other. Once Trump was elected president, those two camps were suddenly on the same side.”44
In one such meeting, at the exclusive City Tavern Club in Georgetown, another Pulitzer-winning journalist, Bart Gellman, said he was bringing a guest. He opened his laptop, dialed a number, and there on the screen was Edward Snowden, hitherto on the run, chattering away from Moscow. Former deputy director of the CIA’s clandestine division, John McGaffin, who had no love for Snowden, prompted Gansa to say, “‘There’s a senior intelligence officer here, and he thinks he knows what’s going to happen to you.’ Snowden is all, ‘What do you mean?’” Recalls McGaffin, “I made Alex say, ‘Sooner or later, when they’ve gotten everything out of you, Putin is going to have you killed and make it look like the Americans did it.’ I hope[d] he didn’t sleep for weeks.”45
As the seasons fled by, Homeland became a fat target for both the left and the right. The left attacked it, of course, for demonizing Pakistanis, Afghanis, and Muslims in general, all portrayed as al-Qaeda dupes. The cleverest and most widely reported sally came from German graffiti artists hired to make a fictional Syrian refugee camp look more authentic. In Season 5, Episode 2, they tagged walls with Arabic slogans that said, “Homeland is racist,” among other things. Of course, none of the Homeland gang could read them.
Gansa, who by this time had begun to believe that Homeland was indeed racist, was delighted. He recalls, “That is the greatest thing that could have happened. We always imagined that Homeland was a subversive show. I mean, the whole first season was all about putting an audience on the side of an American Muslim and justifying his terrorist acts. I was thrilled. I said, ‘This is going to get us front-page news everywhere.’”46
Homeland lasted for eight seasons. Gordon and Gansa knew that saying goodbye could be hard to do, but they managed an electric finale that even eclipsed that of The Americans. It’s shocking to see the increasingly disillusioned Carrie at the end of the last season in the same state as Lewis’s Brody in the first season, apparently defecting to the other side.
In one scene, having lived in Russia for two years, Carrie is pictured comfortably seated next to her lover, Soviet agent Gromov, at a Moscow jazz concert in Stalin Hall, even though hints of their mutual attraction had been sprinkled about like bread crumbs throughout the previous episodes. Afterward, perhaps the happy couple will hook up with Marsha and the Jenningses, not to mention Snowden, passing the time watching bootleg copies of The Americans and Homeland while collecting their residuals in rubles. She has even written what appears to be an exposé of American espionage—Tyranny of Secrets: Why I Had to Betray My Country. But then Carrie is off to the post office to send Saul (Mandy Patinkin), her CIA handler, a copy of her not-quite tell-all, with a little Easter egg hidden in the binding—and we know she’s playing the long game, acting out an elaborate double switch. So far as endings go, we’d have to wait for Succession to beat it.
With Homeland, Showtime had found its groove. Recalls Nevins, “Homeland was the ‘It’ show. It really was the end of Showtime’s inferiority complex with regard to HBO, which I hated.”47
Satisfying though it might have been to beat HBO at its own game, and outstanding as Homeland was, by 2011 Showtime was still playing catch-up with AMC, that lowly basic cable channel with its down-market hit, The Walking Dead. Both services passed on it with their noses in the air, but both must have been pleased to watch AMC entangled in a high-profile and expensive bunch of lawsuits with the creatives who made the show.
Veteran writer Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) developed The Walking Dead, based on a popular graphic novel by Robert Kirkman, for NBC. Darabont got nowhere with the networks. But when he took it to the usual suspects, only AMC bit and premiered it on Halloween, 2010. Right out of the gate, it was a hit. The first episode drew 5.3 million viewers, and it was off and running from there. Five years later, it was averaging 15.8 million viewers an episode, making it one of the highest-rated scripted shows on television.
Despite its startling success, however, it appeared that AMC was cheapening out on it. For the second season, it insisted that Darabont double the number of episodes—from six to twelve—for three-quarters of the first season’s budget. At one point the cabler suggested, for example, that the zombies be heard, not seen, kept off-camera so it could save money on makeup.
