Pandora's Box, page 22
Finally, the show strays from the straight and narrow by heroizing misfits, those who are customarily stigmatized as freaks or weirdos at the expense of heteronormative characters. Outsiders become insiders. Girls who behave like men, like Arya, who today we might call pre-trans, are ennobled, while femme men who behave like girls are advisors to heads of state. Drunks like Tyrion aren’t dispatched to AA; they become the Hands (counsels) to kings. Some women may be mothers, but they are mothers of dragons, and warriors.
Between the premiere of Game of Thrones in 2011 and the finale in 2019, the per-episode cost rose from around $6 million to $15 million, while HBO’s operating income rose by almost $500 million. Its domestic subscriber base grew a hefty 16 percent. All the hairline cracks and crevices in the edifice that was HBO were concealed by the veneer of the show’s success until the controversial final season.
Meanwhile, Lombardo, despite the broken handshake, had continued to romance Fincher. He signed him up for two shows. One was Videosyncracy, a half-hour comedy set in the LA music scene of the ’80s. A handful of episodes had been shot before HBO pulled the plug in 2015. The other was a fast-moving, intricate thriller called Utopia, based on a British series. The scripts were written by the red hot Gillian Flynn, whose novel Gone Girl Fincher had turned into a hit. Utopia already had a series order, and was reportedly a month into rehearsals when HBO pulled out, also in 2015.
Mocking the HBO programming executives, and probably referring to Lombardo, Fincher echoed Wolynetz, saying, “There are a lot of people in that position, deciding how they’re going to spend tens of millions of dollars, who I describe as the Chihuahua inside a car with the windows rolled up on a hot summer’s day. They are people who react to this situation with incessant trembling and dyspepsia.”81 Fincher avoided HBO, at least for the moment, and took Joe Penhall’s serial-killer series, Mindhunter, to Netflix, where it became a hit.
With the entire drama division in disarray—drama head Michael Ellenberg was out by January 2016—Lombardo named Casey Bloys to replace him. How Bloys, a kid from Lehigh, Pennsylvania, had navigated HBO’s venomous internal politics for so long is another story. The short version is that he “played his politics by being apolitical, which was brilliant, in a subtle way,” says Schaffer. “By doing so, he never posed a threat to Lombardo. All he would hear from people was ‘Casey’s great,’ and he was.”82 First he developed HBO’s series of hit comedies, then dramas. It didn’t hurt that he was not a screamer. Moreover there was no superstar candidate inside the company, and HBO did not have much luck bringing in outsiders.
In April 2016, Lombardo confessed that he didn’t have a clue as to what would replace Game of Thrones—not to mention Vinyl, which was winding up its first and, as it turned out, only season. After Vinyl imploded, Plepler invited Terry Winter to dinner. Winter recalls, “When we got through with the how’s-the-family stuff, he said, ‘I want you to very frankly walk me through what you see as the dysfunction of HBO.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’” Winter unloaded his Vinyl stories on Plepler. Plepler thanked him for his candor, and, as Winter tells it, “Literally ten days later Lombardo was fired.”83
Bloys was the last man standing. The first thing he did was address the insane number of projects HBO had accumulated. “There was a lot of development, a lot of buying, much more so than we ever would have been able to produce, hundreds of scripts,” he says. “I tried to spin that all out. Basically, get the drama group together and say, ‘What are you working on that you’re just doing just because somebody bought it as a favor? What did you buy defensively?’ Because if we passed on something, we would not allow the writer to take it to any of our competitors. Let’s try to get real about what we’re doing here and be honest with people and give scripts back and let them take them elsewhere. There’s this old saying: ‘The best answer is a yes. The second best answer is a fast no.’ People just wanted to know where they stood. That really helped our relationships in town when we stopped buying so much.”84
Bloys had no skin in Vinyl, which was still on the table. Killing it wasn’t an easy call, given the starry names behind the camera, but the numbers were against it: the ratings were low, and $100 million was a lot of money, slightly less than half the budget for The Pacific, and in Vinyl there were no battles for Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and so on. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones was growing more and more expensive. The sixth season was shot in five different countries and cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million to $80 million. In June 2016, Bloys said to Plepler, “Look, even if you get it right, couldn’t the amount of money we’re going to spend on Season 2 of Vinyl be better spent elsewhere?”85 The answer was yes. It wasn’t a popular decision. As Bloys put it, “It did not resonate well in my building.”86 Winter was out as of April 8, 2016.
The end of Vinyl was not the end of the world. Even Coulter admits, “Looking back, people in general did not like the show. They didn’t like Bobby Cannavale’s character. We couldn’t see that, because we were inside it. In that sense, I guess Mike and Mick can say to themselves, ‘We were right.’ I don’t know why it didn’t work, except for this undercurrent of negativism [that] was coming from HBO and one of the creators of the show. It’s not a great vibe to work in, but Terry was into the show, and we all did the best we could.”87
More important, it marked the end of HBO’s relationship with a circle of talent that was largely responsible for much of its golden age. Justified or not, by putting Vinyl out of its misery, HBO slammed the door on the Sopranos era.
Winter had another year left on his deal, but he was bitter and exhausted. Bloys said, “Let’s do another series.” Winter replied, “I just spent years pushing this rock up the hill to give you a Marty Scorsese–Mick Jagger series, and I don’t have another series in me right now.”88
Bloys was anxious to introduce more diversity into HBO Max’s lily-white programming. Enter a raw, raunchy, and racy show called Insecure, a full-blown version of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, a series of 25 ten-minute internet episodes self-produced by Issa Rae for $56,000, much of which she raised on Kickstarter. It went viral, gaining an estimated 20 million views. It attracted just under two hundred thousand subscribers, enough to get the attention of Bloys and his comedy executive Amy Gravitt in 2013. They gave her a half-hour show to do more, much more, on a real budget. Rae co-produced (with Larry Wilmore), co-wrote (with Wilmore), show-ran (by herself), and starred.
Insecure is set in that netherland when young adults are not only insecure but unmoored, drifting between college and careers, flirtations and marriages, and boy or girl friends. In this case, there’s the added burden of having to negotiate a world without color.
The first season wasn’t easy. Rae recalls, “HBO was not feeling the latest draft and I was losing Larry. I was like, ‘This isn’t going to happen for me, and I just did all of this for nothing.’” She continues, “I’m going to put everything that I’m going through out on the table in this pilot. If they say no, at least I tried, and fuck it.”89
Easily recognizable for her red-ish, black-ish hair piled on top of her head at a dangerous angle, and a mouthful of dazzling white teeth that she displays in a signature cheek-to-cheek smile, Rae was born Jo-Issa Diop. She is one of five children of a Senegalese father and an American mother from Louisiana, who got together when they were both students in France and became a doctor and teacher, respectively. Rae calls herself “Halfrican.”
Awkward had its roots in her childhood, when she was shuffled about by her itinerant parents from Senegal to Los Angeles to Potomac, Maryland, and back to South LA. A fish out of water in white Potomac, she was again odd girl out in Black LA, where she was considered too uncool-for-school, insufficiently dark by her teenage peers, lacking as she was in familiarity with their cultural totems. The nadir came, apparently, when rapper Tupac Shakur was shot to death in 1996. She had no idea who he was or even how to pronounce his name, and failed to register the shock it caused among her friends. Determined to catch up, she plunged into Black music and the few Black TV shows that were on the air, but the feeling that she was Ms. In-Between left her uncomfortable in her own skin. She turned this to her advantage in Awkward Black Girl and then again in Insecure, where she’s too Black for white people and too white for Black people.
Not to detract from its originality, which is considerable, Insecure is a verbally acrobatic high-wire act drawing on HBO comedies-so-white like Sex and the City and Girls, darkened by the lacerating humor of Curb Your Enthusiasm, all filtered through a Black lens. It bows in the direction of Queen Latifah, Nia Long, Sanaa Lathan, and series like Moesha and Girlfriends. With a stunning music track courtesy of Solange, it’s safe to say that there has never been anything on cable quite like Insecure at its best.
The series focuses on Issa Dee (Rae) and her friends, a small group of twentysomething young Black women navigating life, love, and work in Los Angeles. It has some fun at the expense of well- and not-so-well-meaning white folks with their knee-jerk racism, to which they are, of course, all too oblivious. As Rae puts it, her character, Dee, spends a lot of her time “watching white people dictate what’s best for black people,” but mercifully not too much time, because it’s a target that’s just too easy to hit.90
Rae’s goal was “trying to convey that people of color are relatable,” she says. “This is not a hood story. This is about regular people living life.”91 Generally, Black roles have either been “focused on specific struggle stories, or we’re just side characters, or we’re just supernatural, and there was never any real in between,” Rae explains. “White people get to have scenes with them just washing their hands and thinking. We don’t get that shit.”92
The first few seasons are consumed by the ups and downs of the love lives of Dee and her friends, who couple and uncouple with regularity. Despite its specificity, Rae succeeds in making this material irresistible to people bleached of color, partly because we come to care about the characters, but also because it’s so damn funny. The highlight of Season 1 comes when a collection of young kids in a class Rae is running discover she has done a rap about her best friend Molly (Yvonne Orji), who constantly complains about her sex life. It’s called “Broken Pussy.” They disrupt the class and embarrass her by chanting riffs: “Maybe it’s really rough, Maybe it had enough . . . Broken pussy . . .”
Rae dissects relationships with surgical finesse, both female and male, the latter ranging from casual click-a-dick encounters to all-consuming ones. Her former boyfriend picks up some stuff he left at her house when he moved out. They have quick sex and he exits, leaving Issa confused. “What kind of fuck was it?” asks Molly. “Was it like a ‘We back together’ fuck, or a ‘Fuck you fuck’?” Issa: “I don’t know. It was a nebulous fuck.”
Given the prickliness of her characters, relationships take up a lot of screen time. One of the things she does so well, however, is refuse to be trapped or limited by them, so effectively does she dramatize the 1960s slogan, “The personal is political.” It can segue into feminism, race, and class issues in the blink of an eye, and she handles it all with potty-mouthed aplomb, sans preaching. In one scene, Molly and Issa complain about the lack of men in their lives:
Molly: “One day I looked over, my dick meter was all the way on E.”
Issa: “Join the club, bitch. Dick on E. Bank account on E. Life on E.”
Politics lie just beneath the surface, and show up as if by accident, as when Issa pulls off a sweater over her head revealing, briefly, a T-shirt emblazoned with fbi killed fred hampton. In another scene, she walks a few blocks of her old, largely Black neighborhood, Inglewood, and sees her favorite stores boarded up to make way for gentrification. Alive as always to the absurdities and contradictions of her politics, she says, “I want the benefits of gentrification without the gents.”93 She adds, “When I’m driving to work on Crenshaw seeing a Black woman” use the sidewalk for a bathroom “because she doesn’t have a home, and she’s not being cared for, and people just drive by—we can get used to stuff like this, and I want to do my part because I don’t want to get used to it.” She adds, “I want to be able to expand my footprint outside of the industry; I want to make an impact, to combat gentrification, to help combat homelessness in the city.”94
Then, of course, there’s the patriarchy, which is color blind, not in a good way. When Molly discovers that her law firm is paying her less than her white male colleagues who are at the same level she is, she asks for a raise. Instead, the smarmy white partners give her a ridiculous certificate of merit. She defects to a Black firm, only to face the same—sexism of another color.
Molly adopts a different strategy to even the scales. “I’m not one of these pay-me-half-as-much type bitches. That’s why I make sure my white clients get less on their tax returns. It’s reparations. I feel like Robin Hood. That’s what I marched for . . . to do shit to white people.”
Rae probably could have gone anywhere after Insecure, but she remains grateful to HBO for giving her a shot. “That first season, I was scared as hell,” she recalls, explaining, “because the ratings on it were dry then, and they’re very aware of being a subscription-based model.” She continues, “[But] they’ve never pulled us to the side, ‘Can you explain this first because the audience . . .’ They don’t care about your broad appeal, which is why I also wanted to make a home with them.” She signed a five-year deal with Time Warner reportedly worth $40 million, and at one time has had fifteen new shows in development at HBO and HBO Max.
Rae is building a not-so-modest empire for herself—actually, not for herself so much as others. She wants Black performers and producers to put down roots in the entertainment business because she’s seen them get hot and then go cold when everything is “ripped from under us because we don’t have the control.”95 She defines “roots” as permanence, longevity, “still being here. Alfre Woodard–ness. Denzel-ness, because he belongs to Black people and has never denied who he is and his roots. There’s a legacy there, just realizing your worth. Also, seeing how little these white people care about asking for more than they’re worth in many cases. You can’t be polite, or tiptoe, or be modest about those things.”96
Part III
Stream or Die
9
Netflix’s Albanian Army
In 2013, using House of Cards as a wedge, Netflix disrupted linear TV with streaming, while Amazon dipped its big toe in the water.
Not satisfied with upending the cable applecart with its two-season buy, Netflix turned around and dropped the entire first season of House of Cards at once, all thirteen episodes, thereby further scandalizing both the networks and cablers by discarding the old watercooler model that drip, drip, dripped out shows one episode at a time. “With House of Cards, when we put up all thirteen, I had every TV executive in Hollywood tell me what a moronic thing I was doing,” Sarandos recalls. “They insisted, ‘You have to stretch it out, you have to keep them waiting for more, you have to keep them hungry.’”1
Sarandos, however, remembered that way back when he worked in a video store, his customers swallowed whole seasons of The Sopranos on DVD. So-called binge-watching completed the transformation cable had started when it had made it possible for viewers not only to choose what they wished to watch, but when they wished to watch, and how much.
Watercooler conversations would go the way of watercoolers, to be supplanted by social media, with an eventual boost from the pandemic that forced fans to work remotely. Nevertheless, a spate of hysterical studies appeared likening binge-watching to drug addiction, and citing ancillary disorders like increased smoking, weight gain, muscle loss, sleep deprivation, attention deficit, and dopamine flooding, accompanied by anxiety and a sense of loss when a series ends—everything, that is, short of suicide.
Bingeing was indeed addictive, or “immersive,” the term its fans preferred. In words that would come back to haunt him, in 2017, when he was riding high, Hastings boasted that Netflix’s most formidable enemy was sleep.
Sarandos and Hastings ignored the doomsayers and tried to normalize bingeing by comparing it to reading novels. “When you buy a book,” said Hastings, “it’s not remarkable that you’re allowed to read three chapters one night, and five chapters the next night.”2
There’s no question that bingeing changed the way stories were told for the better. Many of the shows of HBO’s golden age, given the opportunity to exploit story arcs, didn’t take it. They subordinated plot to character, which was another reason David Chase was so cavalier about loose ends. As we have seen, his attitude was that closure was for fairy tales and network TV, where everyone lives happily ever after. He didn’t care about that. What he did care about, and what we remember, are the sharply etched characters: Tony, Carmela, Livia, Christopher, Uncle Junior, et al.
Streaming, and bingeing in particular, revived season-long and even series-long story arcs that allowed us to have story and character at the same time. Moreover, whereas network gospel dictated, “Don’t confuse the viewer,” eliminating the intervening week between episodes meant they could fracture their narratives. They used flashbacks, flashforwards, and even flashsideways to begin episodes without totally disorienting viewers.
The practice even spread to services that released episodes the old way, once a week. Fans, say, of Showtime’s Yellowjackets, Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters, or Netflix’s Queen Charlotte could hop between two alternating time frames, past and present. Netflix boasts that Kaleidoscope offers a non-linear streaming experience, wherein episodes are designated by colors, not numbers. Different viewers see them in different orders.
