The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Breaking Bad: what do they all have in common? They were American drama series produced by cable channels and created by driven characters with an unbending vision. They were also exceptionally good.
According to American film journalist Peter Biskind’s new book, those shows formed the centrepiece of a golden era of US TV that burnt brightly in the first decade of this century and then fell victim to economics and ego.
Biskind is best known for his 1998 book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which told the tale of another golden era, that of American movies of the 1970s, and the seamy excess it engendered. The celebrated screenwriter Robert Towne once told me that he thought Biskind should be “horsewhipped” for what he wrote.
His latest book, Pandora’s Box, is subtitled The Greed, Lust, and Lies that Broke Television, which suggests that it’s another helping of the same sensational flavour. But while there’s plenty of misbehaviour, it’s not quite as louche as his look at the 1970s.
The great TV of the 2000s came about as a consequence of a change in the business model. “The networks had pretty much reached a dead end,” says Biskind in a Zoom call from his home in upstate New York.
The big networks in America were dependent on advertisers, who didn’t want their products associated with controversy, moral complexity or authentic depictions of sex or violence. That was a recipe for bland content, which was what they largely delivered. Towards the end of the last century, cable TV, a subscription service that had no need of advertisers or US censors, began to assert itself.
“And the transmission apparatus was privately owned, so the Federal Communications Commission had no jurisdiction over it,” says Biskind. “That meant cable was able to address all those areas that the networks weren’t able to cover.”
It also offered an outlet to writers and directors who had felt hamstrung. The most obvious case was David Chase, a talented writer who had spent decades labouring away on safe network shows. When he had an idea for a show about a gangster with panic attacks, the networks duly turned him down.
So he went to HBO, which funded him to make The Sopranos, and the rest is TV history. Except that would make for a short book. Biskind delves deeper and focuses on what it takes to be the showrunner of an internationally acclaimed drama that ran for 86 episodes over eight years.
“As The Sopranos became more and more popular, becoming a phenomenon, he felt more and more pressure,” he says.
“Every season was a new challenge and it had to surpass the previous season. So he didn’t lighten up. If anything, he got more depressed and difficult to deal with.”
Chase is characterised as a tortured figure, never happy with his achievements. While it’s an unflattering portrait, it’s one that tallies with my own experience of visiting The Sopranos set during the third season and finding Chase, exhausted and almost crushed by the weight on his shoulders.
Recently, I spoke to Jesse Armstrong, the English writer behind Succession – arguably the best HBO drama since The Sopranos – about being a showrunner, a role that has become a byword of the streaming era. “Unlike directing a movie,” he says, “your duties are nowhere described. But if you like control over the tone of the project, it’s an incredibly appealing role, because it gives you this overview from the casting to the final cut, which is very reassuring.”
Armstrong has criticised Biskind’s book, seeing it reinforcing the myth of the “difficult man”, the dictatorial and invariably male creative genius. The genial Armstrong’s reputation is that of a collaborative team player.
Biskind doesn’t really deal with Succession in any depth, partly perhaps because Armstrong doesn’t fit his stroppy film-maker mould, but mostly because it arrived after what he sees as HBO’s demise, which marked the end of the “golden era”. “I think it was a great show,” he says, “but it’s already done and gone.”
He views it more as an upward blip on a downward trajectory. For HBO the rot set in, as far as Biskind is concerned, with the end of The Sopranos in 2007. It coincided with the jettisoning of HBO’s chairman and CEO Chris Albrecht after his arrest for assaulting his fiancée in Las Vegas. He was replaced by four executives, none of whom, says Biskind, had any real programming experience.
“HBO was in such a strong position that they could get anything they wanted. There was no competition. They started buying enormous amounts of material and they put writers under exclusive contracts.”
The problem was most of this material was never made and of those shows that were screened, most were not up to scratch. Biskind records in excruciating detail the twin flops Vinyl – which was produced by Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese and set in the music business of the 1970s – and Luck, a horse-racing drama starring Dustin Hoffman, co-produced by David Milch, of NYPD Blue fame, and Michael Mann, the imperious director who was once the executive producer of 1980s television hit Miami Vice before directing such films as Heat and more recently, Ferrari.
Despite (or because of) huge budgets, both shows were cancelled after one season. Jagger and Scorsese couldn’t agree on what the story was. And Milch and Mann stopped talking to each other. “Both of them were used to running shows,” says Biskind, “and neither was used to being told no, so they couldn’t get along with each other. It was a disaster.”
At the same time, HBO turned down former Sopranos writer Matthew Weiner, who had an idea to make a drama about the New York advertising world of the 1960s. He took Mad Men to rival cable channel AMC, which also nabbed Breaking Bad. Suddenly, HBO stopped looking like the home of the finest TV.
If there was competition from other cable channels, it also came from the new streaming platforms. Netflix flexed its financial muscle when it hired David Fincher, director of Fight Club and The Social Network, to showrun a whole season of political drama House of Cards, which starred Kevin Spacey. Normally, a pilot is audience-tested before a season goes into production.
“They gave Fincher a two-season, $100-million-dollar deal, which was totally unheard of,” says Biskind.
It looked to herald a new era of high-quality streaming drama. But despite some notable exceptions, this streaming nirvana never quite materialised. For one thing, Netflix’s extraordinary growth was thwarted by the competition of rival streamers such as Amazon Prime and Apple +, both of which have near-limitless backing from their parent companies.
By contrast, Netflix is still in multibillion-dollar debt, and is looking at advertising to help bail it out.
For Biskind, this move completes the circle, as the freedom and innovation that were the hallmarks of first cable and then streaming subscriptions will, he believes, be once again circumscribed by sponsors.
“Eventually, we’re going to be in a situation where instead of [American] TV being dominated by four networks – ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox – you’re going to have streaming TV dominated by three or four big streamers. “And they’re already showing a lot of old network shows like Seinfeld, and maybe that’s just going to increase. It’s not a pretty picture.”
Perhaps, but nor is it quite as bleak as Biskind suggests. For one thing, golden eras, by definition, are bound to end. And if the one that The Sopranos ushered in has long since ended, it has also irrevocably changed television drama, not just in America but around the world.
Would the Danes have made The Killing or the French The Bureau had American drama – for so long formulaic and unrealistic – not pushed back the boundaries of form and financial support? Would Jane Campion have made Top of the Lake?
There’s little doubt that artistically, American film went into decline after the period dealt with in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. That was partly because it fell victim to the blockbuster, but also to its own hubris, with egos and budgets running amok.
There aren’t such obvious reasons to be pessimistic with TV. There’s bound to be a reshaping of the business model, particularly in America, but that’s no reason to rule out a new generation of talent finding a way through the gaps.
The year’s streaming flood - stars aplenty in 2024′s big-budget shows
By Russell Baillie
Peter Biskind’s new book may take the view that HBO’s glory days are over but the company will still be releasing some of the most anticipated shows of the coming year. That starts from this month, with a fourth season of True Detective. The series began in 2014 with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as Louisiana detectives whose lives were upended by an unsolved case.
The new season, titled True Detective: Night Country, stars Jodie Foster and former world champion boxer Kali Reis as cops investigating the disappearance of eight scientists from a research station in the wilds of northern Alaska.
HBO’s major new show for 2024 is Regime, a political satire miniseries originally titled The Palace. It’s set in an unspecified modern European country where Kate Winslet is the Chancellor, Hugh Grant is the Leader of the Opposition and Martha Plimpton is the visiting US Secretary of State.
Created by Will Tracy, a writer on Succession, it’s jointly directed by English film-maker Stephen Frears and, our own Jessica Hobbs, who went to this rather than being involved in the final season of The Crown after her Emmy-winning efforts in previous seasons.
Also coming from HBO is The Sympathizer. This spy thriller and cultural satire is based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Viet Cong spy in South Vietnam during the final days of the war who ends up exiled in the United States. Sandra Oh stars, and executive producer Robert Downey Jr plays multiple roles.
Other HBO shows heading to Sky TV’s SoHo channel and its Neon streaming platform in 2024 include a final season of the Larry David comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm and a second series of Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon.
HBO is not the only one delivering star-studded, big-budget shows this year. Here are some others on the streaming horizon for the early part of the year.
Masters of the Air
An epic series about UK-based USAAF air crews who were part of the bombing campaign against Nazi Germany. It follows the template of the Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks-produced World War II shows Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Among its vast cast is Austin Butler who played one-time Germany-based US army sergeant EA Presley in Elvis. (Apple TV+, January 26)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Multi-hyphenate star Donald Glover has been called many things, though possibly not “the new Brad Pitt”. But that’s the risk he’s taking in this movie spin-off series based on the 2005 Brangelina comedy thriller about suburban, married-couple assassins. An earlier attempt to make a show out of the movie starring Martin Henderson failed to get past the pilot stage. Glover is a co-writer on this version, created by Atlanta writer Francesca Sloane, and he co-stars with Maya Erskine, Paul Dano and Parker Posey. (Prime Video, February 2)
Shogun
Paperbacks of James Clavell’s 1975 novel remain an item that can be found browning in Kiwi caravans and holiday home bookcases to this day. The doorstop, about an Englishman who becomes a feudal lord in 17th-century Japan, sparked a memorable miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain as “John Blackthorne”. In this reprise, the role is played by Brit actor Cosmo Jarvis. The Japanese cast is led by Hiroyuki Sanada, a veteran of white-guy-goes-samurai productions such as The Last Samurai and 47 Ronin. (Disney+, February 27)
Manhunt
The list of movies and television shows called Manhunt gets a little longer with this miniseries based on James L Swanson’s book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. Tobias Menzies stars as Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s US Secretary of War, who took the lead in the investigation after the assassination and in the pursuit for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators. (Apple TV+, March 15)
3 Body Problem
The sci-fi saga is the second result of Netflix’s US$200 million deal with Game of Thrones makers DB Weiss and David Benioff after Ivy league comedy The Chair. It’s based on Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem. Astrophysicist Ye Wenjie, having witnessed her father’s murder during the Cultural Revolution, facilitates a planned alien invasion of Earth, hoping the extraterrestrials might sort the place out. (Netflix, March 22).
