Characters you love to hate

It is always difficult to know at the time when things are about to change.  After how many days of rain did Noah’s neighbors start to say, “Uh-oh”?  How many cars were sold before buggy whip manufacturers noticed a drop in sales?  How many televisions were sold before our collective IQ began to decline?

A sea change occurred in American culture in 1999 but most of us were too worried about the Millennium Bug to notice at the time.  HBO debuted a new series unlike any that had come before, mainly because the protagonist occasionally killed people, or ordered them killed.  I am of course referring to The Sopranos.

It was the first successful show to feature an anti-hero as the main character.  I have to add the caveat “successful” because in 1996 Fox showed a little seen program called Profit which starred Adrian Pasdar as Jim Profit, a sociopath who would do anything (including blackmail, treason and murder) to rise to the top of a multinational corporation.  The show was breathtaking, but audiences weren’t ready for it and Fox canceled the show after five episodes were aired.  Three years later times had changed.

Or had they?  The success of The Sopranos is probably due to several changes in the TV landscape that weren't apparent in 1996.  One was the fact that the show’s home network, HBO, did not have to worry about offending advertisers as it was a subscriber-based network.  It also did not have to appeal to advertisers by reaching a tremendously large audience; an audience share that would spell death on a broadcast network was welcomed by HBO (provided the show had “buzz”).  Lastly, the Balkanization of television by myriads of basic cable networks and premium networks meant that audience sizes were shrinking all around.  David Greenawalt, the co-creator of Profit, noted on that show’s DVDs that the audience size that got Profit cancelled in five episodes was far greater than what a “successful” show now pulled in on a weekly basis (he says this in a way that makes me think he may have been hinting that if a subscriber network wanted to resurrect Profit it would be a good idea).

The Sopranos ushered in a new era of television drama that transcended much of what had come before.  Suddenly TV could have cop shows where the police were far less competent than the bad guys (The Wire, on HBO).  The main character could be a serial killer (Dexter, on Showtime), or be a dying high school chemistry teacher providing for his family by cooking crystal meth (AMC’s Breaking Bad).  This new era has been explored in recent books such as Difficult Men by Brett Martin (which deals solely with cable shows) and The Revolution Was Televised by Alan Sepinwall (which also discusses broadcast shows such as 24 and Lost). 

One problem with this shifting landscape is that it has become increasingly difficult to tell a good idea from a bad one.  HBO incredibly took a pass on Mad Men, despite the fact that it was pitched by Sopranos writer Matthew Weiner.  Entertainment Weekly would include this (with other famous network passes) as the 16^th biggest blunder in TV history.  David Milch chose to leave Deadwood in order to create a series called John From Cincinnati, which was about a guy named John who was from . . . no, wait, what was it about?  No one knew and it lasted ten episodes.  Vince Gillian, the creator of Breaking Bad, jokingly said that Breaking Bad was probably the worst idea for a TV series ever.

The recent developments in TV drama are probably significant enough to call this the Third Golden Age of TV drama, the first being the live dramas of the 1950’s and the second being the development of serious dramas in the late 70’s and 80’s.  But does this mean that current dramas are superior to earlier efforts?  Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter called Breaking Bad one of the five best series ever, comparing it only to cable shows that aired post-2000.  But are things THAT much different?

The book Difficult Men points out that the evolution of TV dramas into the current crop of excellence began in the Second Golden Age with the rise of Grant Tinker at MTM Productions.  The book delineates the family tree of current show runners traces their lineage back in a variety of ways; for example, David Milch, creator of Deadwood and John From Cincinnati, won his first writing Emmy for an episode of Hill Street Blues. 

So the success of current dramas is created not by giants but by people standing on the shoulders of others, as the saying goes.  Does that entitle them to claim the crown of best drama of all-time, with no consideration of any broadcast series that came before?  I will address that question in my next post.