Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (10 page)

And then, in week five, Tony strangled a man to death. Right in front of us. In real time. While taking his daughter on a college tour.

“College,” as the episode was titled, didn’t start out as a bid to change television. Instead the story grew, innocently enough, out of a TV impulse as old as
The Brady Bunch
. “After sitting there for three episodes, I said, ‘Oh, I’m so fucking
bored
with this. We gotta get these people out of town,’” said Chase. “‘Maybe they take a vacation or something.’” Chase had recently taken his own teenage daughter on a tour of colleges and quickly landed on the idea of sending Tony and Meadow on a similar tour of small liberal arts colleges in Maine.

Chase always maintained that the goal of each episode, regardless of what narrative business was necessary to the show’s ongoing story arc, was to create a “minimovie.” The premise of “College” was promising on that front even before the introduction of the character that would spur Tony to murder.
The Sopranos
was rarely more acute and unsettling than when it pulled back from the hermetic world of the North Jersey mob to allow a glimpse of the straight world outside. Think of a pair of mobsters’ flummoxed attempts to shake down a corporate coffee shop, or A.J. visiting a rich classmate and seeing what real money and power looks like. (
The Wire
would hit similar notes with equal effect, as when two young drug dealers drive out of town and are shocked to learn that radio stations differ from region to region—even more so that theirs is broadcasting
A Prairie Home Companion
.)

Sending a mobster into alien territory, on one of the ultimate rites of passage for bourgeois parents, couldn’t have been a better setup. The first shot of “College,” directed by Allen Coulter, who would become a signature director of this series and many that followed in its footsteps, finds Tony stranded, like a piece of garish lawn statuary, outside an august stone academic building, bells tolling overhead. (The building, of course, like nearly everything else in
The Sopranos
, was actually located in New Jersey, on the campus of Drew University; as a location scout for the show said, “Everything in the known universe you can find in New Jersey.”) His conflicting roles of father and mobster are never as poignant as when Meadow confronts him knowingly, in the car, about what he does for a living. Or later, when the two join in a father-daughter conspiracy to keep her drunken evening a secret from her mother. Meanwhile, Carmela has stayed home with the flu, giving her the opportunity to spend a wine- and Merchant Ivory–soaked evening with oily, flirtatious Father Phil. After several glasses, she tearfully admits to knowing, and conveniently ignoring, the moral cost of her comfortable life—a cathartic moment of self-knowledge that, characteristically, will never be acted on.

All of this would have made for an entertaining, satisfying minimovie that deepened and expanded our knowledge of, and queasy affection for, these characters. But the plot point that would define “College” upped all these stakes dramatically. It came from Frank Renzulli, who suggested, in the writers’ room, that Tony run into an ex–Mob member, now in the witness protection program. Chase straightened up and walked out of the room, to his office. The next morning, he arrived with the story’s eighteen beats intact: At a gas station somewhere on Tony and Meadow’s route, Tony believes he spots Fabian “Febby” Petrulio, a onetime made man who flipped on the Family after being busted for selling heroin—a realistic nod to one of the prime factors in the Mob’s diminishing power. In between bonding with Meadow and shepherding her to her Colby College interview, he confirms the snitch’s identity, tracks him down, and strangles him.

Within a few years, the idea that a TV protagonist couldn’t kill somebody would seem as fusty and dated a convention as earlier generations not being able to share a bed or say the word
pregnant
. What remains shocking in “College” isn’t the death itself; it’s Tony’s unmitigated relish in doing the deed. There is no tortured internal debate—even after his snooping reveals that Petrulio, now masquerading as “Fred Peters,” has a new family and small daughter of his own—no qualms even about Meadow’s presence, other than the inconvenience it poses. Nor is there any suggestion that Tony stands to earn much in the way of credit or prestige by doing away with a rat; indeed, Christopher (whom we’ve already seen dismember a body for disposal in the back of Satriale’s) begs Tony to allow
him
to fly up and take care of the hit. It is simply a given in Tony’s world: a rat needs to be killed. At least in Chase’s original story, there are none of the “outs” designed to allow viewers to rationalize and justify what they’re about to see—which is Tony grunting, spitting, exultant, crushing Petrulio’s windpipe with an improvised garrote of electrical wire, the wire cutting deep into his palms from the effort, Petrulio begging for his life between gasps. The scene lasts an unwavering minute and sixteen seconds.

In
The Sopranos
mythology, one that flatters both its creator’s sense of auteurship and HBO executives’ sense of enlightened patronage, the network delivered only two notes during the show’s eight-year run. Although it’s hard to believe this is literally true, it does seem that the network challenged Chase only twice on issues of substance. And both times, the showrunner prevailed. The first was over the series title, which HBO found sufficiently confusing (“What, is it a show about opera singers?” Jamie-Lynn Sigler thought when called for her audition) that they assembled a binder of alternatives, mostly variations on Chris Albrecht’s preferred name: the ham-fistedly punny
Family Man
. In the end, the title proved once again the lesson of the Beatles, Amazon.com, and others: that the silliest, most obscure name will seem perfect and inevitable the moment it is attached to a cultural phenomenon. Before long, a Google search would return hundreds of results on “Sopranos” the show before any on “sopranos” the centuries-old musical tradition.

The second of the legendary two notes was on “College.” In Chase’s mind, murdering Petrulio wasn’t meant to be a grand narrative statement. Like Tony himself, he believed it was simply how things had to be—the natural outcome in the world his characters lived in. Sending the script in to HBO, he expected that it would occasion some discussion, but when the phone rang from Albrecht’s office, he wasn’t prepared for the passionate exchange that ensued.

“You’ve created one of the most compelling characters on television of the last twenty years and you’re going to ruin him in the fifth episode!” Albrecht yelled.

“What do you mean?” asked Chase, guileless.

“He kills that guy! We’re going to lose the audience!”

“Well, Chris, I have to tell you, I completely disagree,” said Chase. “In fact, I think we’d lose the audience if he
didn’t
kill that guy.” Viewers, he argued, understood what being a rat meant in Tony’s world; if he was to let Petrulio live, “what kind of mobster is that? He’d be without portfolio.”

The argument went back and forth. Chase suggested they simply shelve the episode and move on to the next. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Albrecht sputtered. “We spent all that money and now we’re not going to show the episode? I mean . . . maybe if we knew this guy he killed was a real scumbag . . .”

“He’s a
rat
!”

In the end, Chase won the war—dragging Albrecht, who happily admitted he was wrong ever after, and TV history along with him. But it wasn’t without a concession that nearly cost him the battle. As an accommodation to HBO’s point of view, Chase inserted a scene in which it is revealed that Petrulio not only is dealing drugs in town, but is seen trying to hire a couple of junkies to kill Tony and Meadow. Predictably, the scene feels false and conventionally “TV.” It was the last such concession that Chase would make.

“After that we’d talk about money, maybe. Budget stuff. He said some intelligent things,” said Chase of his relationship with Albrecht. “I never had conversations like that with an executive. Where you’re actually talking about the same things, and he’s not saying, ‘If he’s a gangster, maybe . . . his sister’s in a wheelchair or something?’ I used to joke that on a network, from day one, Tony would have been helping the Feds fight terrorism on the side. I’d never had conversations in which, nine times out of ten, we had the same goal.”

For all that, he said of the drug scene, “I don’t think it was a terrible compromise, but it was a compromise. I wish we hadn’t done it.”

• • •

T
he “College” story had a slapstick coda. In a good example of how the collaborative process of the writers’ room works, the episode was a group effort: Renzulli had suggested the rat, Chase had outlined the main story, and the room had worked out the beats for the B story, of Carmela and Father Phil. However, luck of the draw gave the official credited writing assignment for the first draft to James Manos. By his own account, Manos was an unusual guy, a chain smoker with a few agoraphobic tendencies. “I probably have an uncommon fear of being trampled to death,” he said. This made the Emmys, stressful under any circumstances, particularly excruciating. Adding to the strain was the fact that Manos was married at the time to his second wife, Hilda Stark, who several weeks earlier, in an off-screen ceremony, had won an Emmy for the production design of HBO’s movie
The Rat Pack
.

“We had a very competitive relationship,” he said. “I knew that if I didn’t win, it was going to be ugly at home.

“So there were all these famous people around, and I got very tense,” he went on. “I thought I had plenty of time to go out and get some air, smoke a cigarette, calm down. So I left. And then I met somebody, met somebody else, we talked . . . and then I remember my phone ringing and it was my mother, in Brooklyn, watching the show live and asking, ‘Where
are
you?’”

“College” had won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Chase, onstage alone, asked, “Where’s Manos? He was sitting right next to me.”

Despite not making it onstage, the award served Manos well; he went on to write for
The Shield
and create the pilot for
Dexter
, during which he also met his next wife, the actress Lauren Vélez. His main memory of the 1999 Emmys, though, is being yelled at by a producer who wondered where the hell he had been and later standing onstage next to Helen Mirren for a group photo of the night’s winners. Looking over, he noticed a trickle of blood running down Mirren’s side. She had been stabbed by the Emmy statuette’s knife-sharp wings.

“I thought, ‘What a great fucking metaphor,’” he said.

• • •

W
riters don’t much like complimenting other writers. This is a simple fact that should not be obscured by the amount of time they spend doing so—in blurbs, introductory speeches at readings, and so on. This may not be any worse among Hollywood writers than others, but in a world where success really can be a zero-sum game—there are only so many pilots that can be picked up in any given season—it’s certainly not better. Thus, when a piece of work sparks a frenzy of unequivocal praise among fellow writers, you can assume two things: (1) It’s pretty good. (2) It promises something for them.

So it was for
Hill Street Blues
when it debuted, and so it was for
The Sopranos
, particularly after “College” aired. One of the many toiling in network trenches who suddenly sat up and took notice was Alan Ball, a forty-year-old TV series writer-producer turned screenwriter. “I felt like I was watching a movie from the seventies. Where it was like, ‘You know those cartoon ideas of good and evil? Well, forget them. We’re going to address something that’s really real,’” Ball said. “The performances were electric. The writing was spectacular. But it was the moral complexity, the complexity of the characters and their dilemmas, that made it incredibly exciting.”

Ball, like David Chase, was a veteran of the traditional television machine. Plucked from a moderately successful New York playwriting career, he had been put to work as a writer for two sitcoms built around female comedians, first
Grace Under Fire
, starring Brett Butler, and then
Cybill
, starring Cybill Shepherd. Like Chase, he was filled with self-loathing at the direction his career had taken—even as he grew more and more successful. Both Butler and Shepherd were outsize, volatile personalities; Shepherd was given to midseason fits in which she would fire half her writing staff, resulting in battlefield promotions for those who remained. Within a year, Ball had risen to the position of head writer. “It was like being a member of the court of a mad queen,” he said. “The whole environment was toxic. People were terrified. I remember thinking, ‘If I ever get my own show, it will not be this way.’”

Ball poured his disillusionment and yearning into the screenplay for the film
American Beauty
, which starred Kevin Spacey as a frustrated, ennui-soaked writer trapped in a loveless marriage and infatuated with his daughter’s cheerleader friend.
American Beauty
was squarely in the suburbs-as-death tradition—some might say too squarely. And it hit a nerve, going on to gross some $130 million for its studio, DreamWorks, and to win Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and, for Ball, Best Screenplay. Shortly after the film was released, Carolyn Strauss called.

A decade later, Strauss denied that she and HBO were feeling anxiety about creating the network’s first dramatic series since
The Sopranos
had debuted when she met with Ball in October 1999. “Everyone was saying, ‘What’s the next
Sopranos
?’ but that wasn’t it at all for us. It was just another show,” she said.

This is hard to take at face value. In one fell swoop,
The Sopranos
had thrust the network from its cozy spot under the radar into the harsh spotlight. The company had also become enormously profitable thanks to increased subscriptions; in 2000, HBO earned nearly as much as the six broadcast networks combined. With HBO’s parent company, Time Warner, having just completed its ill-fated merger with AOL, there would be pressure to keep those numbers up.