(This is a revised version o the latest chapter of the book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” To read the full book, so far, from the beginning, click “The Book,” under “categories.”)
All in all, the 20th century was quite interesting.
It sort of started (in January of 1901) with the death of Queen Victoria. It ended (in 1999) with the birth of both “The Sopranos” and “The West Wing.”
In short, the century began with the end of the Victorian era and ended with the start of a TV golden age. In between, other stuff happened.
For TV, the new era has gone by different names. John Landgraf, the FX networks chief, calls it “Peak TV.” David Bianculli, a TV critic, calls it “The Platinum Age.” I’ll go with the second golden age of drama.
As the new century took hold, comedies were fading, overwhelmed by reality shows, cops, “ER” and even a game show. By the 2005-6 season, no comedies were in Nielsen’s top 12.
But quality dramas? The trend was propelled by those two shows in 1999 … and foreshadowed by the early days of cable, when Bob Cooper coined the phrase “quality noise.”
Cooper was a Canadian who made HBO’s first original film, “The Terry Fox Story” (1983). It was the true story of a Canadian who lost his leg to cancer, then made a 3,000-mile walk across the country.
Michael Fuchs, the HBO chairman, soon put Cooper in charge of original movies. As Cooper later recalled, Fuchs told him: “All I ask from you is, ‘Don’t do middle-of-the-road vanilla. I need you to help brand (HBO). And find content that makes sense.”
Indeed, when one early film sputtered, Cooper recalled, Fuchs said: “At least it wasn’t vanilla.”
They were going for “quality noise” — strong subjects, controversial people, done with intelligence and skill.
HBO made movies or mini-series about Murrow, Mussolini and Mendes (a rainforest activist), about Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Roy Cohn and many Russians — Stalin, Sakharov, Yuri Nosenko and more.
It made fictional films about global intrigue, plus epics — “And the Band Played On,” “Angels in America” — about gays. It found fun in surprising places, via “Barbarians at the Gate,””The Late Show” and “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Slaying Mom.”
And soon, other cable channels were aiming for some of that.
In their early days, many cable channels wanted to look like a real network … or, at least, like an independent TV station.
They loaded their line-ups with low-cost, low-impact shows. They took few risks and stirred little excitement.
Ted Turner took that route with TBS, but when TNT started in 1988, he went a different way.
At first, Turner told the Television Critics Association, TNT might have only one new show a month — but it would be the best thing on TV that night. Then it would have one a week, then more.
It was a fine notion … but what qualifies as the best show of the night?
The first TNT project — Charlton Heston in a 1988 remake of the powerful “A Man For All Seasons” — qualified. For another example, Turner planned a two-night mini-series on the life of Donald Trump. “You’d want to see that, wouldn’t you?” he asked.
When a TV critic responded that no, he wouldn’t, Turner seemed surprised.
The Trump idea was eventually scuttled, but the general idea stayed: Only do a few new shows, but do them well.
TNT made plenty of movies and mini-series that could fit that standard. There was John Milius’ “Rough Riders,” “Martha Coolidge’s “Crazy in Love,” Tommy Lee Jones’ “Good Old Boys.” There was Patrick Stewart in “A Christmas Carol” and “King of Texas,” William H. Macey in “The Wool Cap” and “Door to Door.” There was “The Heidi Chronicles” and “Pirates of Silicon Valley” and lots of terse, taut cowboy films.
Other cable channels — and, at times, broadcast networks — joined the quality-movie trend. But the big change came with t
“The Sopranos” started as a movie script, then as a pilot script for a Fox series. When Fox passed, it reached HBO, which meant there would be no limits for language or violence.
As Bianculli wrote in “The Platinum Age of Television” (Doubleday, 2016): “On HBO’s unrestricted playing field, following the path paved by Tom Fontana’s ‘Oz,’ David Chase’s ‘Sopranos’ defied one convention after another.”
And this wasn’t just curse words and beatings, Chase told Bianculli. On HBO, “you could write English that sounded like really contemporary English …. You were free to depict human behavior much, much more realistically.”
In the fifth episode, Tony Soprano did some consummate multi-tasking: While taking his daughter to look at colleges, he departed briefly to kill an informant. TV protagonists don’t usually do that.
And there were other kinds of freedom. “The Sopranos” had no rigid rules for when a season would start, how many episodes it would have and how long each one would be.
When a critic told Chase that a network TV “hour” was under 42 minutes, he just shook his head in disdain. His epioodes might run 47 or 49 or whatever.
And they weren’t rushed. The start of the fourth and fifth seasons each came 18 months after the previous ones began; the sixth season started two years after the fifth.
This was a luxury that broadcasr networks couldn’t match: For HBO (or Showtime), the prime product was fresh movies after they ran in theaters. For TNT, it was that vast MGM treasure trove; for FX, it was the Fox library. The new series were bonuses; they came at their own pace.
The networks, by comparison, had to fill out schedules; they needed shows to crank out at least 22 episodes a season, all the right length. There was no way a network show could match cable, Except ….
“The West Wing” had none of the HBO advantages. It needed to arrive on time, on budget and at the right length. And it had nothing to jolt the viewer.
“My feeling was that it was too good to succeed on network television,” Martin Sheen, who starred, wrote in “The West Wing” (Simon & Schuster, 2002). “I’d explain, ‘There’ll be no car chases, no fist fights, no gun battles, no special effects. There’s no sex.’ It sounded like the kiss of death.”
What it did have, however, was the genius of writer Aaron Sorkin.
Sorkin had already written three excellent movies — “A Few Good Men” (adapted from his play), “Malice,” and “The American President” — plus the sharp ABC series “Sports Night.” He wrote about workplaces where eloquence seemed natural. He could unleash the full, Sorkinian touch.
“Ir’s very disciplined, with very, very specific dialog,” Sheen wrote.
At first, Sheen — like many actors — would say something close to the words on the page; he soon learned that you say them precisely.
As D.L. Hughley (co-starring in Sorkin’s later “Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip”) explained it, other scripts are like jazz, open to improvisation; Sorkin’s are “classical — you play every note.”
“West Wing” and “Sopranos” were opposites in many ways, but the same in ways that counted: They were brilliantly written, perfectly produced and acted with skill and subtlety. There were five times that they collided as Emmy nominees for best drama series. “West Wing” won three of them, “Sopranos” won once, then they both lost to “Lost.”
That was in 2005, after Sorkin had moved on. He soon found the more gradual approach of writing movies (including “The Social Network”) and “The Newsroom,” a brilliant HBO series. “My last season of ‘The Newsroom’ was six episodes,” he told Bianculli. “And it seemed worth it to me.”
But his “West Wing” had proven that quality drama can work, even on a broadcast network. It spent its first six years in the top-30 of the Nielsen ratings, peaking at No. 8.
And “Sopranos” showed that anything was possible on cable. One of its writers, Matthew Weiner, created “Mad Men” for AMC — which followed with Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” then detoured to the scary precision of “The Walking Dead.”
FX also jumped in. Landgraf had arrived shortly after it debuted “The Shield,” with the most intriguing anti-hero this side of Tony Soprano. He has followed with a rich mixture of series and mini-series, including “Reservation Dogs,” “What We Do in the Shadows,” the “Shogun” reboot, fresh rounds of “Fargo” and the amazing O.J. Simpsons mini-series.
Other cable channels also grabbed that idea of doing a few series very well. They included::
— USA, from the amiable “Monk” to the sleek “Suits” and “La Femme Nikita” and two brilliant bursts of whimsy — “Resident Alien” (originally on its sister channel Syfy) and “Mr. Robot.”
— TNT, with lots of fantasy (“Babylon 5,” “Witchblade,” “Falling Skies,” “Snowpiercer”) and several brainy shows — “Leverage,” “The Closer” and David E. Kelly’s “Monday Mornings.”
— HBO’s competitors in the pay-extra world, especially Showtime and Starz.
— And HBO itself. Once “The Sopranos” showed the way, top dramas kept flowing — “Six Feet Under,” “The Wire,” “True Blood,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Newsroom,” “Big Little Lies,” “Succession” and many more.
HBO seemed to have no limits … including budgets.
George R.R. Martin had spent years writing for TV, often being told that his ideas were too expensive. He decided to write books instead.
“I wanted to put all that behind me, to pull out all the stops,” he wrote in ‘”Inside HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones'” (Chronicle Books, 2012). “Huge castles, vast dramatic landscape, deserts and mountains and swamps, dragons, gigantic battles … characters who were complicated, conflicted, flawed.”
The books became best-sellers. Then he was surprised that producers wanted to turn them into an HBO series. “”You’re mad,’ I told them. ‘It’s too big. It’s too complicated. HBO doesn’t do fantasy.'”
But then it did. “Game of Thrones” won 59 Emmys, plus a Peabody. In separate years, the Television Critics Association picked it as best new program, best drama and program of the year.
HBO had proven that spending big can pay off. By then, it had competitors with big checkbooks.
Yes, this drama golden-age was propelled mostly by cable and occasionally by broadcast networks. (The networks never quite matched their “West Wing” peak, but had their moments, from “House” to “Elsbeth.”) But it was soon joined by the streaming networks.
The streamers eventually ranged from Netflix to HBO’s own companion Max. They continued the basic ideas: Do fewer shows, do them well and, if need be, spend more. And that pushes us to the next chapter.