Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad Read Online Free PDF Page B

Tinker’s office, listening to one side of a phone conversation with NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff, who was apparently unhappy with the ratings performance of a particular show. “But is it
good
, Brandon?” Tinker said over and over. “Is it
good
?”
    Of course Tinker, for all his genuine appreciation for and support of writers, wasn’t running a nonprofit artists collective. He believed that his approach was not only good for art, but good for business. This was the era of “Fin-Syn,” the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, enacted in 1970, that among other things prohibited the big three TV networks from producing and owning their own programming. Until their repeal in the 1990s, the Fin-Syn Rules bestowed enormous power and profit on independent producers, who maintained ownership over their programs and syndication rights. Not only would happy writers produce profitable programs, Tinker believed, they would also attract a steady stream of
more
good writers. He proposed a show business axiom—“The best creative people love to work with other best creative people”—and described the ensuing “magnet effect” that made recruiting talent surprisingly easy.
    In this, Tinker’s studio provided a blueprint for what HBO would become in the late 1990s and early 2000s. MTM’s offices in Studio City became the place writers wanted to be—not necessarily because it was where they’d get the most money, but because they’d have the freedom to do good work. Said Tinker’s son Mark, who began his own career as a director and producer at MTM, “It was
the
gig in town.”
    • • •
    S everal dramas to come out of MTM had direct bearing on the generation of TV to follow. The studio’s second drama,
The White Shadow,
about a white ex–NBA player coaching at an inner-city high school, turned out to be one of those strange intersections in television history at which a disproportionate amount of talent ends up working on a show that doesn’t necessarily reflect that talent. By the nature of the business, people working on good TV shows almost always got there by working on bad—or at least less good—ones; at one point, the list of past credits assembled in the writers’ room of
The Sopranos
included
The Incredible Hulk
,
The New Adventures of Flipper
, and
Xena: Warrior Princess
. “
All
TV credit sheets look terrible,” said HBO Entertainment president Sue Naegle.
    No show or producer, however, would have the impact of the studio’s fourth dramatic series,
Hill Street Blues—
in terms of both what was on the screen and how it got there.
    Steven Bochco was thirty-four when Tinker hired him, a veteran of the Universal Television script mill, where he had specialized in churning out scripts for cop shows but had failed to break through with a real hit
.
Bochco arrived at MTM with no small amount of self-confidence but little interest in doing another police series—even less so when his first effort for the studio,
Paris
,
starring James Earl Jones as a detective, flopped after a single season on CBS.
    Nevertheless, even at MTM the customer had some power, and what the customer—in this case NBC president Fred Silverman—had set his mind to in early 1980 was a police drama
.
Silverman dispatched Brandon Tartikoff to pitch the idea to Bochco and Michael Kozoll, a fellow Universal alum, at a meeting at La Scala in Beverly Hills. The pair were reluctant. “It was late in the cycle and they were desperate. So we had some real negotiating leverage,” Bochco remembers. He and Kozoll agreed to write a police pilot if Tartikoff would grant them autonomy. And Tartikoff, on behalf of NBC, agreed.
    What he and Kozoll delivered, ten days later, was nearly the Platonic ideal of a form that would define quality television well into the Third Golden Age: the Trojan horse. That is, a show that by nominally fulfilling a network’s (or viewer’s) commercial demands allowed its creators the