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

all viewers (which was becoming increasingly impossible in any event), networks now targeted specific demographics—rich, young, educated, male, and so on. The fragmentation of the American audience had begun. And, as it would again twenty years later, that meant good things for quality TV.
    • • •
    T o be young, talented, and well compensated at MTM in those years was a beautiful thing. It became even more so when Bruce Paltrow began producing
St. Elsewhere
, which transplanted much of the
Hill Street
formula to a Boston teaching hospital. The show’s offices were one floor below
Hill Street
’s. “There was great excitement,” said Milch. “It was as if everyone felt as if he or she had been caught doing something wrong.”
    “We were just a group of guys, all in our mid- to late thirties, and suddenly, because of the power Grant had given us, we were changing the business. We were
becomin
g
the business,” Bochco said. “It was very, very thrilling. To suddenly have the sense that you could be proud of what you were doing, that you could begin to use the word
art
. We began to tentatively say, ‘We’re artists.’ In this maligned medium.”
    Across Hollywood and New York, TV writers stood up and took notice. As important, so did those in MFA programs, theater workshops, journalism programs, and elsewhere. “Look at what else was on the air that season,” said Andrew Schneider, who was a producer on the
The Incredible Hulk
at the time. “Go watch an episode of
Simon & Simon.
We were toiling along on shows like that, and then
Hill Street
came out and said, ‘This is possible.’ I remember coming to work the day after the pilot aired and everybody was like, ‘We’re going to get to do stuff like this!’”
    And yet, the window that MTM had thrown open would remain so only briefly. Grant Tinker would leave the studio in 1981 to become head of NBC. Bochco was fired from his own show by MTM’s new regime, for chronic cost overruns. He’d continue his career with
LA Law
,
NYPD Blue
, and a host of variously successful shows at 20th Century Fox Television. The regulations and incentives of Fin-Syn would be eroded in the early 1990s and finally abolished in 1995, drastically sliding power away from independent producers and toward the networks while at the same time spurring the proliferation of new, smaller networks like the WB and UPN. Cable would march inexorably forward, along with video games, the Internet, and more, exploding the audience into ever smaller fragments. Network TV, on the whole, would remain a dismal landscape. Indeed, the networks would run in the other direction from the new writer monarchy the first moment they had the chance, seizing instead on programming that dispensed with writers altogether in favor of “reality.”
    Yet before long, strikingly similar circumstances would conspire to continue what Tinker and his writers had started: new, disruptive technology, an anxious, shifting industry, a network with little to lose, and men who had labored long and hard in the Wasteland, sniffing the air hungrily for the chance to call themselves “artists.”

Two
    Which Films?
    D avid Chase never liked
Hill Street Blues
. Or
St. Elsewhere
. The rest of the world may have been thinking that television was rising from the muck, but not him. “I thought it was getting worse,” he said. “It was just more cops and doctors.”
    But then, David Chase liked almost nothing about television—not even the paychecks, each one of which reminded him that he was a sellout, too weak and compromised, he imagined, to follow the path of the renegade filmmakers he’d come of age idolizing. If ever a man who spent his entire career in television could claim intellectual, emotional kinship with Jerry Mander and his campaign to eliminate the medium itself, Chase was that man.
    “Look, I do not care about television. I don’t care about where television is going or anything else about it,” he said