If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

The showrunners of Difficult Men all have one thing in common: they didn’t start as showrunners.

That makes sense, I mean who is born knowing how to do a job like that? But unlike musicians who make a great first album, directors who knock it out of the park with their debut film or advertising creatives who win several Pencils with their first commercial, the people entrusted with the job of running a TV series (even a shit one) must have paid their dues elsewhere first.

Each story, whether of David Chase, David Milch, David Simon or Vince Gilligan, begins with some less good TV that they either improved or demonstrated they were much too good for.

The one with the best CV is David Milch, who started on Hill Street Blues before creating NYPD Blue alongside proven producer Steven Bochco. He then started a couple of less successful shows then on to Deadwood.

In his earlier days, David Chase was a cantankerous bastard on The Rockford Files, and Northern Exposure, amongst others. He won an Emmy in 1980, proving his talent, but didn’t end up in charge of The Sopranos for another 15-20 years.

Vince Gilligan was a fan of The X-Files who submitted a script for that series, became a staff writer then executive producer, then supervising producer. But that all ended in 2002 and is followed by a bare patch in the CV until Breaking Bad started in 2008.

David Simon was a journalist who ended up being disillusioned by that career, wrote a book about the crime scene in Baltimore. That got picked up to become a TV series, which led to him writing HBO miniseries The Corner, which then led to The Wire.

So lots of different routes to the privileged position of Showrunner Of Classically Brilliant TV Series. But it’s not just those guys: Danny Boyle started on Eastenders and Casualty before Trainspotting, and even his Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire was intended to be a straight-to-DVD blip until he made it good enough to gross hundreds of millions of dollars and win all the awards going.

Clearly there are certain industries in which you have to start at the bottom, paying your dues and proving yourself. But from what I’ve read, these guys were obviously brilliant in the beginning, allowing them to move faster and higher than their colleagues. However, they still needed a hell of a lot of patience and perhaps a hell of a lot of experience, with every solved problem on Northern Exposure possibly leading to a better situation on The Sopranos.

Maybe, like Alan Parker, you’re taking the first steps on a long and prestigious road.

Maybe, like Joe Bloggs, you will never rise above the mediocre.

Fortunately you can switch paths whenever you like.

Let’s take a little break from Difficult Men to see some quite incredible thievery (thanks, V):

Original…

Copy…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4S-k9KZ0_0

Original…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mudOonoGK_U

Copy…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3VWgQlAsds

I’ve already written about this subject, but

1) It was over four years ago.

and

2) It needs another going over in the context of Difficult Men.

Many of the people reading this will by now have seen the final episode of Breaking Bad. For those that didn’t (no spoiler alert) it was a perfect end to an almost-perfect (the ‘fly’ episode was shite) work of filmed fiction: consistent in tone and plot with the preceding 50something hours; surprising yet inevitable; and never putting a foot wrong even though there were 10,000 crappy ways to go and very few astounding ones.

That got me thinking about just how amazing an achievement these series are. We heap endless praise on shorter works, such as Fargo, Goodfellas and even the six hours of The Godfather Parts 1&2 (not Part 3, obv), but for that level of quality to be sustained over two solid days is something I find difficult to comprehend.

In the book there’s a section where the Breaking Bad writers discuss a point of the plot which goes to and fro for a few days until Vince Gilligan reaches a solution he’s happy with. This is the part I really find hard to understand: the removal of possibilities until the one that truly works remains. As a writer I know that’s like the scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where there are many cups that could be the Holy Grail, but only one which actually is. Drinking from the wrong ones will kill you; drinking from the right one will make you immortal. And so many times has an otherwise perfect cup-chooser made a clunky decision that ruins everything. If you want an example of that check out season 5 of The Wire: the first episode is awful, but the lack of quality continues with a strange plotline involving McNulty pretending there’s a serial killer on the loose. 50 hours of perfection followed by 10 hours of patchiness. Then look at the follow up series from The Wire writers: Treme and Generation Kill were, by all accounts very good, but they weren’t The Wire.

And Dexter isn’t Deadwood.

And The Shield isn’t The Sopranos.

And Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an abomination.

Good is difficult. Excellent is nearly impossible. 50-60 hours of sustained excellence? I can barely imagine taking on something that hard and having it work out.

That’s why it’s not just the content of these shows that leaves you shaking your head in wonder.

It’s the achievement.

Here’s another lesson from the great TV showrunners: make sure every single element of the creative process is under your control.

Or don’t.

Many of them wanted to make sure they steered each and every element of the production to the screen. Mathew Wiener of Mad Men was particularly obsessive, making sure all the period pieces were perfect, but also maintaining a tight rein on the characters (he admonished one of the writer producers for allowing Don to brush the dust of his jacket sleeve in a certain way). I guess this makes perfect sense: if you have conceived of a vision for a story and all its constituent parts then you’d probably like to make sure all those parts turn out as close to that vision as possible. In the position of showrunner you have one of the few modern opportunities outside of a Woody Allen film to make this happen.

But most artistic endeavours are collaborative processes, and you could look at that collaboration as either a help or a hindrance; a series of improving contributions or a damaging chain of dilution. And the truth is either way is possible depending on how good you are at selecting the contributors and how adept you are at getting the best from them. So the questions are: how much control are you prepared to concede, and how good can you make the parts you have to let go?

This is an interesting question in advertising where you can certainly have total control over a press ad (client input notwithstanding), but if that works for you, how comfortable would you be when a director, DP, music composer and set designer turn up to demonstrate the extent to which your vision chimes with theirs?

From a personal point of view I like spending my spare time as a novelist because I can control every part of the final work. Sure, I’ll take suggestions, but it’s up to me to incorporate or decline them. Then the book succeeds or fails almost entirely because of me. Does that make me a megalomaniac? To a certain extent I suppose it does, but more often than not I’ve been disappointed with the contributions of collaborators (that doesn’t mean they were bad; I just wanted to see how a closer approximation of my original vision would have turned out).

So maybe the grip, maybe the freedom. But whichever you end up choosing, the fun part is that you’ll never know what the alternative would have been.

I’ve just finished reading Difficult Men, an analysis of the great cable TV series of recent years and the ‘difficult’ men behind them.

It’s a fascinating insight into the creative and development processes that have brought us these ridiculously good dramas, from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad, via Mad Men, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood and several others.

There were so many aspects of them that seemed interesting, or applicable to other areas of creativity, that i thought I’d look at each angle in turn until I ran out of them.

The first is a question that I’ve asked and discussed many times and in many different contexts over the years: do you have to be something of an arsehole to be a great creative?

The entire theme of Difficult Men suggests that you do, as many of the showrunners (the people in control of the artistic vision and central idea of these series) are indeed ‘difficult’: arrogant, manipulative, ruthless and perfectly happy to sacrifice niceties to protect what they perceive to be necessary parts of the creative process.

But (sadly inconsistent with the title of the book), two of the showrunners, Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad and Alan Ball of Six Feet Under and True Blood, are very nice people indeed. Their writers rooms are places of happiness and harmony, but in no way has that compromised the quality of the output.

Ball says: ‘I understand being passionate about your work but I’m not a person who wants to control every element. Nothing makes me happier than watching a show come together in a way that surprises me. Or getting a script where I don’t have to do anything to it. I want this to be fun. Maybe I’m just lazier than most people.’

(The hard grip vs loose rein is another point worth exploring in greater detail.)

So the evidence is there: you don’t have to be an arsehole to create greatness. But having said that, some people do have to be arseholes to do their best. For whatever reason, be it insecurity, fear, daddy issues or a megalomaniacal streak, some people can’t do what Alan and Vince do and still be sure that they will produce classically brilliant work unless they exert the kind of control that pisses off those around them. Then again, they might not be intrinsically mean people, but the wide variety of skills the job demands could lead to discrepancies that create problems: they might have filled their writers room with the wrong people, they could be under a different kind of pressure from the station suits, they may just be great writers but not inspirational leaders. But whatever it is, their attempts to weave a thousand disparate threads into a perfect quilt may not be perfect in both output and method.

From the outside these achievements are so immense that I suppose the arsehole-ness is a price worth paying for such a great result (and anyway, I didn’t have to suffer the bullshit, so whatevs). They got into a situation that most of us can’t even begin to comprehend and made the best of it; who are we to judge that?

There isn’t a finishing school in being a showrunner, so there are as many styles as there are people who do the job, and the people who work with them have the choice to do so or quit (as many of them eventually do). They may suffer but they could also look back and see that they contributed to a lasting piece of art that many people enjoyed, loved and admired. Was that worth it? I’m sure there are many answers to that, but I think many of us would wade though a few turds to be part of something that incredible.

So it’d be great to live in a world without arseholes, but like foie gras, we just have to accept that sometimes wonderful things are the result of misery.

50s American housewife drops acid (thanks, V):

The Wild goddam West (thanks, G).

If rappers were copywriters (thanks, J).

Bill Murray infographic (thanks, V).

Shit PR ideas (thanks, W).

Commentary to rival honey badger (NSFW if you’re a dog. Thanks, J):

10 things wrong with the modern blockbuster (thanks, G).

GTAV on the SNES.

The Humping Pact (thanks, J).

The horror of getting caught checking out computer porn (thanks, G):

Get a picture painted and help stop cancer (nb: this is a charity link, not an entertainment one).

Awful comic book artist dissected (thanks, D).

Everything in a Golf (thanks, G).

Brand generator for students getting their book together (thanks, W & S).

Let this site choose movies for you (thanks, G).

Good ‘lost’ signs (thanks, D).

Steve Albini’s letter to Nirvana about producing ‘In Utero’ (thanks, E).

Amazing projection mapping (thanks, B):

Occasionally a side project comes along that touches my heart so deeply that I just have to tell you all about it:

Project Bush is seeking to destigmatise the porncentric expectations of femaile pubic hair.

How?

Glad you asked.

By getting as many of you as possible to go to Mother on the 3rd of October to have your own topiary (or lack thereof) photographed anonymously for an exhibition.

As the organisers put it:

A project designed to encourage debate and discussion about choice in pubic hair, and to show there’s more to vaginas than their current representation in porn.

It’s not about exhibitionism. It’s not about pornography. It’s about choice.

We are going to photograph bushes in all their glory, totally anonymously and very beautifully, in our Bush Booth next Thursday 3rd October here at Mother.

Be there.

You have nothing to lose but the opportunity of having someone anonymously photograph your muff.

If you were on the blog late last night you might have seen a link to, and a cut-and-paste from, this site.

It’s a huge amount of brilliant screenwriting advice from Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, the guys behind Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean and Aladdin (as well as this year’s less successful Lone Ranger).

Anyway, apparently my cut-and-paste fucked their site up, so now there’s just the link.

Click on it to find out about how ideas (not just screenwriting ones) live and die, the Raiders Of The Lost Ark method of cramming more words onto a page, and why letting your first excellent screenplay go unmade is a really smart thing to do.

In the ever-expanding world of car analogy ads I found this one to be refreshingly fun.

http://vimeo.com/66487005