The Revolution Was Televised

The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Change

Alan Sepinwall

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781476739687
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

A phenomenal account, newly updated, of how twelve innovative television dramas transformed the medium and the culture at large, featuring Sepinwall's take on the finales of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. In The Revolution Was Televised, celebrated TV critic Alan Sepinwall chronicles the remarkable transformation of the small screen over the past fifteen years. Focusing on twelve innovative television dramas that changed the medium and the culture at large forever, including The Sopranos, Oz, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, Sepinwall weaves his trademark incisive criticism with highly entertaining reporting about the real-life characters and conflicts behind the scenes.Drawing on interviews with writers David Chase, David Simon, David Milch, Joel Surnow and Howard Gordon, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, and Vince Gilligan, among others, along with the network executives responsible for green-lighting these groundbreaking shows, The Revolution Was Televised is the story of a new golden age in TV, one that's as rich with drama and thrills as the very shows themselves.

CHAPTER 1

What we were don’t matter…Oz blazes a trail

The Rolling Stones don’t have a name or a sound without Muddy Waters. “Clapton Is God” signs don’t pop up around London if Slow Hand doesn’t first listen to Robert Johnson. And The Sopranos doesn’t get on television without Oz.

The Sopranos was the first commercial success of the revolution, but it wasn’t the first revolutionary cable drama of the period. That honor belongs to Oz, the prison drama HBO and creator Tom Fontana made almost as a lark, that became the foundation for everything that followed.

HBO had been pairing its movie library with original programming since the 1970s. There were critically acclaimed comedies like Tanner ’88 and The Larry Sanders Show, anthologies like The Hitchhiker and Tales from the Crypt, and more, but “the original programming was an afterthought,” says Chris Albrecht, who became president of HBO Original Programming in 1995 (and later ascended to CEO thanks to his work in this period). “Even Sanders was an afterthought.” In the mid-’90s, though, Albrecht and his boss Jeff Bewkes decided to take a more serious approach to original scripted television.

Meanwhile, Fontana was in the midst of running Homicide: Life on the Street, an artful cop drama that his bosses at NBC kept pushing him to make less artful and more commercial. (With each passing season, the cast became more conventionally attractive, while the philosophical conversations made way for shootouts, helicopter chases, and evil drug dealers.)

Fontana grew up in Buffalo, and had been fascinated by the nearby Attica prison riots. He says that as he made a television show where, at least every other episode, the detectives would send someone to jail, “I thought, ‘Boy, every TV cop show ends with someone being put away, and you never hear about them ever again. Could you do a series about that?’ ”

He tried pitching gentle variations on the idea—a juvenile detention center, a “Club Fed” for white-collar criminals—but found little interest at the big networks. “So then I had to wait for HBO to decide they were going to do scripted television,” he says.

Albrecht was talking with studio executive Rob Kenneally—one of the few in the business Fontana had mentioned the prison idea to who hadn’t dismissed it out of hand—about HBO’s plans to do a scripted drama series, and mentioned in passing that the network had found surprising success with its documentaries about life in prison.

“Rob heard the word ‘prison,’ ” recalls Fontana, “and virtually left the meeting, got on his phone, called me in New York and said, ‘Get your ass out here. I’ve finally found someone who will do your stupid television show.’ It’s just one of those kismet moments. I wouldn’t have known otherwise.”

Fontana and his Homicide partner Barry Levinson pitched the prison show to Albrecht and HBO executive Anne Thomopoulos. Albrecht wasn’t sure it could work, but told them, “I’ll give you a million dollars: shoot as much as you can.”

Levinson and Fontana were able to put together a 17-minute pilot presentation for Oz (the title is the nickname for the show’s fictional Oswald State Penitentiary), telling the story of wiseguy Dino Ortolani, a violent inmate who winds up burned to death by a rival convict.

“Chris said to me, ‘I don’t care if the characters are likable as long as they’re interesting,’ ” says Fontana. “And he asked me, ‘What’s the one thing you’ve always wanted to do in the pilot of a broadcast television show that you’ve never been allowed to do?’ And I said, ‘Kill the leading man.’ And he said, ‘I love that! Do that!’ ”

At the broadcast networks, there was layer upon layer of executives to go through to get a new show on the air. At HBO at that time, things were so informal that Albrecht invited Fontana and Levinson to screen the Oz prototype in his office.

“It was the first and only time in my career where I flew out with a tape or a disc and the executive said, ‘Come on, let’s watch it!’ ” says Fontana. “And I go, ‘I’m going to watch it with the head of the network. He won’t have any defenses. He won’t be able to hide behind the research and the hoo-ha.’ So we sat there, and I must have looked back and forth from the screen to him. I hope I wasn’t just staring at him.”

Albrecht was impressed. “It was the first thing we had seen for premium television that was a true dramatic series,” he says. “And it was startling how much different it felt from everything else on television.” He ordered Oz to series.

The Ortolani story would survive to the finished version of the pilot, while Fontana began sketching out the characters who would outlast Dino inside the walls of Oz. He conceived of two administrators to represent the schism between those who believe prisons exist for retribution, and those who think the goal is to rehabilitate: respectively, Warden Leo Glynn (Ernie Hudson), and Tim McManus (Terry Kinney), manager of an experimental prison unit called Emerald City. As a point-of-view character for the audience, Fontana created Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), a middle-class white attorney—“Beecher was the HBO subscriber,” he says—sent to Oz after killing a nine-year-old girl while driving drunk. The other inmates were more serious criminals, including white supremacist Vern Schillinger (J.K. Simmons), who turns Beecher into his slave, branding a swastika onto his rear end to prove his dominance; black gang leader Jefferson Keane (Leon); Ryan O’Reily (Dean Winters), an Iago-like schemer with a gift for getting others to do his dirty work; Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker), a Muslim radical threatening a riot from the moment he enters the place; and Miguel Alvarez (Kirk Acevedo), a young gangbanger whose father and grandfather are also doing time in Oz.

Some actors were ones Fontana had worked with before (Hudson did a memorable stint on St. Elsewhere as an injured fireman, while Tergesen and Edie Falco—cast as prison guard Diane Wittlesey—had played husband and wife in a couple of Homicide episodes). Others, he had always wanted to work with (Tony winners B.D. Wong and Rita Moreno played the priest and nun tasked with the inmates’ spiritual health), and still others were unknowns with interesting auditions.

A hulking black actor named Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje wandered in to read for the role of one of Keane’s buddies, and “it was terrible,” Fontana says. But the man’s presence and charisma were undeniable, so Fontana invited him to stay and talk, and discovered that he was actually English (and much more comfortable when not faking an American accent), with Nigerian ancestry. Fontana’s wheels started spinning, and he invented Simon Adebisi, a malevolent force of nature in a comically small hat who took whatever (and whomever) he wanted within the prison’s walls.

This was one of the most racially diverse casts ever assembled for a TV series. Even the progressive dramas of the ’80s and ’90s tended to have merely token minority representation; it was so unusual for Homicide to have a scene featuring a bunch of black cops conversing among themselves (and not about race) that it sadly merited special mention by TV critics.

“That was one of the things I laid out first when I was first pitching it,” says Fontana. “The prison population could represent the population of America, but the percentages were not representative.”

Because he knew the average prisoner was even less likely to open up about his innermost feelings than the average homicide detective, Fontana decided to have each episode narrated by wheelchair-bound inmate Augustus Hill, played by Harold Perrineau.

“It really came out of the Greeks,” Fontana says, “and Greek tragedy, where you would have this chorus of somebody in the community who would step out and talk about themes and bigger ideas. My original concept was John Leguizamo, but he thought about it and decided he didn’t want to do it. I wanted the person to be a minority, either Latino or black, because I felt like this idea that a person had to be from an environment in which they had much more depth of experience than just being in a prison.”

In addition to being one of McManus’s charges in Em City(*), Hill would address the audience directly multiple times in each episode, musing on problems universal to the prison experience, or to life outside the walls of Oz.

(*) Fontana killed off Hill at the end of the fifth season so Perrineau would be free to appear in The Matrix sequels, but kept Hill as the narrator for the final season (where he was often joined by other dead characters), since Perrineau could come in and film those monologues in chunks.

“Oz is where I live,” Hill announces midway through the first episode. “Oz is where I will die, where most of us will die. What we were, don’t matter. What we are, don’t matter. What we become, don’t matter… Does it?”

“The thing about the Oz experience that stuck with me the most is that, compared to how things are now, it was utterly, ‘Let’s see what happens,’ ” recalls Carolyn Strauss, an HBO executive who became Chris Albrecht’s top lieutenant during this era. “ ‘Let’s cast this guy, let’s do this, let’s do that. Let’s experiment with form.’ Not only was there a narrator, but the narrator was going to be shot differently by every director. The main character was going to be killed at the end of the first episode. It was very much a ‘let’s see what happens’ attitude rather than a ‘we need to know exactly what happens every step of the way.’ It was a black-box theater, rather than the main stage. I think that gave people a tremendous sense of freedom and experimentation, and just a great sense of, ‘You know what? We can try it. It’s not going to be the end of the world if something doesn’t work.’ ”

Hill Street Blues had laid out the template for ensemble dramas, which bounced back and forth between different stories over the course of each hour. It was a template Fontana knew well from St. Elsewhere and Homicide, and one he decided to step away from here. Oz episodes told multiple stories, but they tended to be presented one at a time, all the way through: first O’Reily scheming, then Moreno’s Sister Pete counseling Alvarez, then Schillinger oppressing Beecher, etc.

He chose to experiment “because it was HBO, and they said you could do anything you want. I had written so much in the broadcast form, and I thought, ‘Why not make each episode like a little collection of short stories?’ Some weeks, the Beecher story would be five minutes, and some weeks it would be 15 minutes. The freedom to be able to do it differently every week, and decide what order they were coming in, was very liberating from a storytelling point of view. You weren’t bound by, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get to this point by the commercial so that I can get them back from the commercial,’ or ‘I haven’t serviced this character in the second act.’ None of the old rules applied, and it was wonderful. ‘Oh, you can just tell the story for the length of time it needs to be told in this episode.’ ”

“One of the great things about the guys who did the first couple of big drama and comedy series on HBO is almost all of them had a lot of schooling on network series,” says Strauss. “They knew the rules of series television. They knew how to tell stories, knew the rules they needed to keep and knew the rules they could throw out. They had a lot of fun with that. There was a lot of esprit, in terms of going at it in a whole new way.”

When Fontana had pitched even mild versions of Oz to the broadcast networks, he says he was told, “ ‘Oh, they’re all too nasty. Where are the heroes? Where are the victories?’ ” These questions simply didn’t apply at HBO. There were no obvious heroes in Oz—even the idealistic McManus had myriad flaws—and the villains tended to win, usually in the most gruesome way possible. O’Reilly and Adebisi team up to take out the prison leader of the Italian mob by grinding broken glass into his food until he slowly bleeds to death internally; when the man’s son comes looking for revenge, Adebisi rapes him. A rare victory of sorts comes when Beecher finally fights back against Schillinger, savagely beating him with weightlifting equipment in the prison gym, then tying him down and literally defecating onto his tormentor’s face.

Fontana’s bosses at NBC likely would have fired him on the spot if he had put such a scene into a Homicide script. Chris Albrecht had no major objections to any of the content.

“Chris is not only leaving me alone,” says Fontana, “he’s encouraging me to be incorrigible. He was literally saying to me, ‘Go as far, take as big a risk as you possibly want.’ He never dictated any specific thing, but every time we spoke of the show and he had read a script or seen a screening, he was absolutely encouraging about the risk-taking.”

Fontana says the only time in the run of the series when an HBO executive strongly objected to the content involved a flashback to an inmate who had murdered an entire family, including two young children. Strauss didn’t even have an issue with the crime itself, but on how long the scene dwelled on the killer pointing a gun at the kids.

“So I just sped up the amount of time it was pointed,” Fontana says. “I figured one note every five years, I’d be an asshole not to change it.”

If Oz had just been about the brutality, it would have been the best-cast exploitation film of all time. The violence was inherent to the setting, but Fontana had higher aims. He wanted viewers to confront the dehumanizing nature of the prison experience, but also use these criminals as proxies to talk about race, addiction, sexuality, religion, elder care and any other hot-button issue he had on his mind.

The setting, and the rapid turnover in the cast (Em City had a very high body count), allowed Fontana to keep bringing in interesting faces to play prisoners: rap star Method Man, former teen idol Luke Perry, NBA veteran Rick Fox, KISS drummer Peter Criss, even Gavin MacLeod from The Love Boat. The longer the show was on, the more obvious it became that it was a fun place for actors to try roles unlike anything in their careers to that point.

“It was thrilling” says Fontana. “And I have been very blessed in my career. Starting with St. Elsewhere(*) and then doing Homicide, I can’t really say I had a shitty time doing those shows. I had a great, joyous time doing those shows. But this was like ‘Eat all the chocolate you want, and you won’t get fat.’ It was extraordinary. It made me rethink all the rules I assumed were unchangeable. Suddenly, you could change it. From a writer’s point of view, it was so liberating. I would get up every morning at five and just be chuckling that I was going to get to write this stuff again.”

(*) In addition to breaking new ground for cable drama with Oz, Fontana had blazed a trail with the St. Elsewhere finale that revealed the show as a fantasy of the main character’s autistic son—a polarizing ending that presaged the divisive conclusions to The Sopranos, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and others. Though Fontana hadn’t meant to anger his fans with the St. Elsewhere ending, he was relieved by the reaction to these other conclusions: “I was like, ‘Oh, thank God there’s other people ...