Sepinwall’s new book, The Revolution Was Televised, looks back at the (very recent) golden age of the television drama. Let’s grill him!
Tony Soprano.
Alan Sepinwall — the prolific TV critic, even-keeled Twitter presence and saver of Chuck — has written a book about the ongoing golden age of television dramas called The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever. Read it and you get the backstory of era-defining shows such as Lost, Oz, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Shield, and, of course, The Sopranos, which Sepinwall wrote about weekly at the Star-Ledger. (He now writes for Hitfix.) It’s a fast yet exhaustive read — TV fans will love it. The book is self-published, and you can buy it at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and through iTunes.
Sepinwall — who's been a friendly acquaintance for years — and I e-mailed extensively about The Revolution Was Televised this week. We discussed endings and antiheroes, and I pressed him particularly on why he left out certain shows (you’ll see which ones below) that would have defined this revolutionary time in television differently, perhaps — and more diversely. Our e-mail exchange is below.
KA: How did you pick which shows to focus on? What was your taste and shows you really know and cover, versus what other people might consider to be revolutionary dramas?
AS: Some of them were obvious, particularly the four HBO shows that start the book. (And I left out Six Feet Under in part because I didn't want to do HBO overload, but also because I never liked that show as much as the others, though it was certainly capable of greatness at times.) After that, I tried as best I could to pick shows that I both loved — because I really didn't want to be spending a lot of time poring over ones I didn't care for — and that reflected some larger part of the story of this period. So The Shield chapter is a lot about how HBO's monopoly on this kind of show ended, the Buffy chapter is about the WB (and, to a lesser extent, UPN) as an alternative place where creators were getting a bit more freedom to experiment, and the chapters on Friday Night Lights, Lost, and 24 all in different ways deal with the changes in technology and distribution systems that were cropping up during this period. I tried to not just make it "the best dramas ever," or even "the best dramas of this period" — you'll notice that West Wing (which was a great but very traditional network-y show) is barely mentioned at all in the book — but to be about this specific movement. There was even a period when Mad Men and Breaking Bad were going to be squeezed into a single chapter, because I wanted to include Breaking Bad but worried there wasn't enough of a different angle from Mad Men (and the rise of AMC) to justify its own chapter.
The inscrutable Don Draper gaze. Courtesy of AMC.
KA: Let's get to Six Feet Under in a little bit. Tell me about how you define the "movement" — there's certainly an antihero thread that runs through a lot of these shows that could be called derivative.
AS: Well, certainly there's a lot of middle-aged white male antiheroism going on in there. The Sopranos was the first big hit of the movement, and even rule-breaking TV takes inspiration from those who came before. (As I note in The Sopranos chapter, HBO's choice to follow Oz came down to Sopranos vs. a Winnie Holzman show about a female business exec at a toy company, which would have made the next decade in TV very different, whether it succeeded or failed.) But I think the antihero thing also comes out of a sense of collective frustration most of these creators had with the traditional rules of TV drama (where the worst any protagonist could be was "crusty but benign") and then the sense of freedom they had during this Wild West period. When there are no laws for a while, suddenly everyone's an outlaw, which translates not just into shows about criminals, but shows that don't behave the way we'd been conditioned to expect from decades of TV before it. So you could have a show like Sopranos where the narrative took frequent detours or deliberately went down dead ends, and you could have another like The Wire where each season was one big, interwoven story where the whole was much better than the sum of the individual episodes. You could have both an action show (24) and a space opera (Battlestar Galactica) dealing with hot-button political issues like religious fundamentalism and torture, or even a high school drama like Friday Night Lights that was matter-of-fact in its depiction of teen drinking and sexuality, which had previously required Very Special Episodes to deal with.
KA: The thing about the antihero shows is how few people watch them. Other than The Sopranos, which was actually a huge, popular hit, as you point out in the book, the closest runner-up, ratings-wise, would be The Shield — and House, which isn't in the book, was massive for awhile. Is it just a case of angry middle-aged male executives loving stories about angry middle-aged male characters? Or is there something about this area of storytelling that lends itself to unique stories?
AS: Well, it depends on how you view a show like Lost (where Jack was the unquestioned hero but also kind of a self-destructive, bullying jackass) or 24 (another Jack who violated various rules and social conventions, albeit in a direction the creators meant as more purely heroic), which were both big commercial hits. But no, most of these shows did not have huge ratings, but they tended to do well with critics (who were — and are — still predominantly middle-aged white guys) and Emmy voters, so there was a level of prestige to them (particularly at a network like AMC, where attention-seeking was really the only motive for the creation of Mad Men). And though money remains by far the primary motivator among TV executives, most of the ones I've met over the years are in the business because on some level, they really do like television and want to make good shows. (Preferably with American Idol–level ratings, but you can't have everything.) There was definitely a sense in talking to Chris Albrecht, Kevin Reilly, Rob Sorcher, and some of the other execs from this period that they were really just happy at first to be trying something new. That many of these shows wound up being similar thematically wasn't really apparent until later in the decade.