Sepinwall - Sepinwall on Mad Men and Breaking Bad : an eshort from the updated Revolution was Televised

TOUCHSTONE

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Copyright 2012, by Alan Sepinwall

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First Touchstone ebook edition December 2015

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ISBN 978-1-5011-4217-8

The book was finished... Two of the shows werent

Its a time machine... AMC gets into the game with Mad Men

I am the one who knocks!... Breaking Bad gives the recession the villain it deserves

Its a time machineAMC gets into the game with Mad Men

T he ad man stands before a pair of potential clients, each of them eager to hear how he plans to market the advanced technology at the heart of their new product. He says new can create an itch with consumers, but he learned long ago that appealing to their nostalgia is a stronger approach.

In Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound, Don Draper tells the men from Kodak. Its a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.

By the summer of 2007, it was already easy for TV fans to feel nostalgic about this second golden age. The Sopranos had just ended. Deadwood and Six Feet Under were done. The Shield and The Wire each had only one season to go, and HBOs initial drama burst had been followed by the short-lived likes of John from Cincinnati , Carnivale , and Rome . We had been lucky enough to witness this unprecedented wave of quality drama, but all great things come to an end, right? If we were lucky, we thought, maybe wed see another Sopranos 5 or 10 years down the line.

Instead, it only took 39 days from the infamous cut to black for a worthy successor to appearone with a Sopranos bloodline, and on a network that, like FX a few years earlier, was just looking to get noticed.

Don Draper, the anti-hero of Mad Men , at first glance would seem to have nothing in common with Tony Soprano. Hes sleek and classically handsome, where Tony was large and sweaty. Hes eloquent; Tony was vulgar. He represents the kind of vintage mans man Tony longed to see (and be) when he asked, What happened to Gary Cooper?

But Don Draper isnt what he seems under that polished surface. Hes as flawed and complicated and fascinating as any other great character of this period, and hes at the center of a show that masterfully explores the difference between perception and reality.

And perception was at the heart of why AMC wound up extending the revolution with Mad Men .

AMC, which used to be short for American Movie Classics, had been playing second fiddle for years to Turner Classic Movies. AMC was a black and white movie network, but TCM was the good black and white movie network, says Rob Sorcher, an executive who was hired in 2002 to reformat AMC so the movies would feature commercial interruptions.

TV critics complained about the ads, but ratings went up as a result, and AMC CEO Josh Sapan came to Sorcher with a new mission, and with four magic words.

Josh Sapan wanted to get into original programming, says Sorcher. His directive to me was, We need a Sopranos .

Sorcher tried to explain that HBO had been in the original series business for years before The Sopranos came along, but Sapan was unmoved.

His point was this: AMC doesnt need to worry about ratings at that moment of time, recalls Sorcher. What AMC needs is a show, a critically acclaimed and audience-craved show that would make us undroppable to cable operators. Because AMC, as a movie network, was mostly second-tier movies or ones you could get anywhere, unaffiliated with a larger cable empire like Viacom or Turner. They were very worried that the likes of Comcast were creating their own movie channels, and that they would be dropped completely off of systems. Josh knew that he had to have something that the public wanted really badly.

Sorcher wasnt sure how seriously the company was going to take this plan. He knew he needed somebody who was focused on finding material, was good with material, and could comfortably make their way through L.A. while he was based in New York, but he was reluctant to hire someone away from his or her current job for a gig that could evaporate in six months. Eventually, he turned to screenwriter Christina Wayne.

When I went in to meet with Rob, I was pretty skeptical and didnt want to do it, says Wayne. When youre a screenwriter, its pretty embarrassing to go over to the other side. When I met with Rob, I realized immediately we had a similar love for film, and we hit it off. He started talking about how AMC was looking for someone to put their stamp on the network with original scripted programming. At the time, I had been watching Sopranos and Sex and the City and Six Feet Under on HBO. I had never really watched TV prior to that. I thought, Wow, this is a way to do HBO on basic cable. I agreed to come on as a consultant for six months, because I didnt want to admit to my friends that I had gone over to the dark side.

Sapan wanted to test the waters with a movie or miniseriespreferably a Western, since those always rated well on the channeland Wayne asked her agent, Nancy Etz, to find her some scripts. One was Broken Trail , which already had Robert Duvall attached to star and Walter Hill to direct. Wayne had never much cared for the genre, but she found herself getting emotional as she read the Broken Trail script on the flight back to New York.

I thought, If I respond to it, and Im not a Western fan, then its a broader audience, says Wayne. That was March. We went into production in August. Within a week, we got approval from [AMC executive] Ed Carroll and Josh for millions of dollars, with Sony as the studio. It was one of those whirlwind, insane, never happens in the business world things where you get approval to make something thats only half-written at that point.

In Sorchers early days at AMC, he says, the channels original series were cheap, unscripted fare that was costing $100,000 an episode, or $150,000. Even with Sony as the studio, Broken Trail was at least four million bucks to us. This was the greatest single investment in the history of the channel.

But heres the thing in my mind the whole time, he adds. Im at AMC, none of this has been done before. If I make something thats lousy from a quality point of viewif its critically pannedand then it doesnt do a rating, then everything is shit. Why bother? But if we make something thats critically acclaimed, then having a great rating on it was just an upside. The reason to do it is not ratings. My boss has told me that ratings, in that moment, dont matter.

Ratings may not have mattered, but they didnt hurt, either. Broken Trail drew nearly 10 million viewers in July of 2006, a number that Charlie Collierwho was preparing to become the new president of AMC that fallcouldnt believe.

I saw the number and said, Thats gotta be a typo, says Collier. But it showed that the movies and originals could live side by side in an interesting way. In the build-up to the miniseries debut, AMC had been running a string of the best Westerns in the networks library, all of them hyping the original production.