World Screen @ 35: In the Beginning

As World Screen marks its 35th anniversary in this most unusual and challenging year, we realize how much information, edification, entertainment and distraction—vital now to mental health!—television shows have brought us.

In the spirit of celebrating our 35 years and the evolving medium we have covered, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series. Most in the industry believe The Sopranos was the watershed drama that changed the genre forever. Indeed, many refer to television as “before The Sopranos” and “after The Sopranos.”

Storytelling goes back to the beginnings of humanity. Television has become one of the highest forms of communicating and connecting. At its best, it has even inspired, changed hearts and minds, and offered a window to places, occupations and lifestyles not seen before. Allow us to tell our story of chronicling the efforts and achievements of today’s best storytellers.

IN THE BEGINNING…
The scripted television shows we enjoy today have evolved from the cop, legal, medical and family dramas and comedies created in the medium’s early years. Even the highly serialized, addictive shows we binge on today, those displaying cinematic production values, characters with compromised moral compasses and layered storytelling, have their roots in yesteryear.

Today’s writers and showrunners stand on the shoulders of counterparts from decades ago who had to be bolder and fight much harder for their visions.

It is worth looking back to examine a few of the shows that laid the foundation for The Sopranos and all the cutting-edge series that followed.

In the early years of the medium in America, television was financed by advertising. The broadcast networks, keen to keep advertisers happy, made sure TV shows remained primarily bland and formulaic. In Europe, most of the early TV stations were state-run, obliged to serve the public interest. But change was in the air in the ’60s and ’70s. Social unrest, Civil Rights and women’s movements in the U.S., worker and student protests on both sides of the Atlantic influenced scripted fare.

In America, thanks to some courageous creators and network executives willing to take risks, shows started to present uncomfortable truths and controversial topics. Based on the British show Till Death Do Us Part (1965-1975), Norman Lear produced the trailblazing All in the Family, which premiered on CBS in 1971 and ran until 1979. While in the previous two decades, most shows on American television featured affluent, morally upstanding, white families, Archie Bunker, the paterfamilias of All in the Family, was working-class, reactionary and unashamedly bigoted.

Each week, Archie, married to the subservient Edith, would battle with liberal son-in-law Mike and their daughter, Gloria. Lear went on to produce Sanford and Son (1972-1977), also based on a British show, Steptoe and Son (1962-1974), and The Jeffersons (1975-1985), featuring African American characters. And Maude was an All in The Family spin-off featuring Edith Bunker’s liberal, outspoken cousin. Wrapped in the comforting packaging of comedy, these shows talked about racism, prejudice, class and racial divides, women’s rights and abortion.

UNVARNISHED REAL LIFE
While these half-hour comedies broke with tradition in subject and tone, one-hour dramas in the ’80s fostered new storytelling techniques, introduced handheld cameras, jump shots, gritty, realistic environments and featured ensemble casts. Steven Bochco’s Hill Street Blues, which premiered in 1981, ran seven seasons and followed the daily life of Chicago police precinct and its beat cops, led the innovation. The following year, the medical drama St. Elsewhere bowed.

Tom Fontana, who started his career in television as a staff writer on St. Elsewhere and then moved up to producer, said in a 2013 interview that the writers had two goals with the show. “One, on a grander scale, we were trying to bust the mythology that had been created in television about how doctors were God. Think Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey, Marcus Welby, M.D., Trapper John, M.D. We were trying to say these are people, and they are as flawed and as confused and prone to make a mistake as any of us are. Second, St. Elsewhere got on the air because of Hill Street Blues. Immediately, we were called Hill Street Blues in a hospital, and that so pissed us off that we went out of our way to distance ourselves from Hill Street every possible way we could. We were both ensemble shows in an institution, but doctors and nurses are very different kinds of people from beat cops, and we decided to exploit all that. Brandon Tartikoff, who was running NBC at the time, told John Masius and me, ‘you are vaudevillians trapped in a one-hour drama. Try to make the show as funny and as irreverent as possible without completely turning it into The Three Stooges.’ So we tried to have this mix—which is very true to working in a hospital—of laughter covering the tears that these men and women have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.”

Flawed characters and real-life issues and problems were elements that laid the groundwork for shows to come. Taking the lessons learned from St. Elsewhere, Fontana worked as a writer and executive producer on Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999), a cop show set in Baltimore, and eventually crossed paths with Dick Wolf.

Dick Wolf’s long-running Law & Order premiered in 1990, but it wasn’t an easy sell. Two networks turned it down before NBC’s Tartikoff picked it up.

“In 1987 and 1988, you could not give away one-hour shows in syndication; nobody wanted them,” said Wolf in a 2018 interview. “They only wanted half-hour shows. The strike by the Writers Guild of America in 1988 exacerbated that; there was no development going on. So I was trying to come up with shows that could run either as half-hours or hours. We did Law & Order [structured as two half-hours: during the first half, a crime is investigated, and in the second half, the suspect is prosecuted] and we also did a hospital show. Luckily, we never had to split them because they wouldn’t have worked, but it would have been better than not getting them on the air at all.”

Other networks turned Law & Order down before NBC’s Tartikoff picked it up, as Wolf explained. “Brandon really liked the pilot, but he said to me, ‘What’s the bible for the show?’ And I said, ‘The front page of the New York Post.’”

Indeed, Law & Order became famous for its “ripped from the headlines” format. “We may rip the headline, but we change the body copy,” Wolf said. “We have researchers, technical advisors and experts who are obsessed with accuracy. So what you see reflects real police work and legal strategy.”

Law & Order remained on the air for 20 years and continues to thrill die-hard fans in re-runs in the U.S. and around the world. During those two decades, Wolf spun off several scripted and unscripted shows, most notably Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001-2011) and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, referred to as SVU. It premiered in 1999 and holds the record as the longest-running scripted show on the air in the U.S. It has been renewed till 2023, with another spin-off in the works.

When asked what gives the Law & Order franchise its longevity, Wolf said in 2014, “The Law & Order brand has endured in a huge part because of the writing. The showrunners/writers have kept the series current and written stories that are topical and compelling. For 25 years, people have been telling me that Law & Order is addicting. Crime is a constantly renewable resource, so there is no shortage of stories to tell.”

Wolf also created the famous crossover episodes. “I will pat myself on the back along with Tom Fontana, who is probably my oldest friend in the business,” said Wolf in 2016. “This all started 25 years ago with Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street crossovers. We did two of those in two successive seasons, and both of them were the highest-rated shows of both series. So that got filed away for the future—they work! And actor Richard Belzer came over to Law & Order: SVU after Homicide. Wolf admits producing crossover episodes is a lot more work for cast and crew. “To do crossovers is a huge, huge pain in the ass! Everybody hates them, but they like the results. They are different, and you don’t get them anyplace else.”

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES
While Law & Order was slowly gaining recognition and audience, Steven Bochco revisited the cop drama with NYPD Blue, which premiered in 1993 and aired until 2005. Bochco teamed up again with David Milch, who also worked on Hill Street and would later create Deadwood (2003-2006) for HBO. Together they led the writers’ room to push the limits of what a broadcast network would allow in the use of profanities, partial nudity and scenes of realistic violence.

In a 2005 interview, looking back on his work up to that time, Bochco explained, “The only time we ever consciously wanted to innovate was with NYPD Blue, and those were for very commercial reasons. When we started to think about that, in 1991, the hour-drama was pretty moribund. Ratings were down for all the hour-long shows, no one was buying them in syndication, and there was generally a sense that the genre had flattened. We were getting killed by the growth of cable as it began to penetrate more and more households. One would look to [premium] cable—HBO and Showtime—for grittier, more stimulating drama than we were providing on broadcast television. So, NYPD Blue was a conscious attempt to create a show which would bring back some of that viewership by competing on somewhat of a more level playing ground with the cable channels.”

Although by 2005, audiences had grown much more sophisticated and accepting of complex characters and uncomfortable subject matter, Bochco said he still had to fight for his vision of a show with network executives. “It’s always a complicated battle with these people. You have to understand that this is an economically driven medium, and no advertiser wants to be associated with controversy. Because controversy may be interesting and high profile, but it doesn’t necessarily sell soap. That’s why NYPD Blue, in its first year, could attract no top-shelf advertiser—no one wanted to touch us with a fork. It was only when the controversy went by the wayside that they all came back on board. It’s first and foremost a commercially and economically driven medium, so you’re always going to have those issues to deal with. The networks are always looking over your shoulder. They do not want you to do anything that’s going to buy them any sort of controversy. Ironically, the easiest time I ever had with them was with NYPD Blue because we had so carefully negotiated the parameters of that show, both in terms of language and in terms of nudity. For over ten years, as long as I stayed within those parameters, there was never anything to argue about. But on every other show I ever did, including the current one, [Blind Justice] they’re blue noses, they’re terrible. They are so frightened. They are so conservative. I used to have horrible fights with them when I was younger, and now I just kind of disregard what they say because I don’t have the energy to shriek anymore.”

As Bochco pointed out, in the ’90s, HBO had slowly started stealing the broadcast networks’ thunder with comedy shows like The Larry Sanders Show, which aired from 1992 to 1998. It was created by and starred comedian Garry Shandling, who had started his career as a writer on Norman Lear’s Sanford & Son. It should be noted that HBO, as a pay-TV service, did not have to cater to advertiser needs or demands, which freed up creators and writers.

In the late ’90s, Tom Fontana, who had contributed so much to innovating the medical drama with St. Elsewhere on network television, created Oz for HBO. In our next post, we will see how groundbreaking that series set in a maximum-security prison was and how it paved the way for The Sopranos and a host of other high-end scripted dramas.