World Screen @ 35: HBO After The Sopranos

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, 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.

In our last article, we heard from showrunners with significantly different backgrounds and creative sensibilities talk about shows they created for FX: Joe Weissberg and Joel Fields with The Americans and Carlton Cuse with The Strain. Today, we look at HBO after The Sopranos and how the premium pay service found new shows that met the high standards set by the seminal drama.

HBO AFTER THE SOPRANOS
The Sopranos, which aired on HBO from 1999 to 2007, is considered one of the best TV shows of all time and certainly one that altered scripted drama forever. Industry insiders and critics often talk about television as “before The Sopranos” and “after The Sopranos” with the series created by David Chase as fostering more layered and nuanced storytelling, flawed, complex characters, and infusing a cunning stratum of humor within the mob-related violence. The series garnered 112 Emmy nominations and 21 wins, including three each for Joseph Gandolfini, who played New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano and Edie Falco, who played his wife, Carmela.

The series finale sparked a passionate debate about whether or not Tony Soprano had been killed. The same industry insiders and critics who had proclaimed The Sopranos a game-changer were wondering, along with viewers, what HBO could offer that would match that level of success and critical acclaim.

In a 2012 interview, Richard Plepler, then HBO’s co-president, said, “The Sopranos was, of course, a transcendent piece of popular entertainment, but we are not looking to ever find the next Sopranos, there is no such thing. What we are looking for always is the next high-quality piece of programming, and we believe, with gratitude, that Boardwalk Empire represents that, Game of Thrones represents that, Luck represents that, and True Blood represents that. Aaron Sorkin’s new show Newsroom, Armando Iannucci’s new show, called Veep, Lena Dunham’s new show, called Girls, these are all, in our opinion, in the tradition of HBO high-quality programming. That is what we are selling.

“It’s very important that you define success correctly every day,” continued Plepler. “And there is always the temptation to define success as your last success. And the truth is that success is really about original voices. And you never know when that original voice is going to come in the door. So you need to have a culture which is responsive and open to those original voices.”

Terence Winter, the Emmy-Award-winning writer and creator of Boardwalk Empire, which aired from 2010 to 2014, was one of those voices. He continued a key trait of The Sopranos: getting the audience to sympathize with a bad guy.

“If you are really honest about a depiction of any human being and show every aspect of their personality, you’ll find something you can relate to even in the most evil person,” explained Winter in a 2012 interview. “Take a guy like Al Capone. Generally, in movies, you only have a limited amount of time to tell the story, so most of the time, you see Al Capone depicted as the guy with the white fedora and the cigar and the machine guns and the violence. But on a TV show, we have the luxury of really spending a great deal of time with these people and digging really deep into character. So you’ll see those moments of Al Capone at home with his deaf son and say, Wow, this guy really loves his kid. Some of the things that happened to him are informed by events that have happened in his life, and suddenly, it gets a lot more complicated; how did this person become this gangster, this ruthless killer? And once you start to dig deeper, it takes the black and white and makes it gray and suddenly you’re not sure what you think.

“We went through the same thing on The Sopranos,” Winters continued. “People loved Tony and his relationship with his kids and his wife. They would get lulled into this sense that he was this big cuddly teddy bear, and then suddenly he would engage in some horrific act of violence, and you’d go, I thought I liked this guy! You are really conflicted and think, I do like him, but I don’t like certain things that he does.”

Winter’s penchant for quality storytelling was well known in the industry. While planning the pilot of Boardwalk Empire, he was able to capture the attention of director Martin Scorsese.

“The collaboration came early on,” said Winters. “It was really an idea of first settling on what the show would be and what era the show would take place in. The book Boardwalk Empire is essentially the history of Atlantic City, and it runs from the mid-19th century, when it was literally a mosquito-infested swampland, up till the present day. HBO had given me the book and said, read it and see if there is a TV series in there, and I zeroed in on the 1920s. So that is originally what I pitched Marty: prohibition and the birth of organized crime in America. Prohibition is what made millionaires out of gangsters and forced them to organize because they were killing each other over this. Marty was very interested in exploring that era and very interested in my idea of long-form storytelling that could go on hours and hours. We did 83 hours of The Sopranos, so you can really dig deep into these characters. I just went off and wrote the script. Early on, he was just supposed to be involved as a producer, but he read my script and called me up and said, I think I might like to direct this. I was blown away!”

Winter’s vision for the show was ambitious. “Terry Winter decided what he wanted to write about, the 1920s, and about this character loosely based on a real character,” explained Michael Lombardo, HBO’s president of programming, in 2012. “The scope of it was something he believed in. It meant, for us, that the show was going to be more expensive than we would have hoped. It meant that it was a period piece. Initially, when we had talked about Atlantic City, we thought he might gravitate toward something modern, but this moment in history is what moved him. That’s the character of almost all of our shows.”

Recreating Atlantic City’s 1920s boardwalk was no small undertaking.

“The first place we looked to shoot the show was the actual Atlantic City, which makes the most sense if the show is set there,” said Winter. “Unfortunately, 99 percent of what existed in 1920 doesn’t exist anymore. There may be three camera angles that you say, OK, yeah, that looks the way it was, but if you move the camera an inch to the right, it’s done.

After looking high and low, we decided the thing that made the most sense was to shoot it right in New York City, and the Steiner Studios in Brooklyn is where we have our headquarters, our production offices, our writers’ offices and our sets. Then the big challenge was the boardwalk. When I was writing the show and starting to do my research and looking at pictures of what the Atlantic City boardwalk looked like, I thought, there is no way we can do this show! This is cost-prohibitive; this is impossible. When I turned in the script, [I described the boardwalk] as Times Square on the ocean, circa 1920: one massive hotel after another, Ferris wheels, just this huge carnival atmosphere and lights as far as the eyes can see. And to be crystal clear with HBO, when I handed in the pilot, I gave them 15 pages of photographs of Atlantic City so that when I say the boardwalk, just to be clear, this is what I am talking about visually.”

At about the same time as Winter was working on his pilot, HBO had aired the miniseries John Adams, which used digital special effects to create backdrops of 1770 Boston. “For the first time, I thought, Wow, we actually might be able to pull this off,” recalled Winter. “If we build a big enough section of our boardwalk that is a practical set and then augment it with visual effects, we actually can create the illusion that we are on the ocean and that the boardwalk goes on for miles and the buildings all have height. And that is exactly what we did. We built a 300-foot replica of the 1920 Atlantic City boardwalk in a parking lot in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, surrounded by shipping containers…That is then augmented and surrounded by green screens, and a lot of our action takes place there, but you watch it on TV, and suddenly the Atlantic Ocean is lapping its waves on the shore of this parking lot in Brooklyn!”

FROM GANGSTERS TO POLITICIANS
British writer and showrunner Armando Iannucci, who had already skewered the U.K. political system in the comedy The Thick of It for the BBC, crossed the Atlantic to lampoon American politics with Veep for HBO, which premiered in 2011.

While narrowing down the premise and characters, Iannucci realized Julia Louis-Dreyfus was the right person for the lead role.

“It was a long process of mine thinking what should be the central role—should it be someone in Congress, a senator, a governor, an ambassador, a cabinet member,” said Iannucci in a 2013 interview. “Then we decided the vice president. And pretty instantly I thought it would be good if it’s a female vice president because we could make it feel a bit new, a bit fresh, and people wouldn’t say, Oh, is this meant to be Joe Biden. So we wrote the pilot script for Selina, and once we wrote it, we realized that we’d need a very good strong comic actress to play her. Julia was the first name that sprung to mind and the first person I got in touch with, and it was all sorted pretty quickly after that.”

Besides being a gifted comedic actress who had starred in Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus had other qualities that appealed to Iannucci. First, she had grown up in Washington D.C., which meant, as Iannucci explained, “she already had a slight background feel for the city [and its workings]. Julia also had a lot of experience doing improvisation in Chicago. But the other thing that she brings to the role is, because of who she is and what she has done [she starred in the hugely successful comedy Seinfeld], she is quite an eminent figure in America. Therefore, she is used to going into a room and knowing that everyone is looking at her and knowing that she has to smile and be pleasant. She knows all the tricks that Selina would have to use, but Julia can look spontaneous and natural rather than making it seem like a performance. So there was that element of body language, of being on the public stage but trying to be protective of your own privacy, or not let slip what is actually going on in your head. These were all unexpected bonuses from my point of view. We cast her because she is a brilliant performer, but when we really got down to talking about the role and the script, these other things all started emerging as bits of her experience that could be brought to the role.”

While one of the recurring themes of Veep is obtaining power, the responsibilities it entails, and how it impacts one’s public and private lives, the series also looks at women in positions of power. “Even though we made a female vice president, I didn’t want any of the episodes to be about being a woman,” said Iannucci in 2013. “However, if you want to be real, then you have to look at how women are portrayed in politics. And it’s true; they will get adverse headlines if they have a very expensive hairstyle or have spent a lot of money on clothes. On the other hand, there will be photographs of them wearing the same dress twice and things like that, so they are aware that they are being judged in a different way from men. I think there is also that sense of women high up in power who feel that because they are still the exception, they will be marked down unless they can show that they are as macho as the male politicians.”

With its hilarious and biting satire of human behavior and the U.S. political process, Veepengendered a loyal fan base and was showered with critical acclaim. The series racked up 68 Emmy Nominations and 17 wins, including three for Outstanding Comedy Series and six for Louis-Dreyfus as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

Iannucci found a supportive, creative environment at HBO. “working at HBO reminded me a lot of doing stuff for the BBC because HBO is different from the big networks. They want to protect the creator, so they give a lot of autonomy to the showrunner and the writers. It’s not a huge season order; it’s only ten episodes. In many ways, it reminded me of the protectiveness that I got when I was working for the BBC.”

Part of Iannucci’s vision for the show was to shoot it cinema-verité style, which allowed him to catch comedic moments. “We light it more or less so we can move 360 degrees on the set,” he explained. “That means it’s quicker to shoot because we don’t have to reset and relight for all the reverse shots. It means that we can flow a lot more. We can shoot a whole scene uninterrupted and then add in a few notes and suggestions, shoot it again, add in a few more notes and suggestions, shoot it again, pick off a moment that we feel can do with loosening up, loosen it up, so we’re shooting loads of stuff, but we usually end the day on time. For the actors, that’s a very heavy day. They are never off. They could be sitting way over in the corner, but a camera might still find them, and certainly, their radio microphones might still be on so we can hear what they say. They are on all the time, which they love, but it does make for a quite intense shoot.”

Aaron Sorkin, who had explored politics, power and the inner workings of the White House in The West Wing, turned his attention and imagination to journalism in The Newsroom, which premiered in 2012 and ran three seasons. The show explores a fictional cable-news network, its anchorman Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels—who won an Emmy for his performance—and the decision-making process of the newsroom’s team.

In a 2012 interview, Sorkin explained the research he did before writing the show. “I spent time in several newsrooms just to get a feel of the place (and it turns out they’re all different). I also had a series of meetings with some of the top people in American journalism. Sometimes they were one-on-one, and sometimes, they were rowdy roundtables. I asked a ton of questions but mostly let them do the talking. At some point, I’d ask two questions. The first was, ‘What would a utopian news show be?’ The second was, ‘What’s stopping someone from doing that?’ The answers to the first question varied a bit, but the answer to the second question was always some form of ‘guts.’ If you want to write romantically and idealistically, that’s the best answer you could hear.”

While some critics thought Sorkin was preachy in The Newsroom, he felt he was never talking down to his audience. “I try to write something that I like and that I think my friends would like and that I think my parents would like, and then I keep my fingers crossed that enough other people will like it that I can earn a living. I think it’s important to like your audience and have faith in them. I don’t think the people who watch television are any dumber than the people who make television.”

Among the many different storytellers HBO attracted, two that became among the pay-cable channel’s most famous were David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. They brought George R.R. Martin’s bestselling book series A Song of Ice and Fire to the small screen. We look at Game of Thrones in our next post.