World Screen @ 35: Leading Up to 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.

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.”

In our last article, we looked at network shows that evolved scripted storytelling prior to HBO impacting the cultural zeitgeist. Today, we look at a ground-breaking drama set in a maximum-security prison and how it paved the way for The Sopranos and a host of other high-end scripted dramas.

THE ROAD TO THE SOPRANOS
Tom Fontana, who had advanced the medical drama genre on broadcast television on St. Elsewhere, went on to create Oz, HBO’s first hour-long drama, which ran from 1997 to 2003. Oz offered a raw, unflinching look at the inmates and correctional officers in the Oswald Maximum Security Prison, nicknamed Oz, as they fought for power and survival. Oz premiered in 1997, two years before The Sopranos. While most in the TV business consider The Sopranos as the watershed series that changed the drama genre, often referring to the evolution of television as “before The Sopranos” and “after The Sopranos,” in truth, without the success of Oz and the many risks it took, other serialized shows may not have made it to the small screen.

Repeatedly, throughout the history of television, new technologies have unleashed and enabled creativity. HBO, a premium cable channel whose business model was based on subscriber fees, not advertising, gave writers the freedom to craft storylines without worrying about commercial breaks. HBO also had an executive willing to take risks, Chris Albrecht, who was the head of HBO’s original productions in the ’90s.

“[HBO] was a network that had no rules and didn’t really have a clear sense of how they would define themselves,” recalled Fontana in a 2013 interview. “They were doing some things very successfully—documentaries, sports and comedy—because Chris’s background was running an improv club where comedians got their start. When they were casting about for an hour drama, they wanted to go as far away from anything you could watch on network television as possible, which now seems so simple but at the time was just so revolutionary. What could be further away from Touched By An Angel than Oz? It was a little like being a crack addict and being told you can do as much crack as you want, and nothing will happen. You can’t get arrested, and you can’t hurt your health. You’re just going to feel good. And it was a tremendous experience for me.”

HBO’s lack of rules allowed Fontana to unleash his creativity. Because there were no commercials, he could craft a show that was a series of short stories about individual prisoners. “Some weeks a character’s story would last 20 minutes and some weeks two minutes,” he explained. “Things didn’t necessarily have to follow. You didn’t have to find a story that was going to bring you through the whole hour. One of the most difficult things about writing an hour drama on a week to week basis is every week you have to have a central story that drives action, that whatever else is happening, relationships or all that stuff, it’s pushing you through, and you go back to it constantly. To be free of that was an extraordinary gift and a lot of fun to write, and I think, for the actors to play because a character’s story was all together. He or she got to feel what it was like for that character. It wasn’t spread out over the whole hour.”

Although Fontana enjoys writing for broadcast television, the inclusion of commercial breaks forces a task he finds “miserable.” “You have to create these false moments of ‘uh-oh’ so that [viewers] come back from the Pepto Bismol commercial,” he explained. “Sometimes, if the story is right, it has five built-in ‘uh-ohs,’ but most stories don’t have five. As it turned out, Oz probably had 20 ‘uh-ohs’ per episode! But I didn’t have to force it timewise. It didn’t have to be eight minutes in, or ten minutes in. It could be whenever it was organically part of the story.”

At the time, Fontana fully realized the weight of the extraordinary opportunity and freedom he had been given, “I felt enormously responsible to—and at that point, there was nobody on the playing field but me—whoever was going to come next. Because I felt if I screw this up the next guy who comes in here is going to say, ‘give me the creative freedom,’ and Chris is going to say, ‘I gave it to Fontana, and he fucked me, and I’m not giving you the creative freedom.’ I seriously worried about that because you don’t want to be the guy who created the problem. We all in this business spend our time paying for the sins of someone else. Say a studio has gone into production and the showrunner went way over budget. You’re the next showrunner, and they say, ‘Look, this is the way it is, you’re not spending a dime more.’ Or the network gets in trouble because some public interest group starts a letter campaign about somebody else’s show that tried to [tackle] abortion. [Setting aside] how different people handle things, you end up paying for other people’s sins. I didn’t want anyone to pay for my sins. And I feel very proud that HBO has had such a great run of hour dramas. None of them were like Oz. It’s not like David Chase [The Sopranos] said I’m going to do another of what Tom did. He had his own vision in the way I had mine, as did Alan Ball [Six Feet Under] and David Simon [The Wire] and David Milch [Deadwood]. Oz made HBO be OK to take huge risks.”

The success of Oz helped HBO attract A-list talent, many of which had worked in film and were not used to the pay-TV financial model.

In the early days of HBO, as Albrecht explained in 2014, “The financial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was the result of successful series airing on a broadcast channel and then being sold in syndication. The idea that theatrical talent would cross over to television was almost unheard of. It was very difficult to draw talent, but we were able to convey that we had something unique to offer from a creative point of view—a platform, a way to tell a story differently, these big serialized dramas, a different kind of comedy—and that attracted a certain amount of people. Once we were able to add real financial reward for producers and partners—a show becoming a big hit and selling a lot of DVDs, which was a business that never existed before, syndication for shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City and big international sales—we started to have more of a complete story to tell when we were trying to get people to work with us. The work that the early pioneers, if you will, at HBO did attract people who were drawn by the desire to do something that they were very passionate about.”

LEGACY OF OZ
The exploration of anti-heroes’ motivations that we later saw with Tony Soprano, the way institutions fail individuals, a theme in The Wire (2002-2008), the compulsion for vengeance displayed in Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014), the extreme violence of prisons, evidenced in The Night Of (2016), and the killing off of main characters we thought was exclusive to Game of Thrones (2011-2019)—all had their roots in Oz.

By delivering a show that garnered attention and critical acclaim, Fontana ensured creative freedom for showrunners who followed him.

Alan Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under, which ran from 2001 to 2005, said in a 2004 interview that there were three levels of artistic freedom at HBO. “One is the relaxed broadcast standards,” he explained. “You can have nudity and profanity, and you can have characters’ sex lives being a major part of the story. That allows you to write a storyline about someone combating sexual compulsiveness.

“The other level is that when HBO pitched this idea to me, Carolyn Strauss [the president of HBO Entertainment] said, ‘I want to do a show about America’s relationship with death.’ No network is ever going to do that, because the network’s main reason is to sell products. They want to create this world that puts you in this frame of mind to believe in stuff and be happy, so you will go buy the products. When you remove the element of having to sell products, the show becomes something in and of itself, rather than becoming a means of delivering the advertisers’ messages. That’s a tremendous amount of freedom.

The third level of freedom is that they respect the people they hire. They don’t second-guess you, they don’t [give notes suggesting changes in the script]. They don’t spend a lot of time trying to take what you are creating and turn it into something else that looks like something that has been successful before. They want to broaden the scope of what television can be.”

In our next post, we will hear from people who worked on The Sopranos and how the show changed the course of scripted television.