Thirty Years of Hating Television

A lot of people with 10, 20, 30 years of experience are feeling the pressure right now. Some good news, courtesy of the man who gave us Paulie Walnuts, Phil Leotardo and Tony Soprano.

David Chase had been in television for almost thirty years before HBO let him make The Sopranos. He wrote for The Rockford Files in the seventies, spent the eighties on failed pilots and TV movies nobody remembers, and ran Northern Exposure in the nineties. He was 53 when the Sopranos pilot aired, and had spent most of those years wanting to be making films instead (he has never been shy about this).

"The Sopranos does not exist without David Chase having worked in television for almost thirty years," said Blake Masters, the writer-producer who created Brotherhood for Showtime.

"Because The Sopranos really could not be written by somebody unless they understood everything about television, and hated all of it."

Jason Grote - a playwright who came to TV writing late and ended up on Mad Men - said much the same thing:

"Prestige TV wasn't new blood coming into Hollywood as much as it was a lot of veterans that were never able to tell these types of stories, who were suddenly able to cut through."

I'm not sure your world maps exactly onto the TV and film industry of the early 2000s. But where there's disruption, distrust, disillusionment (hello) - knowing exactly how it all works, and hating most of it, might count for more now than it did five years ago.

P.S. The pilot script the networks read had no murders in it. Chase assumed they'd never allow one. "The Sopranos was a mob show where nobody got killed." He rewrote it before HBO, and put in Christopher shooting Emil Kolar in the back of the head at Satriale's. That's the version they bought.