Sons of Anarchy, and the war of words on violence in the media

October 18, 2013October 30, 2014 Rilaly2 Comments

What would cause a forty-seven year old man to become so enraged that he regresses back to his high school days, and his favorite high school swears, by calling another grown man “a f***ing douchebag”? What would cause a seemingly brilliant mind —a mind that created six seasons of a highly rated television show— to become so desperate in an argument against a critical opponent he calls them “an idiot that is idiotic, unintelligent, not bright, and an angry white guy with an exclusionary plan, using fear and (G)od to spread a gospel of ignorance?” What would then cause other men —men purported to be respected in the mainstream— to read such a letter and regard it as “widely respected”?

Founder of the Parents Television Council (PTC), and current Media Research Center (MRC) member, Brent Bozell, and Sons of Anarchy creator, and primary screenwriter, Kurt Sutter engaged in a war of words regarding the violent nature of that show’s September 10, 2013 season premiere for its sixth season.

Brent Bozell claimed, in a Fox Nation piece, that the show’s premiere was gratuitous with it’s depiction of violence. Some of the scenes, that Bozell catalogued from the show include, a Columbine-style “School shooting, ‘milking a fictional Catholic school shooting for commercial gain,’ as well as two rapes, and a man drowning in a bathtub of urine.”{1} Sons of Anarchy creator, primary screenwriter, and showrunner, Kurt Sutter, claimed that he didn’t include any of those particular violent scenes for shock value, and Bozell responded to that, and a war of words was born.

Most of the back and forth that occurred between these two doesn’t interest me. I’m not overly concerned with Bozell’s greater, moralistic fears for society, or the role of Michelle Obama in this matter… or any other matter. I also don’t think Sutter’s “widely distributed, widely read, and widely praised” letter was effective, but the reason I deem this exchange newsworthy is Brent Bozell’s attempt to dissect the motivations for making violent TV shows today, by using Sons of Anarchy as a focal point for that argument.

Sutter wants people to believe that the larger plot point was how the biker gang, in this series, is going to (slowly, over many episodes) reap the consequences of their gun-running. But we know what the “bigger objective of the episode” is: “Ka-ching.” You load as much sensationalistic sludge in your debut episode to build some ratings momentum. The “narrative arc” that follows may try to make some sense of that avalanche, but it doesn’t justify it.”

The fact that the narrative arc may not ever justify the inclusion of violence is true, but for many of us that just doesn’t matter. Most of us don’t care what happens in the aftermath of such scenes. We don’t care if there is a greater moral message, or if the character learns from his depravity, we just want the scenes. We want to rubberneck on that interstate accident to see that guy’s leg sticking out of the car, every night, in primetime, and in the comfort of our living room. We want to see a Mr. White cut off a policeman’s ear, as happened in the brilliant Reservoir Dogs, to speak into it. He cut off the cops ear and said stuff into it. Suh-weet!!! What happened to Mr. White in the end? Did he learn from his malfeasance? I honestly don’t remember, because I don’t care. We want to see blood fly, and we want to see the perpetrators of the violent act walk away like it’s just another manic Monday. This, as Mr. Christopher states in the quote below, is what is called “torture-porn”. Writers know all about torture-porn, as do screenwriters, and everybody that’s into this type of fiction, but it doesn’t advance their agenda to talk about it in this manner, so we don’t. We call it art, we defend it as art, and we expect our audience to define it as art regardless how far down the pole we slide.

(Sons of Anarchy) began as a well-produced, white-washed examination of morally ambiguous bikers,” writes Tommy Christopher for Mediaite, “But it has devolved into melodramatic torture-porn.”{2}

As Mr. Christopher alludes, most creators/show runners have one, maybe two, and possibly three seasons of a television show, in mind even before the production of the first season begins. They have it all logged in what is called a show’s bible. That bible contains tight scripts, motives for actions, reactions, characters, characterizations, beginnings and endings, and anything and everything showrunners can think of to pitch to the networks then make what they hope to be a great show. If they are lucky, and that term may be considered relative over time, and their show gets renewed a couple times, the showrunner begins to realize that the material in his bible is finite.

Most showrunners don’t plan on making a season six when they begin. They can’t. They have to take it day by day, and season by season. It’s the nature of the business. If a showrunner is lucky enough to have a season six, one cannot blame them for feeling some desperation, and some pressure, be it external, or internal, to create a sixth season that is as great as his first or second. The first couple of seasons of tight scripts that the showrunner pined over for years, and in some cases a decade, are gone, and they’re left with months to produce cutting edge material that keeps them atop the hip, cutting edge, cut-throat world of TV.

One has to guess that in place of those tight narratives, Sutter chose to supplant them with torture-porn, and murder-porn, scenes that kept his show cutting-edge and popular. One has to guess that there was great deal of pressure on Sutter to make this season’s premiere the greatest ever made, just as there is immense pressure on every writer to do it, and possibly overdo it every time out, until “it” hopefully becomes unforgettable. If Sutter were not under such pressure from the network, and their advertisers, one would think that Sutter would have been able to shrug off Bozell’s charges better, and say that the man doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Sutter’s juvenile attack on Bozell, suggest that Bozell must have nailed Sutter’s motivations so well that Sutter had no defense for it.

The You-So-Stupid defense

“I would imagine these (PTC and MRC members) are not evil people,” Sutter says, in an attempt to be sardonic. “But they are just not very intuitive or intelligent individuals. It’s such a small and simple view of process. The fact that people want to be monitoring what my children watch is terrifying. There is no awareness of what is the bigger objective of that episode is, the bigger point of the narrative.”{3}

It’s not complicated, I would counter and Mr. Sutter knows it, and that’s what makes him so sensitive to Bozell’s charges. Sutter wanted to have provocative, cutting-edge, timely, and popular scenes. He got eight million viewers. Do you know how many showrunners would kill for eight million viewers? You did it Mr. Sutter. Quit trying to make it seem more complicated than it is. You won!?

Bozell countered Sutter’s charge:

“(Sutter and his team) are getting paid millions to offend as aggressively as they can possibly imagine. They have nothing to discuss but their own “intelligent and intuitive” work and how outrageously hip they are.”

OUCH! Placing myself in Sutter’s shoes —as a creative writer that writes scenes that are violent, based on the numerous violent scenes that I have enjoyed in fiction, movies, and TV— I have to say that Bozell’s insightful condemnations would wreck me. I like to think that I’m a creative, intuitive, and intelligent writer, but when someone takes away my ammunition as thoroughly as Bozell did in two sentences, I would probably start making mean faces and throwing spitballs too.

The Censorship Defense

“Whenever that stuff crosses the line into censorship, it’s just scary … I’m not a social guru, I’m not a guy with an agenda politically, socially or morally. I’m a f***ing storyteller.”

Most artists misuse the word censorship when someone criticizes their work. It’s their desperate attempt to thwart criticism, for in the truest definition of the word, Bozell is not capable of censoring Sutter. Bozell does not work for a government agency, he does not work for Sons of Anarchy in any manner, or for the network that airs it, and he does not have any direct pull with their advertisers. He is simply acting as a critic, in the manner Brent Bozell has always offered criticism. Anyone that pays attention to Brent Bozell knows who he is, and how and what he critiques. If you don’t like him, don’t read him. When Robin Williams denigrated religious preachers, was he censoring Jerry Falwell, or was he a righteous dude? In this game, it all depends on which side of the stadium you’re sitting on.

The Start-A-Debate Defense

At one point, Mr. Sutter claimed that he just wanted to “start a debate” on the topics covered in the show. He obviously picked that “start a debate” card out of the politician’s excuse hat that contains the cards “start a dialogue,” and “start a conversation”. The problem with using such a line is that some of the times an actual debate breaks out, and you might encounter someone that takes the other side of that debate. It appears that the debate that Mr. Sutter wanted to start was one that he was entirely unprepared for, and he was left with nothing more than personal attacks and swears.

The aspect of this debate that is utterly confounding is that anyone that reads Bozell’s actual blog on this topic, will probably have to re-read it about five times to figure out how this relatively benign criticism sent Sutter on such a tear. You’ll wonder how such a relatively benign criticism could cause a forty-seven year old man to lose his mind and write a letter that calls another grown man a “Pathetic, f****ing douchebag.” I’m not sure what school of thought Mr. Sutter currently calls home, but having nothing left but juvenile names and petty accusations says more to me about Mr. Sutter than it does Mr. Bozell.

In his letter, Sutter writes that Bozell is an “idiot” and his organizations are “idiotic”. He claims that Bozell is about nothing more than his agenda, that is “desperately trying to create a lobby”, and that Bozell and “his hate club are flaccid and impotent”. Sutter writes that Bozell is: “Not very bright, (that Bozell’s) message is archaic, and loving parents can innately sense that the PTC has no heart and no real interest in the betterment of children. You reek of McCarthyism and holy water. And right-minded folks can smell you coming a mile away.” He writes that Bozell is “just an angry white guy with an exclusionary plan, using fear and god to spread a gospel of ignorance.” Sutter then concludes his letter with: “I bet your kids hate you.” {4}

In a piece for the Washington Free Beacon, Sonny Bunch claims that this Sutter letter was: “Widely distributed, widely read, and widely praised.”{5} I know that it’s written to denounce a conservative, and I’m sure that those on the receiving end of these distributions hate conservatives, but I’ve tried to read this “widely praised” letter with objectivity, and I can’t understand how anyone would consider it a “gotcha” moment for Mr. Sutter to celebrate. It reads like a letter a teenage boy would send to a girl that just dumped him, and it makes the reader want to take Sutter aside and say, “There are other fish in the sea.” Adolescent rage are the only words that come to mind when I read Sutter include “idiot” and “idiotic” in the same sentence. When he criticizes Bozell’s attempts to lobby professionally, it sounds like the raging, teenage boy is trying to find the perfect punctuation to the letter, along the lines of, “and I hope that you don’t make the pom pom team either.”

I don’t understand why Sutter didn’t just let it go. I don’t understand why Sutter didn’t just say, ‘Bozell is a religious, conservative, and he’s not my demographic, and the only people that read his column are religious conservatives.’ I don’t understand why he would want to give Mr. Bozell’s opinions more airtime.

At this point in the overall debate of artistic content, so many provocative artists have defended themselves in so many ways, that all of Mr. Sutter’s defenses now sound like clichés. Sutter could’ve tried the “reflecting a culture” response that rappers give, but even that has become a cliché at this point. He could’ve tried turning the responsibility back on the parents, with the cliché: “Hey, it’s their job to watch what their kids are watching not mine.” The only response that is not cliché, and the one I would use if I had eight million viewers, is, “People watched it. Scoreboard! I provide a product in the same manner Budweiser provides a product, or Coke, or Hostess. It may not be good for you, or the culture, as Bozell puts it, but that is a decision each household has to make. That is what the free market is all about.” The only thing that would prevent me from doing an “Eight million viewers” touchdown dance would be if I had some sort of insecurity about the material I created that attracted eight million viewers.

Bozell wrote: “The (FX) network and the “creative team of Sons of Anarchy” are getting paid millions to offend as aggressively as they can possibly imagine.”

This line, more than any other, probably provoked Sutter, because it called to mind all the pressure Sutter felt to do it, and overdo it, with more shock, and more violence than he had included before. I’m sure he felt personal, and professional pressure to equal, and possibly top, the progression that began with Goodfellas, moved to Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, to The Sopranos, and finally to Breaking Bad, and that he hoped to carve Sons of Anarchy a niche somewhere in that lineup. Judging by Sutter’s vitriolic response, I’m guessing Sutter feels he fell short, and Bozell’s commentary only intensified that feeling.

When Sutter tells you it’s not about the shock, I can tell you –as a writer of violent crime fiction– that it’s all about the shock. To paraphrase Bret Easton Ellis, I try to write something that will shock my friends, and my friends are pretty jaded. All the movies and shows listed above have jaded us, and we are always on the lookout for our own progression in that line. We love to shock, we live to shock, and we probably wouldn’t be writing today if it weren’t for those inspirations shocking our sensibilities into this direction.

I would not be interested in writing a story about a quirky family in New Hampshire that happens to live in, and own, a Hotel. All the power to John Irving, one of the greatest living writers, but that ain’t me. I would love to achieve the fame, and sales, of The Bridges of Madison County, and Tuesdays with Morrie, but I’ll never write stories like those. I need a little violence in my stories, to be intrigued. I need a lot of violence to be interested, and I need this violence to reflect a culture that has the perpetrators walking away from these extremely violent scenes like it’s just another manic Monday. I am not a violent person, but I think those movies listed above were monumental, and influential. All of them bordered on being gratuitously violent, in a manner that shook my foundation and my fundamentals, and after viewing them, I decided that I wanted to write the progression, and I’m sure that it was Sutter’s goal too.

The problem with being this open and honest about your intentions, or your agenda, is that you’re allowing others to see your intentions, and your agenda, and that somehow minimizes your intentions, and your agenda in a manner that makes them too apparent. If an author has a violent scene that is cool, very few of them will say that they just wanted to write a violent scene that was cool. They’ll tell you that the character, and the plot, are driven by a myriad of complications that will become clear when the narrative arc reaches its climax. Yet, if you watch these shows, and movies, as often as I do, and you read ‘the complications to come’ interviews from their author, you find that more often than not, it was all about the shock and awe of writing violent scenes that were cool. You can’t say that though. Saying things like that makes you feel too much like a carnival barker trying to get patrons to take a look at the bearded lady, and the problem with that is that there might be some critic that comes along and says it’s just another bearded lady, and you’re just another carnival barker.

{1}http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/09/21/bozell-newtown-amnesia-hollywood

{2}http://www.mediaite.com/online/brent-bozell-is-right-something-should-be-done-to-keep-kids-from-watching-sons-of-anarchy/
{3}http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-bozell/2013/09/19/bozell-column-newtown-amnesia-hollywood#ixzz2hztXmyLo

{4}http://www.mediaite.com/tv/youre-a-pathetic-fcking-douchebag-sons-of-anarchy-creator-goes-off-on-conservative-activist/

{5}http://freebeacon.com/blog/brent-bozell-kurt-sutter-and-cultural-relevance/

Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus vs. Zealot, by Reza Aslan

October 9, 2013November 20, 2020 RilalyLeave a comment

Prior to the killing of Jesus, there was a much more monumental (at the time) killing of a leader named Julius Caesar. This assassination of Julius Caesar led, in a circuitous fashion, to the assassination of Jesus of Nazareth. The resultant, and relative, degree of chaos that occurred in Rome, as a result of Caesar’s assassination, spawned chaos in the many Roman territories, including: (what is now called) Israel, Jerusalem, and Galilee. Much of this chaos, and the subsequent insecurity of the rulers, and leaders of this era, led to the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the theme of Bill O’Reilly, and Martin Dugard’s book Killing Jesus. Reza Aslan’s book Zealot has a theme that “Jesus of Nazareth was a ‘politically conscious Jewish revolutionary’ whose kingdom is decidedly of this world,” and that much of what you’ve been told about Jesus is wrong.

If your goal is to believe that much of what “you might have heard in a Palm Sunday sermon” is false, and you want to have those preconceived notions backed up, then you will probably love Aslan’s telling of the tale of Jesus of Nazareth in his book Zealot. If it’s your goal to uncover a truth about a violent, angry, and revolutionary Jesus of Nazareth, the theme of Reza Aslan’s Zealot will probably support that bias. This theme, as described in reviews in the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation, and the Jewish Review of Books, is pervasive throughout the Biblical passages and quotations that Reza Aslan chooses to illustrate the point that Jesus of Nazareth was a Zealot.

The point these reviews make, in varying ways, is that Aslan cherry picks Biblical passages and quotes to bolster his point, while ignoring, or being highly skeptical of, those that don’t. As Michael Robbins points out in his Chicago Tribune piece:

“It’s fashionable to claim that (Saul) Paul of Tarsus (the man that spread the word of Jesus, after Jesus’ death) watered down Jesus’ original revolutionary message, but the truth is that we just don’t know.”

This line: “We just don’t know..” the total historical truth of the actions of the man named Jesus, is the theme of so many of the reviews of Aslan’s book, that it borders on a total dismissal of the book. Jesus may have been an angry and violent revolutionary, or He may have been the passive figure that other authors choose to depict Him as, but in the end we just don’t know.

As Aslan, himself, wrote in his notes on Zealot, “(T)here is some truth in both views.” This line calls to mind the: “Both sides are to blame” line that talking heads issue, on political television shows, when they can’t properly defend the comments, or positions, of their favorite political leaders.

Michael Robbins uses Aslan’s line to conclude that: “Aslan is sometimes more confident in his pronouncements than is warranted.” If Aslan used this line in his text, it probably wouldn’t have led to Aslan achieving a best-seller, and it probably wouldn’t have made for a very good read, but it probably would’ve silenced all the criticism that followed.

Michael Robbins goes on to claim that it was wrong for a Fox News interviewer to ask, of Reza Aslan: “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?” (Editor’s note: I’m sure Aslan loved it, as that very question, when wrapped around the world via Youtube, propelled Zealot to the best-seller list, and it gave all of Zealot’s sympathetic reviewers a qualifier before dismissing the book.) Robbins also claims that all of the one-star reviews on the book, on Amazon.com, are unfair, as is the fact that far too many have condemned Aslan for writing a book that goes against scripture, but Robbins concludes all this condemnation with: “I just wish I didn’t have to report that the book itself is, well, not very good.”

In his second piece on the book Zealot, The New York Times writer Russ Douthat, attempts to defend Aslan by writing that the totality of Aslan’s research is not great, but it’s better than some of the ridiculous notions put forth by other, supposedly more credentialed, theological writers. He then provides a list of examples of these ridiculous notions, before writing:

“To be clear, these examples are not intended to absolve (Reza) Aslan of the sin of writing a bad book; they do not suffice to make the argument in “Zealot” convincing; and they don’t justify its self-regarding author in his claims to extraordinary expertise. I agree with his recent critics on those counts and many others. All I’m saying is that by the standards of both the larger genre and Aslan’s specific academic influences, the book could have been a whole lot worse.”{2}

Washington Post writer Stephen Prothero, suggests that the theme of Aslan’s Zealot is built on two scenes: Jesus’s thrashing, and overturning, of the tax collecting tables in the public courtyard of the Jerusalem Temple, and Jesus’s ride into Jerusalem.

“The rest of the book,” writes Prothero, “is devoted to fleshing out this portrait.”

Aslan describes the scene of Jesus entering Jerusalem as:

“The moment that “more than any other word or deed, helps reveal who Jesus was and what Jesus meant.” This scene has been described as an illiterate peasant entering Jerusalem, riding on a donkey, as riotous crowds shout “Hosanna!” But Jesus of Nazareth is not demonstrating his humility, as you might have heard in a Palm Sunday sermon. He is demonstrating his kingship. “The long-awaited messiah — the true King of the Jews — has come to free Israel from its bondage” to Rome.

“In Aslan’s telling, these two scenes introduce a “revolutionary zealot who walked across the Galilee gathering an army of disciples” to rain “God’s wrath . . . down upon the rich, the strong, and the powerful.”{3}

The key line, of this particular portion of the text is: “As you might have heard in a Palm Sunday sermon.” This line basically suggests that one of Aslan’s goals is to tweak those who ascribe to religious doctrine and entice those who don’t. One would think that if Aslan’s goal was to simply factually refute everything we might have heard, he would not have been so theatrical in his verbiage. As evidenced by this particular line, however, Aslan knew who his audience would be, and he definitely appealed to them… Thanks, in part, to Fox News.

There have been so many books written on the life of Jesus that we can look at them, collectively, and say that the approach that any author takes on approaching the sometimes loose information we have says more about the author than it does about Jesus the man, or His story.

Aslan is skeptical of any Biblical quotes that depict Jesus as a peaceful revolutionary, while fleshing out the quotes and passages that make him appear violent. Aslan’s focus, in other words, are all those passages and quotations that support his theme. He is no more objective than those on the other side of the argument, who are routinely castigated as lacking in objectivity. Aslan’s objective is simply different.

The negative reviews of Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s Killing Jesus suggest that O’Reilly’s approach involved selections of Dugard’s research that focused too much on Jesus’s plight against taxation, and the moves He made to interrupt the money flow. The negative reviews suggest that O’Reilly cherry picked information that would’ve otherwise illuminated the idea that Jesus’s plight was more against the rich in general.

Candida Moss, in an article titled Five Things Bill O’Reilly flubs in ‘Killing Jesus’ for CNN, also suggests that O’Reilly and Dugard were in error when writing that (Saul) Paul of Tarsus was a Christian, “(Paul) was a Jew who moved from one branch of Judaism to another”; “that (the disciple) Peter chose to be hung upside down, because he didn’t believe himself worthy of being executed in the same manner as Jesus” (that was a 5th century interpretation); that O’Reilly sought questionable Roman records in his depiction of the pre-Jesus era Rome, that Mary Magdalene didn’t wash Jesus’s feet in oil, and that women weren’t treated better in Jesus’s time, if those women were slaves.”{4} Some of these criticisms have been deemed arguable, and others have claimed them to be outright false. Many critics have also condemned the style that O’Reilly uses to convey Martin Dugard’s research in “the Killing” series, but O’Reilly expressed, before the first of the series, Killing Lincoln, was on the shelves, that it was his goal was to make history interesting, by writing these books in the fast-paced style of a John Grisham book.

Those who have read Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, and H.W. Brands, among others, know the niche that Dugard and O’Reilly carved out. These top historians all write excellent books, but they also do most of their own research. The reason the latter half of this point is germane is that these authors feel compelled to show the readers the research, and the work that they’ve done. One has to sympathize with them, to some degree, for if a researcher has done five years of research, and they begin to realize that, say, six months of that research can be whittled down to a single sentence, the researcher in them cannot help but feel that those six months were otherwise wasted … if they don’t expand on the point a little. On the flip side of the coin, when that same researcher belabors a point that could’ve been whittled down to a single sentence, it leaves the reader feeling exhausted by detail. Therefore, when O’Reilly hires a researcher, and thereby avoids the conceit of displaying the researcher’s effort, it can lead to a much more interesting read, and a renewed interested in the subject of History for many.

Anytime an historical tome is written, it should be 100% accurate, and when it isn’t a Candida Moss, and anyone else, who offers these corrections (and others) should be applauded for their fact-checking. Having said that, none of the corrections that I’ve read from Ms. Moss, and others, take away from the overall effort put forth in Killing Jesus … in my humble opinion. Aslan’s Zealot, on the other hand, has been so summarily dismissed, by even seemingly sympathetic critics, that an objective observer can’t help but think that it has to be judged a failed effort.

Overall, these reviews suggest that O’Reilly chose information, gleaned from Martin Dugard’s research, that included some hyperbole from Popes, and other arguable interpretations, that led to what some critics have defined as factual errors, but the theme of O’Reilly and Dugard’s book has not been as thoroughly dismissed as Aslans. The errors that Aslan made, write these critics, were made to support his theme. He was skeptical of any quotes that made Jesus appear peaceful, but his theme was heavily influenced by those quotes and passages that made Jesus appear to be a violent revolutionary, and Aslan expounded upon them with interpretation.

{1}http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/books/ct-prj-0825-zealot-reza-aslan-20130823,0,3364171.story

{2} http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/in-defense-of-reza-aslan/?_r=0

{3}http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-02/opinions/40991405_1_palm-sunday-scholar-jesus-s

{4}http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/04/five-things-bill-oreilly-gets-wrong-in-killing-jesus/

A Book Review: of Brett Martin’s Difficult Men

August 15, 2013January 15, 2021 RilalyLeave a comment

Brett Martin’s book Difficult Men, is a writer’s dream, in that it finally gives credit where credit is due. It doesn’t give undue credit where so many other, lesser periodicals, give credit, to the stars. It doesn’t give undue credit to the directors of the individual episodes, the “brave” networks that eventually broadcast them, or that individual studio exec that provided the show its green light. It does give credit, finally, to those who rarely receive the amount of credit they are due in the court of public opinion, the writer. Martin is more specific in his dispersal of credit when he says it’s not just any writer that deserves credit for the success of these shows, it is the writer, the creator, the head writer, the emperor of the room, or what he calls the show runner.

“The show-runner,” writes Martin in a GQ piece, “is this era’s version of the Creative Titan.”{1}

The amount of credit currently given to star James Gandolfini, for the success of the show The Sopranos, is entirely disproportionate to the amount of credit owed show runner David Chase; Jon Hamm’s acting ability, and his rugged good looks are a reason that people tuned into Mad Men, but the overall quality of the show is primarily due to the writing, and the obsession, of show runner Matthew Weiner; and Bryan Cranston isn’t Breaking Bad as much as Vince Gilligan is. Martin does give some credit to the stars, and to some of the individual writers of individual episodes, and to some of the other behind-the-scenes players of each show, but he maintains that these shows wouldn’t have been a fraction as good as they were, if they were in less capable hands than those listed as creator, or show runner.

This isn’t to say that Martin’s book Difficult Men is as obsessed with credit dispersal as I am. He simply focuses his narrative on the history of these show runners, and the work each of them did throughout the life of the project in question. The rest of us can’t help but be obsessed with credit, especially when so many of our friends misdirect it to the stars.

James Gandolfini is the face of The Sopranos, of course, and Jon Hamm is the face of Mad Men, so most of us can’t help but associate them with the shows, and subsequently give them all the credit. Just as we can’t help but believe Basic Instinct is Sharon Stone’s movie, and her coming out vehicle, and the movie where she showed a vital organ. Very few people have even heard of Joe Eszterhas and Paul Verhoeven. Everyone knows that Christopher Reeves was Superman, but how many people know the name Mario Puzo? How many people, on that note, know what Mario Puzo’s relationship to “Marlon Brando’s” The Godfather is? How many of those who love Entertainment Tonight, and their red carpet interviews, know anything about what happens behind the scenes of their favorite movies and TV shows, and how many would care if they did?

Those of us who care, and wish the creative types received more credit in the public arena than they do, have tried to stay in tune with the creative drivers of the projects we love, and we subsequently became obsessed with knowing which party deserves the credit for each production. Martin’s book Difficult Men informs us that we have been wrong in our credit dispersal when it comes to TV.

Prior to reading this book, I assumed that in TV, like the movies, the directors rule. Those of us who love movies, for example, know that a Scorsese movie is almost always great, regardless of the star who leads it, the screenwriter who writes it (unless it’s Scorsese), or any of the behind the scenes players involved in it. Therefore, we obsessives have habitually searched through the credits of TV shows to see who the director was to determine if that show will be any good or not. Martin informs us, through a Matthew Weiner quote, that movie goers are dead wrong in their assumption that directors have the same amount of power in TV that they do in the movies.

Those of us that love books, also lived with the somewhat sanctimonious assumption that individual writers were more of an essential ingredient to TV shows, but we didn’t put enough thought to the concentration of power that had to be assumed by the head writer, or “emperor” of the writing room, to keep it all consistent.

Here’s what most of us thought. We knew that there had to be an “emperor” of the writing room, but we thought that an individual writer, of an individual episode, simply handed the finished draft to the head writer, and that head writer then either outright rejected it, or added a few notes here and there to spruce up the final product. We thought that the head writer acted in a manner similar to an editor of a freelance magazine, and he would continually reject an individual writer’s product, until it was perfect. We also knew each episode had a “writing room’s” influence on the finished product, but we had no idea—as in the case of Weiner and Mad Men—that the head writer, or the show runner, rewrote an average of eighty percent of every episode that was handed to him. We were the ones trying to dissuade our star-obsessed friends of the notion that the stars were the end all of a given product, and that it had more to do with the individual writers. Yet, we were even wrong by a matter of degrees. Martin writes that a show runner is, in general, and specific to these particular shows, the person that dreamed up the general premise of the show, wrote the show’s bible, and controlled and edited every aspect of that show.

Martin’s description of the process is as follows: The writing team meets behind closed doors, they put in an ungodly amount of hours trying to come up with ideas for each individual episode. One writer will then eventually take the lead on an episode, and he and the rest of the writing team will eventually come up with a 40-50 page script. Once they have completed this script, the show runner will walk into the room, take the script to his office, and rewrite 80% of it, on average. For most shows, the next step in the process involves a debate between the studio execs, network censors, and the show runner over what they believe will be popular and acceptable to audiences and sponsors. With these three particular shows, however, the show runners state that this part of the process rarely involved much in the way of this intrusion.

Show runner of AMC’s Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, illustrates his role as the show runner in the following description:

“Over 80 percent (of writing on TV) is rewriting, and if I’ve rewritten more than 80 percent of a writer’s script, I’m going to attach my name to it. If I keep 20 percent or more, of one of my writers’ scripts, I’ll give them a lone writing credit. Basically, it’s a question of ego. I can’t stomach the idea of someone not knowing that I was involved in it. For the well-being of my daily interaction with the people I work with, I felt it best not to have to watch somebody go up and get an award for something I had written every word of. I’m not Cyrano de Bergerac.”

The one asterisk to the process described above, for these three particular shows, is Breaking Bad, as show runner Vince Gilligan regards the process as a more democratic one than Weiner, Chase, or even Deadwood’s creator David Milch do. It should also be mentioned, in this paragraph of asterisks, that Brett Martin’s Difficult Men covers a number of other shows in Difficult Men, including: The Wire, The Shield, Six Feet Under, and to a lesser degree Deadwood and Dexter. All of these shows, writes Martin, comprise what critics call the Third Golden Age, but I regard The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad as the triumvirate of it.

Another little talked about aspect of these three shows, that turned out to be essential to the show’s long term success, was the main star’s willingness to acquiesce to the show runner’s ideas of where the character should go. Most stars are not willing to concede characteristics of “their character”, because it will reflect upon them more than the show runners. Most stars are not willing to put themselves in compromising positions, and they’re not brave enough to look bad on screen with the fear that it could affect the rest of their careers. Cranston, and to some degree Gandolfini, weren’t afraid to have themselves portrayed on screen in their underpants, which Vince Gilligan says is a “pretty good physicalization of their fearlessness.” These stars had to be willing to be very “un-starlike” for these particular shows to have the kind of flawed weaknesses that eventually made them monumental.

As stated throughout Difficult Men, the egomaniacal nature of the show runners was paramount to the success of these shows. It dictated to the stars that they would acquiesce, but it also dictated to the networks that they would have to acquiesce too. Had any of these show runners sacrificed their egos, and gone with the “suggested” tweaks of the studio execs that eventually rejected these shows—just to finally get their project made—these shows surely would’ve been different, and possibly drained of most of the value they eventually brought to TV.

One cannot entirely blame those studio execs who passed on these shows, as they had their own bosses to answer to, their sponsors to satisfy, and their audiences to avoid offending. To get these particular projects made, the studio runners needed a vulnerable network that was less concerned with controversy, and ratings, and in having “some say” in how the finished product would appear.

“In TV, as nowhere else, the writer is king—none more so than those emperors of the air that control every aspect of an ambitious, ongoing cable drama,” Brett Martin writes in the GQ article.

I’m embarrassed to say that I never heard of this term “show runner”, until I read this book, but I did have an idea that there had to be an “emperor” of the writing room. I had these ideas of how a show was created, but I never really focused in on it, until HBO informed me, in their ad campaign, that I should watch Deadwood, because its creator, David Milch, used to work on The Sopranos. AMC ran a similar campaign for Mad Men, saying its creator, Matthew Weiner, wrote for The Sopranos. Other than maybe Steven Bochco, I can’t remember a creator given such prominence in a show’s ad campaign, and Bochco largely created shows that I didn’t watch. I did watch The Sopranos, however, and I was willing to watch any show attached to it in anyway, especially when the ad campaign centered around the show’s artistic creativity and not the stars. The only reason AMC used the campaign they did, writes Martin, is that they couldn’t think of another way to market a show about ad men sitting around a table talking sales.

As the title of this book suggests, the stories of these three shows involve difficult, uncompromising, and flawed males, but the real story, or the story behind the story that is not commonly talked about with these shows, involves the difficult, uncompromising, and flawed males behind the scenes that got these shows made, and finessed, until they achieved the creator’s idea of perfection.

Portions of this book are devoted to the stars of the shows, but if you are purchasing this book to learn more about them, you’re probably also going to be disappointed, especially if your perspective is that they are strictly star-driven vehicles. And you’re probably going to be just as disappointed by the limited amount of space Martin devotes to Gandolfini’s psychosis, the Tweet page devoted to showing Jon Hamm crotch shots, and Bryan Cranston’s comfort level with being shot in his underwear in various episodes of Breaking Bad. That having been said, Martin’s book Difficult Men, and his perspective, is probably not what most readers would expect, nor—sadly—enjoy, but it’s fantastic. No reader, who makes it to the end of this book, could mistake it for a gossip piece that focuses on the daily lives of stars. It is about the creative process. It’s about quality TV. It is about how one show, The Sopranos, influenced some relatively vulnerable cable TV networks to pursue other, similarly “important” shows, until a Third Golden Age of television was born.