David Chase Hasn’t Written A Single Word for TV in 17 Years.
Why Should We Believe Him When He Says The Era of Peak TV Is Over?
The Sopranos, for all the incredible quality of every aspect of it, did not start the revolution that led to Peak TV. That show was OZ which because it came first and was far darker made things easier for the show that followed. It does not tell nearly as devastating a story of social commentary as The Wire does or is anywhere near as diverse. It did not show the ability of cable to go beyond the limits of its medium the same way that The Shield or Mad Men did. It did not have the great visual style that you would find on Lost or Breaking Bad. And unlike all of those series once their creators had written the final episodes of their masterpieces, David Chase, the man who created the show never wrote another word for TV again.
I realize that it is the nature of art to hail someone who creates a masterpiece as some kind of superb talent. The problem is we never consider anyone the greatest force in any other medium if they had completed just a sole work in their field. No one ever considered Harper Lee or Ralph Ellison the greatest writers of all time, Beethoven wrote many other pieces of music besides Fidelio (his only opera) and while Orson Welles may never have fulfilled his potential, he did make other films after Citizen Kane. So why should we consider David Chase as an authority on all things about great TV when he seems very clear on never writing for the medium again and has only made two movies since The Sopranos ended?
The reason for Chase’s reputation as a final authority on TV seems to be the same reason that so many critics consider David Mamet an authority on film or Harlan Ellison on anything resembling art: he is a misanthrope who treats most of his colleagues horribly who happens to occasionally create great art. What makes this all the more clear is that we’ve known for a while what a miserable person he is to work with — and so many critics seem to revere him regardless.
If you want to read a book that describes how the Golden Age of TV began and learn its secrets, do not read Difficult Men by Brett Martin. I remember the first time I opened the book in a Barnes and Noble in 2013, expecting so much and getting so little in return. Don’t get me wrong; I own the book and I’ve used it as a reference more than a few times in my criticism over the years. But as a volume that has a subtitle saying, “Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution”, it’s kind of remarkable how little there actually is.
For one thing, the book isn’t even three hundred pages long, which would be too short even if it were only to try and tell some of the story. Alan Sepinwall’s treatise The Revolution Was Televised doesn’t try to nearly as detailed a job and still managed to get much more done in four hundred pages. It came out the same year, and Sepinwall expanded on it after the final seasons of both Breaking Bad and Mad Men aired.
Sepinwall uses the lens of a critic to try and tell the saga of the major series that he believes lay the foundation for the revolution. He gives a brief introduction but unlike Martin he does not consider broadcast TV a wasteland and devotes time and energy to Lost, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Friday Night Lights, as well as giving space to the remake of Battlestar Galactica. He does it more as a critic than historian, but he clearly has more access to personalities involved than Martin did and he gets a lot more done.
Martin by contrast seems to be focused entirely as a propaganda mill for HBO. He spends the first section basically talking entirely about HBO and even then it’s only in dribs and drabs; he barely gives three pages to OZ. He then spends roughly eighty pages of the book dealing with Chase and how he got to The Sopranos. And it’s here you get a clear sense of the biggest contradiction of Chase: that a man who spent more than a quarter of a century working in television does not seem to have enjoyed a single minute of it.
Chase makes that very clear in his interviews, saying that he hated TV in the Second Golden Age when L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were king. He makes it clear he thought that David Milch and Aaron Sorkin, two of the greatest TV writers in history, were overrated because ‘no one talked like that in real life’. And while he did so many brilliant shows over the years the nineties, he was never happy and did not enjoy it: Northern Exposure and I’ll Fly Away were two of the more undervalued shows of the 1990s and he clearly loathed the experience.
I think it is his attitude towards network executives — and by extension, commerce — that are the reason critics venerate him. There’s a story in the book about when a young staffer gushed about the work being art. He looked at her and told her: “You’re here for two reasons: to sell Buicks and making Americans feel cozy.” When he took over as showrunner for Northern Exposure, a show he could barely comprehend why people liked, no one understood it. He later said he did it for the money.
Critics like it when their artists feel contempt for commerce and that fits the metaphor for the story that Martin is telling; TV is obviously better when money isn’t involved. This, of course, is one of the greatest lies all critics tell themselves: no one, certainly not Chase, was doing anything at HBO for free and the producers weren’t making series like The Sopranos if there was not a possibility of some financial compensation at the end. (As I recall, we’ve just come to the end of a labor stoppage for this very point.) But because Chase is so blatant in his loathing for the medium he worked in, he will be revered for his work — and it’s pretty clear that covered a lot of ground.
Another one of the great ironies of Chase is that he always wanted to work in movies. Famously when he ended up writing the pilot for The Sopranos he never wanted it to become an actual series. He wanted it to be filmed and when it was inevitably never picked up for series, he would pitch it to the studios for a movie. He kept thinking that even after HBO agreed to have him film it. When he did it was finally picked up for series and aired in January of 1999.
Chase finally felt like he was free when he was making the first season of The Sopranos “I felt after floating on a raft in the Pacific for 25 years, I had washed up on Paradise Island.” But as we found out in Difficult Men, the first thing Chase after getting comfortable in Paradise was making it hell for everyone else — particularly all his fellow writers.
Difficult Men is full of horror stories as how horrible Chase was to work with. I have repeatedly mentioned in other articles that he treated Todd Kessler (who’s credited for co-writing ‘Funhouse’ which earned him an Emmy nomination) so atrociously that when Kessler resigned he created Damages almost as a kind of revenge. But the book is full of similar stories. At the end of Season One, he fires every writer who worked in the first season except for Frank Renzulli and the team of Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess; there are variations on this with every season going forward. He fires Renzulli, despite his understanding of the world because he doesn’t like his personality. He’d work with Green for decades but he eventually got frustrated with the two of them because he didn’t think either of them got the tone of the Sopranos and fired them at the fifth season. There are some writers he fired he never spoke with after this.
And that pales in comparison to his behavior throughout the filming of the series. Chase’s behavior from start to finish was plagued by doubt and dissatisfaction. He demanded his employees rip the scripts to shreds after reading them and burn them to prevent plot leaks. He had endless screaming matches with HBO executives and was sure the network didn’t give him enough respect. Joshua Brand, his former employer, had Chase’s number when he told a crew member during Season Two: “None of this is making him any happier, is it?”
I find it telling that Chase is referred to in Difficult Men as being in ‘the rock-n-roll spirit of what directors like Coppola and Scorsese had done to studios in the seventies.” Again it leaves out the fact The Godfather and Taxi Driver were huge box office hits — and again leaves out the fact that Chase was making a huge amount of money and being as much of a prick as before. In a way the book is a defense of Chase’s actions at every turn, even as it accuses him of being a monstrous human being who is making everyone around him miserable — Tony Soprano writ large — it’s pointed as the sign of a genius. There’s a very good chance that Chase never made a follow up to The Sopranos not merely because he was just as miserable successful as he was failing, but because no one in their right minds would be willing to work with him again, not even HBO.
This brings me back to what may have been the point of this article. Earlier this year Chase was interviewed in regard to TV and is back to his old staple of television being garbage. Furthermore, he says it was always garbage and that the period in which he worked (1997–2022) will just be considered a ‘blip.” I’ll be honest, I’m kind of amazed he was willing to give it that much time, I figured he might say it ended in 2007, but I guess he wants to be charitable to some of the writers he worked with.
Because Chase created one of the greatest series of all time, like so many geniuses critics treat him with a certain amount of respect that glosses over his horrific behavior. I don’t mean toxic masculinity or racism; I mean just being a horrible human being. The writers and producers try to be kind to Chase, trying to separate the artist from the art. The fact that so much of The Sopranos was about the misery of the human condition, punctuated with toxic behavior, the inability to change and psychological and brutal violence, should make that a lot harder to do.
Vince Gilligan may have created similarly twisted characters like Walter White and Gus Fring but in Difficult Men the writers room in Breaking Bad is labeled ‘The Happiest Room in Hollywood’. Martin describes Gilligan as a genuinely good man to work with and for. Yet given a chance to be on the inside of a writing process of a masterpiece, Martin devotes exactly thirteen pages to both Gilligan and Breaking Bad. I guess a functional, even cheerful work environment, even when it was working towards one of the greatest shows of all time, is boring compared to the hostility and horror that is The Sopranos. What does that say about how critics view the great creative forces?
I guess the main reason I find Chase so reprehensible is the way he looks at the entire idea of art and commerce as mutually exclusive. Even in his most recent interview he argues how much he hated when the network gave him notes to make his show’s ‘more accessible’. Now I realize the importance of the artist’s vision, but to act this way in regards to a medium where if more people see your work the more you will get paid and therefore greater job security, would seem to be the living embodiment of the starving artist metaphor my fellow critics seem to believe most film and TV should follow. It’s the idea that no one will see your art, but you’ll have the integrity of your vision. This is the kind of outright idiocy you often suspect only critics are guilty of believing — and it may be why so many of them grab tight to men like Chase who tell them what they want to hear rather than the truth about the business they work in.
Perhaps that is the reason so many in my business listen to Chase and treat him as a grand old man, even though he was a miserable human being and unlike every other artist in Martin’s book (and Sepinwall’s for that matter) he did not ‘sully’ his reputation by daring to create another series that might be judged against The Sopranos. That he might have isolated himself from everybody who worked with him by his behavior, that he treated all his colleagues, critics and executives with disdain and horrible comportment that is only now coming to light, does not matter. He is David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos and when he says the era of Peak TV is over, he is the voice of God. I do agree it is the end of an era: an era where man like him could be as ‘difficult’ as they were and not face consequences. That is a virtue.
Oh and by the way, all of you critics who says that Chase is the epitome of pure artistry, the last film he did was The Many Saints of Newark. A prequel film to The Sopranos with Michael Gandolfini playing a young Tony Soprano. Michael Imperioli narrated the movie from the grave as Christopher, and the film ended with ‘Woke Up This Morning’. But don’t worry. But don’t worry. I’m sure he didn’t sell out.