Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin Page A

went
nuts—
picked him up and grabbed him by the neck and just about throttled him.” Chase had to catch his breath. “I thought, ‘Wow. Right! That’s exactly right!’” Already, the strange alchemical process by which a character who has resided inside one person’s head comes to life outside it had begun. Tony would never again be Chase’s alone.
    Chase returned to California for postproduction, and cast and crew dispersed. Before leaving, Falco remembered, Chase told them, “You’ve been great. It’s been lots of fun. Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to watch this.”
    Secretly, as it had upon completing
Almost Grown
, a part of Chase hoped the pilot would fail. If HBO declined to bring the show to series, he reasoned, the network might be willing to cut their losses by giving him an additional $750,000 to finish the story as a feature film. Even in the midst of filming, he would ask producer Ilene Landress if she thought HBO would prefer to release it that way. “Actually, no,” Landress told him. “They’re a
television network
.
They’re in the business of putting things on TV.”
    The finished pilot was submitted to HBO at the end of October. The Brillstein-Grey team arranged a screening for Albrecht. “The lights came up, and Chris, I’m not exaggerating, just sat there, with his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes. It felt like an eternity,” said Reilly. “I think that on some level he was just trying to get his bearings. Just trying to screw his courage to the sticking place to say, ‘Okay. I guess we’re doing this kind of thing now.’”
    Finally, Albrecht lifted his head and said, slowly, “It’s really good.”
    Still, HBO, which had until December 20 to deliver a verdict, stalled on giving the official green light. One month passed. Chase was proud enough of the finished product to pay for his own screening for friends and family, catered with pasta and sausage and peppers. The response from those who’d spent their lives in TV was at once overwhelmingly positive and reflexively pessimistic.
    “I just remember feeling, ‘I cannot believe I’m looking at this. This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. If it fails, it won’t be the fault of the project,’” said Barbara Hall, Chase’s friend and former colleague on
I’ll Fly Away
.
    “It was the first time I thought, ‘Okay. Really good shit doesn’t get picked up,’” said Mitchell Burgess.
    Three more weeks ticked by. HBO was silent. Chase fretted. “David,” recalled Fitzgerald, deadpan, “is not a good waiter.”
    Finally, on the next to last day, the call came. Chase’s feelings were mixed, as usual. “I thought, ‘Here we go. It’s going to be a tremendous amount of work.’” At the same time, he had the conviction of a condemned man given one more chance: “I didn’t give a fuck about failing. I had nothing to lose. Once I had the go-ahead, I thought, ‘You know what? We’re just going to go for it.’”
    • • •
    C hase knew the main arc of the first season, where it began and where it ended, from Tony’s initial panic attacks to his dawning realization that his mother tried to have him killed. That story would have constituted the feature he’d once dreamed of making. Now, though, he had to figure out how to get from point A to point B while filling twelve additional hours of television. That meant bringing in other writers.
    No other art form—certainly none that putatively bears the imprint of an auteur—is created as collaboratively as the television drama. True, the Fellinis and Altmans of the world relied on the talent and creativity of dozens of other artists—from actors to lighting designers to hairdressers. What they didn’t do was sit down in a room filled with other directors and solicit their input. Yet the very same essential truth about television that elevates the writer to Master of the Universe—the medium’s voracious appetite for ever more content, ever more