TVs deregulated golden age: why so few critics understand what made HBO possible.

• Author: Garvin, Glenn
• Position: Cultures and Reviews - Book review

The HBO Effect, by Dean J. DeFino, Bloomsbury Academic, 327 pages, $73

Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, by Brett Martin, Penguin Press, 303 pages, $27.93

For decades, no art form was more meticulously regulated by the government than television. For decades, no art form was more relentlessly bashed by its critics. Amazingly, nobody ever seems to make a connection between these two facts.

If we had a U.S. Portraiture Commission with the power to investigate whether Willem De Kooning controlled too much of the abstract impressionist market; or if Philip Roth had to worry about losing his novelist license over those scenes in Portnoy's Complaint with a hooker defecating on a glass-top coffee table; or if some agency, every few years, held hearings in which the public was invited to comment on Oliver Stone's qualifications to make films--doesn't it seem possible that painting and literature and the cinema would be different, and probably worse, than they are now?

What makes this blind spot about regulation's effect on art even more curious is that over the past two decades, as TV has increasingly slipped the bit of government regulation from its mouth, programming has dramatically improved. The latter event, anyway, has not escaped attention. Critics and television historians have arrived at a consensus that the Golden Age of television was not the 1950s but right now, and that it was ushered in by HBO, which shattered the TV programming mold with The Sopranos.

That's true as far as it goes. The suburban mobsters of The Sopranos committed as many felonious assaults on the rules of television screenwriting as they did on rival crews. From the relatively trivial (much of the show takes place in a strip club) to the previously unthinkable (a protagonist who is not only unheroic but profoundly and demonstrably evil) to the dramaturgically perverse (what did happen to that Chechen hit man who went running naked into the woods at the end of the "Pine Barrens" episode?), The Sopranos demonstrated anarchic contempt for the established order of TV storytelling.

The success of Tony Soprano & Co. opened the way for a generation of television heroes ranging from existentially troubled (the 9/11-damaged firemen of Rescue Me) to the flatly crazy (the manic-depressive CIA officer of Homeland, so wracked with personal and professional paranoia that it took us a full season to figure out if the guy she was targeting was really a terrorist mole or an innocent victim) to the homicidal (the serial-killer-next-door of Dexter). Not only has it become nearly impossible to separate the good guys from the bad, but on shows like Sons of Anarchy, where an arms-trafficking motorcycle gang slugs it out with voracious developers, or Breaking Bad, where a bedraggled cancer victim remakes himself as a murderous narcotics kingpin, there may not even be any good guys.

The result has been a bumper crop of intriguing TV dramas that are frequently a better creative bet than a movie industry increasingly dominated by slob comedies and superhero stories. From Martin Scorsese, who produces the birth-of-the-Mob Boardwalk Empire, to Steven Spielberg, about to launch his fourth season of homicidal space bugs on TNT's Falling Skies, more and more of Hollywood's big names are turning up on the small screen. At a press conference a few years ago, Ray Liotta was asked why he was doing a TV series rather than looking for a movie deal. He rolled his eyes and countered with a question of his own: "Have you seen movies lately?"

HBO's key role in this process is indisputable. Even before The Sopranos, the company was pushing all sorts of envelopes with the prison drama Oz, which had far fewer viewers but far more deviance, in every sense of the word. (The very first episode included cannibalism and a homosexual rape that ended in the branding of a swastika on the victim's butt.) And the many series that followed proved beyond a doubt that the The Sopranos was no mere lucky punch. Carnivale, a tale of itinerant Depression-era carnies, reimagined the 1930s political storm clouds of fascism and communism as the birth pains of the antichrist. Game of Thrones allowed modern anxieties about class, religion, and sexuality to play out in the guise of medieval mythology. Scorsese's Prohibitionera gangster drama Boardwalk Empire examines how women's suffrage and the Progressive movement inadvertently midwifed organized crime. The revisionist Western Deadwood not only emphasized the role of property rights in establishing civilization but also revealed exactly what Miss Kitty was doing upstairs at the Long Branch all those years on Gunsmoke.

But the question rarely asked and never answered in these discussions is: Why HBO? As the ratings for The Sopranos steadily climbed--the premiere episode of its third season, in 2001, drew 11.3 million viewers, which would have been a good number for a broadcast show and was a staggering number for a cable channel that reached fewer than a third of American homes--a growing buzz was heard from not only critics but even television executives themselves: Why doesn't broadcast television have anything like this?

Bob Wright, NBC's CEO at the time, grew so irritated by the grumbling within his own ranks that he sent tapes of The Sopranos to some of his colleagues with a memo asking if anybody thought the network could...