Books › Difficult Men
Difficult Men
320 pages
A juicy, intellectually rigorous backstage pass to the chaotic writers' rooms that birthed the Golden Age of Television.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like sitting in a smoky, high-stakes writers' room with the most brilliant and infuriating minds in modern entertainment. It is a brisk, deeply researched cultural history that balances high-minded artistic analysis with deliciously candid backstage gossip. The mood is electric and intellectually stimulating, capturing the lightning-in-a-bottle era when cable television usurped cinema as the great American art form. The prose is sharp and propulsive, effortlessly weaving together the on-screen brilliance of antiheroes like Tony Soprano and Don Draper with the off-screen neuroses and toxicities of the showrunners who created them. It will thoroughly delight pop culture obsessives, media historians, and anyone who loves a messy, fascinating story about the collision of art, ego, and commerce.
- Mood
- behind-the-scenes
- intellectually stimulating
- nostalgic
- intense
- Tone
- analytical
- gossipy
- insightful
- candid
- critical
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- creative genius vs. toxicity · the evolution of storytelling · masculinity in crisis · the golden age of television · artistic ambition
- The writing
- Sharp, journalistic, and deeply researched, blending cultural criticism with juicy, character-driven reportage.
- The arc
- Moves from the thrilling, chaotic birth of a new artistic medium to a reflective understanding of the flawed men who built it.
- Who it's for
- Pop culture junkies, aspiring screenwriters, and anyone who spent the 2000s obsessing over Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White.
Content notes
- workplace toxicity
- substance abuse
- sexism
About the book
"A riveting and revealing look at the shows that helped cable television drama emerge as the signature art form of the twenty-first century In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows, first on premium cable channels like HBO and then basic cable networks like FX and AMC, dramatically stretched television's narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition. No longer necessarily concerned with creating always-likable characters, plots that wrapped up neatly every episode, or subjects that were deemed safe and appropriate, shows such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood, The Shield, and more tackled issues of life and death, love and sexuality, addiction, race, violence, and existential boredom.
Just as the Big Novel had in the 1960s and the subversive films of New Hollywood had in 1970s, television shows became the place to go to see stories of the triumph and betrayals of the American Dream at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This revolution happened at the hands of a new breed of auteur: the all-powerful writer-show runner. These were men nearly as complicated, idiosyncratic, and "difficult" as the conflicted protagonists that defined the genre. Given the chance to make art in a maligned medium, they fell upon the opportunity with unchecked ambition. Combining deep reportage with cultural analysis and historical context, Brett Martin recounts the rise and inner workings of a genre that represents not only a new golden age for TV but also a cultural watershed.
Difficult Men features extensive interviews with all the major players, including David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire), Matthew Weiner and Jon Hamm (Mad Men), David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood), and Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), in addition to dozens of other writers, directors, studio executives, actors, production assistants, makeup artists, script supervisors, and so on. Martin takes us behind the scenes of our favorite shows, delivering never-before-heard story after story and revealing how cable TV has distinguished itself dramatically from the networks, emerging from the shadow of film to become a truly significant and influential part of our culture. "--
Description from Open Library.
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