One

In This Maligned Medium

In the beginning, there was the Vast Wasteland. And it was bad.

Already this is easy to forget: that for the overwhelming majority of its existence, the idea that television was an artistic dead zone would have been self-evident. The very term quality television, used by academics to denote anything that rose above the level of brain-dead muck, betrayed the very lowest of expectations. But to understand just how revolutionary the notion of good television was-and how voraciously those who had a chance to make it on cable between the late 1990s and the early 2010s attacked the opportunity-it's useful to revisit the utter depths in the public's perception from which the medium had to rise. And it's worth looking at a prior generation of producers and writers who were given a brief window in which they, too, could do good work and wound up paving the way, in many cases directly, for the Third Golden Age.

There had, of course, been the so-called First Golden Age, that brief, early period in the 1950s of televised Shakespeare and opera and brilliant, original anthologized drama. But in retrospect, that was just a technology finding its legs. In those early days, quality was a default, born of technological limitation (clunky, immovable cameras and limited recording capability made broadcasting live theater a natural starting place) and low stakes: in 1950, a television set cost several weeks' worth of an average salary and could be found in only a fraction of generally affluent, well-educated homes. Television was, of all things-if only for the briefest moment-an elitist technology.

By 1954, however, 56 percent of American households had TV sets. And from the moment TV became a mass medium, it was a reviled medium. Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow coined the phrase vast wasteland in a 1961 speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, but policy types were hardly the only ones with disdain for TV. Perhaps intuiting its power, other artists took every opportunity possible to slag the new medium. In the same way that novelists thank God for short-story writers, short-story writers thank God for poets, poets for more experimental poets-all for making their own career choices seem like models of sober-minded life management-TV might have been invented by moviemakers for the express purpose of allowing them to point to any commercial art form more degraded than their own.

Most striking, though, is the degree to which TV's own practitioners have joined in the hate fest. No other medium contains such a matter-of-fact strain of self-loathing. HBO, indisputably a television network, made its bones declaring it was "not TV."

The criticism, furthermore, has always transcended mere snobbery and included something more primitive and superstitious-as though these boxes of pulsing light and sound had dropped out of the sky into our pristine forest clearing. The exposure to artificial light, it's been said, inhibits cognitive development; the flickering images replicate hypnotism. Television has been accused of being addictive, corrupting, responsible for driving otherwise perfect, well-behaved children to violence and depravity.

Which is to say that TV's crimes have never been merely aesthetic, but also moral, even metaphysical. The set, with its sinister, alien antennae, its ubiquity, became the very symbol of American vacuity and anomie, pouring an unstoppable sludge of false reassurance and pernicious advertising into suburban homes. At best, it was the "glass teat" dispensing anesthesia to the conformist masses; at worst, it was a sinister conspiracy of the capitalist Mind Control Machine, designed to keep us fat, sleepy, and spending. The rhetoric could become nothing short of apocalyptic: Ray Bradbury branded TV "that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little." E. B. White prophesied, "We shall stand or fall by television-of that I am quite sure," while, rounding out this unlikely troika, Frank Zappa sang (from the point of view of TV itself):

You will obey me while I lead you

And eat the garbage that I feed you

Until the day that we don't need you

Don't go for help . no one will heed you

Your mind is totally controlled

It has been stuffed into my mold

And you will do as you are told

Until the rights to you are sold

Of course, such awestruck hate could only have its source in a kind of love. Orson Welles, as good a man as any to address the nexus of commerce and art, might have had the last word: "I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."

Or as Steven Bochco said: "It's always been fashionable to say at cocktail parties, 'I never watch TV.' That's nonsense. Everybody watches TV."

*

The existential fear and loathing of television may have reached its apex with the 1978 publication of a volume titled Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, written by an ex-advertising executive by the apparently real name of Jerry Mander. Mander described his career at a high-powered San Francisco firm, "commuting coast to coast weekly, taking five-day vacations in Tahiti, eating only in French restaurants, jetting to Europe for a few days' skiing." This Master of the Universe idyll was interrupted by a scales-falling-from-his-eyes moment in 1968, experienced while sailing through the Dalmatian Straits, amid craggy cliffs and azure seas: "Leaning on the deck rail, it struck me that there was a film between me and all of that. I could 'see' the spectacular views. I knew they were spectacular. But the experience stopped at my eyes. I couldn't let it inside me. I felt nothing. Something had gone wrong with me." That something, he came to believe, was the same something that afflicted the rest of the modern world: television.

Having awoken from the machine's hypnotic spell, Mander urged the rest of us to follow suit, laying out his indictment in such chapters as "War to Control the Unity Machine" and "How Television Dims the Mind" and "How We Turn into Our Images." In one chapter he listed thirty-three "Inherent Biases of Television." Among them: "War is better television than peace." "Lust is better television than satisfaction." "The one is easier than the many." "The singular is more understandable than the eclectic." "Any facts work better than any poetry." "Superficiality is easier than depth."

"This cannot be changed. The bias is inherent in the technology," Mander asserted with the absolute confidence of a zealot. The notion of television redeeming itself was "as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns."

As it happens, almost simultaneous with the publication of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, an event took place that would begin to challenge Mander's ironclad assumptions. In early 1978, Steven Bochco went to work for Grant Tinker.

*

The veteran TV writer and showrunner Henry Bromell once sketched a family history of quality TV. After starting at the bottom with The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men and a handful of other recent shows, he quickly moved upward, along a spreading spiderweb of connections that filled the page. At the top, alone, he wrote one name in capital letters: Grant Tinker.

Four decades after he left an executive position at 20th Century Fox Television to form MTM Enterprises-named for his second wife, Mary Tyler Moore, and created to produce her eponymous sitcom-Tinker remains that rare, if not unique, creature: a television executive revered by television writers. If you know anything about the species, you may be able to guess that writers loved Tinker because Tinker believed in the importance of writers.

This has by no means ever been a given in Hollywood. Certainly not in the movie business, which had long granted power and prestige to directors while regarding writers as, at best, regrettably necessary inconveniences: in the immortal words of Jack Warner, "schmucks with Underwoods." From the beginning, the ongoing nature of television programming-the medium's merciless hunger for a constant flow of new material-made writers a more valuable commodity than they had ever been. Still, by and large, producers remained in charge of TV through the sixties and seventies, with writers either working freelance or saddled with the peculiarly diminished title of "story editor."*

There's a condition, common among executives and other TV "suits," that involves the secret conviction that-if only they were less damnably good at making money and more willing to spend their time mooning about, wearing rags, and making up stories-they could write and create at least as well as any of their writers.

"Mike Post [the prolific TV-theme composer] used to say, 'Everybody is an expert on two things: their jobs and music.' The same is true of...