[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. I spent this Saturday night at the 12th-night midwinter mask party hosted by the Three Graces from a podcast I did last summer. The Three Graces being Nancy Hightower, Valle Lupeshku, and Theodora Goss. It's neat, because one of my favorite things about doing the show is all the wonderful people I get to meet. The party was a blast, and my wife and I managed to dazzle the crowd with these masks we bought down in New Orleans a few years ago. These aren't cheap, gaudy, Mardi Gras masks, they're more pricey, gaudy, Mardi Gras masks, pretty ornate ones, and you can find pictures of us in full regalia at the show's Facebook site. I posted a couple there that were taken by a potential upcoming guest. Speaking of, the party was wonderful, and I met lots of neat people who might turn up on the show later in the year. Speaking of my wife and Mardi Gras, her family comes from Louisiana, about an hour or so from New Orleans. We go down every year to visit for Christmas, and this time around, I asked online beforehand for suggestions on guests I could interview while I was down there. Pal from College suggested I get in touch with Brett Martin, who also attended college, in this case, Hampshire College, with us, and who recently published the book, Difficult Men, behind the scenes from the creative revolution from the sopranos and the wire to madmen and breaking bad from Penguin Press. I emailed Brett, and he was up for it, and was kind enough to come out to Amy's parents' house to record before we started recording. Well, I did my standard apologies for any awful behavior I have been during the college years. I was really a terrible person. On the upside, Brett had no recollection of ever interacting with me during the time we were there, and that kind of made it easier. I didn't remember anything, but I figured maybe I did something bad. I was a difficult man. Difficult Men, Brett's book, is a wonderful, wonderful book. It's about the great cable dramas from the sopranos era onward, but it's also about the men behind those shows. He's got a lot of great interviews and some really neat insights into the content of those shows, but also the context in which they arose, because it took a pretty weird set of factors for something like the sopranos or the wire to get on the air, and Brett does a really great job of teasing those out while also telling pretty interesting and engaging stories about these bombastic personalities that sort of came to typify this era of TV storytelling and showrunning. So go give difficult men a read if you're into any of those shows from the great era. You won't be sorry. Now Brett's a correspondent for GQ, and his work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, New York Times, Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, and a ton of other places, as well as radio spots on This American Life. He's been included in the annual Best Food Writing Anthology, Four Times, and won James Beard Journalism Awards in 2012 and 2013. I checked out a bunch of his food articles before we spoke, and he's really, really good at writing about that. Now I have two caveats about this episode. First, the room we recorded in at my in-laws house was tiled, and I didn't take the acoustics into consideration before setting up. So this one's a little more echoey than other episodes. Also Brett was expecting an important text while we were together, so his phone was on the table near the mic, and that's why there's a little staticky noise that crops up every so often, it's the data radio thing, it sort of interferes with microphones. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Brett Martin. Difficult men, where does it come from and who does it refer to? Well the title is sort of a double, I don't know if you'd call it an entendre, it certainly has a double meaning. When I started looking at this creative revolution, it became very clear quickly that the signature character of these shows was this conflicted male anti-hero. That sort of starts from, if you want to have an easy place to date it from Tony Soprano, who was a character that is so transformative in some ways that it's difficult now to recognize how radical it was at the time, I mean it's only been a dozen years, and yet I think we've lost a truly good sense of how weird it was to have a character that not only looked like James Gandolfini looked and acted that way, but was truly not cutesily, pugnacious, wasn't that kind of goofy, it wasn't that kind of like goofy, it was a bad man. And the show, as it went on, became more and more about in some ways how we dealt with him being a bad man as viewers. And so that's one of the big tensions of this era of television, and the success of that show for the variety of reasons it became successful spawned this series of Tony Sopranos that are, that I term, difficult men. The more substantive in some ways meaning of the title is that, parallel to this or not incidentally or not coincidentally, the men who created these shows are a singularly difficult lot, a group of guys, in many ways the heroes that they created reflect their own neuroses and inner torments, et cetera. So it serves a double meaning because really the other signature thing about this era is the rise of this new kind of television writer called the, this kind of all-powerful showrunner who I'm arguing in the book is kind of the sickly artist of our age, the auteur of our age, without getting too much into the complicated politics around the word auteur. So. What do you think it was, well within the framework of the book, you sort of break down the economic model of TV content and how things have changed leading up to that era that allowed for this sort of, well, creative period, a third golden age as you refer to it. Can you try to break out some of the structural issues? Sure. You know, I think it's one of these moments in history where, you know, technology, economics, the right people at the right time, and a sort of cultural moment sort of coincided to create this opportunity. From a business standpoint, really the biggest thing you can say is that television had been ruled for since time, since it really had begun, or since soon after it began, by advertisers. It was the most basic principle, is that you watched television program because of the commercials. I mean, you didn't watch it because of the commercials, but it was allowed to exist because of the commercials. And that was the great god of television, was the advertisers. HBO, first of all, pardon me, beginning with HBO for fairly obvious reasons, advertisers didn't matter quite as much because they don't have them. So they recognized fairly early that there was value in something bigger than telling commercials, which is a brand, which is a kind of identity, and that it mattered less whether you had the most viewers as long as you had the right viewers and you had people talking about your shows. That's a huge seismic shift in the way television success has measured. And it's very quickly moved over to basic cable, which, of course, still had to deal with advertisers, but we figured out that in a world in which there are 10 million options open to any viewer at any given time, the only way to survive was to develop this kind of brand, this kind of identity, to make oneself indispensable in the cultural conversation. And I'm happy to say, as a writer, that the answer to becoming indispensable turned out to be writers, turned out to be individual voices, and allowed to have artistic freedom. And what do you think particularly--one of the things that comes up in the book is the notion of these male-conflicted anti-heroes coming from non-elite cultural status and how that seemed to coincide with the Bush era in America. Do you think there was a sort of causal--I know Tony Soprano precedes that era, but do you see that as a correlation or just an unhappy or strange coincidence? No, absolutely. I mean, certainly, you're right to say that the Soprano predates that, but I think it absolutely caught onto a wave in which masculinity--I mean, in some ways, masculinity has been on the table as a topic since the Mad Men era to not put too fine a point on it. But that's explicitly about sort of this great revolution and dislocation of generals. The Bush years, to my mind, as we look back on them now, were very much about manhood, about masculinity, about, you know, were you an American man or were you some kind of French sissy, you know? And I think that, you know, viewers, whether you were sort of four--whatever state you happen to rely on yourself with red or blue, the question of male power and its consequences and how you use it and the moral problems of using swinging ones dick around the world became a major part of the political discussion. And certainly, that's what we reckon with watching Tony and watching Don Draper and watching Walter White, you know, this kind of expression of unbridled macho-ness, which is both very kind of compelling and a great fantasy and a great cause for revulsion. And what do you see coming in the Obama era? How does that-- Well, I do think you see--I think you've seen a shift. You know, you made a good point just to go back to something you said almost as an aside. Those great shows of the early third-gold mage, you know, in the Bush years, were very much, if you look at them about--I say they were about humanizing the red states for the blue states. So you had HBO's relatively elite audience being introduced to, you know, basically Republicans, working class Republicans, whether they were the mobsters of Northern New Jersey or the Mormons of big love or the firemen of rescue me, the cops of the shield. I think, in some ways, there was this urge to reckon with the other side and to figure out how they're like us. And so, so to go back to your question, I do think you see in sort of the second mature age of the--if you want to start breaking it down, the kind of post-revolutionary period of the third-gold mage. You see shows that are much more about showing the HBO audience itself, or the cable audience itself, in whether it's girls or--board to death, or-- The newsroom. The newsroom is the ultimate example. That's right. Yeah, exactly. You're absolutely right. Or even true blood in its kind of tolerance, you know, its kind of pansexual, pan-species tolerance, it's obviously been a shift. And I think it's probably not necessarily a bad thing, although I find it less interesting, personally. Tremé is another example of that. I do think that it is a problem--I think it's a shame, because I think one of the things that these shows did best was introduce us to worlds we hadn't seen before. Speaking of that, the one show that you hadn't mentioned, but of course is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of that era, of all eras, and TV, is The Wire, which does fit your difficult men thesis in terms of the creators of the show, and David Simon, and perhaps Ed Burns, but doesn't have the same grotesque anti-hero that the other shows do. McNulty, I've always found is somewhat conventional. Maybe I'm biased by how the era has changed, but he's not Walter White, he's not Tony Soprano. And if it's into that notion that David Simon's brought up in the past, that he's writing Greek tragedy while David Chase and others are writing Shakespeare, that they're doing great men, he's doing the systems and the gods. How do you fit the wire into the-- Well, I do think you're right. I mean, I think it's notable, it's not nothing that Stringer Bell is a hero of that show, or that Omar is, for that matter, you know, guys, empirically bad behaviorists, if that's a word, bad actors in some ways, who are compelling and humanized by, you know, the depth of the kind of empathy and art of the show. And I think McNulty, to some extent, is in the same way that, for instance, the six feet under cast, you know, that Nate in Six Feet Under is, you know, he's not a Tony Soprano, but he is a narcissist and a substance abuser and a bad actor also in many ways. So I do think they certainly were given permission, given a certain amount of liberty by this new era to paint these characters more realistically than characters had ever been painted before. And as you point out, David Simon, as far as the behind the scenes goes, David Simon absolutely fits into this new kind of writer as king of television. But you're absolutely right also that the ambition of the wire is in some ways very different, which is a piece of social activism and a piece of kind of grand Dickensian sort of, you know, which is, I'm certainly, it's almost become a cliche to point this out, but this kind of broad social canvas with a very specific political intent that I think has caused David Simon, you know, a tremendous amount of agita that, you know, he, one of our first interviews I said to him, you know, I was making the case that the wire was not journalism. I said, you know, that it had, it had so much more kind of, you know, dramatic, that it succeeded as art. And he said to me, oh, no, I would never call this journalism, I have way too much respect for journalism. And my, my point had been the exact opposite, which is that it's elevated above journalism, above mirrored journalism. And I'm, believe me, I'm a journalist myself, I believe in journalism, but that, that I don't think, almost one of the most maddening things about watching the wire is the apparent effortlessness with which that side, I mean, he dismisses it, him and Ed Burns too, they dismiss the kind of literary quality of the show as something you just have to do to get viewers. The Trojan horse idea that you brought up that it was meant to, you know, people are going to see the art, but then they're going to get infected by the, the social message of it. Exactly. And that, you know, the Trojan horse is one of the most, I mean, for, since the beginning of television, that was the way you got good work on. You, you, you, you, you snuck it in through the gates, you snuck in your vision through the gates, under the guise of something, a cop show, a mob show, a Western, a fireman show, et cetera, which of course marks this, this era as well. My point is that they seem to be continually, uncomfortable with the quality of their horse. They don't sit well as, as artists, which I, I think is a, is sort of a, some sort of funny and, and, and, and a bit of a shame. And how's the book been received, particularly by the, the subjects within it? Have you got any response? I haven't gotten in a huge amount of response from the, from the, I mean, Vince Gilligan has been enormously kind, he perhaps not coincidentally comes off the best in, in the book. He knows. He knows spoilers, by the way, because that's the only one that I care about that I haven't watched yet. Okay. You haven't watched any of it? Are you watching the first season? And I haven't seen anything. You know, it's, it's a, it gives me great envy to hear you say that, because it's, it's, it is a, you know, it's a great thing to be at the beginning of one of these shows. I started on the flight down, I had my breaking pads on the, the iPad, I started up again. It's a good game. I get through this 60 hours from now, it's a hard trip. That's the other problem. Now when I watch one of these, you know, now that I'm sort of not doing it for work as much anymore, sometimes I sit at the beginning of one of these shows and just have a premonition of, of how much we're going to have to go through before the, before it's over. And, and it just exhausts me, you know, it's part of why I've sort of backed off of getting involved in too many of these, because I found it, you know, enormously emotionally draining after a while. And how much deep did you watch for the, I didn't watch a fair amount because I did not come from, I wasn't a critic and I hadn't, I'd most, I'd watch most of this stuff once as a layperson. I'm not an obsessive fan in that way. I don't rewatch and rewatch and rewatch. There was a lot of stuff I hadn't seen. Early on I had an elliptical machine and I tried to force myself to only watch while I was on the elliptical machine. That was good for a little while. But the problem is, and this is, it's not coal mining, it's not, you know, it's a lot of jobs worse, but I have to tell you that feeling like you are remiss every time you're not watching television is not a fun thing. And an hour takes an hour. You can't skim a television program. You know, and there's not a lot of things that are like that anymore, that it takes, you know, it's a lot of hours of TV. So, so I had to do a lot of that. And I still probably, by the standards of most of a serious TV geek, I am woefully behind. But I came to this very much as a journalist and rather than a critic. And I think that, you know, and I treated it as the story of these men. I mean, it is a reported book, not a book of theory. Generally it's been silent, the response, as I say, Vince has been very kind to me. His show was continuing to go on. I had reason to go back and talk to him. I did a cover story with Brian Cranston on GQ, at GQ. But otherwise, I take the silence as, you know, I don't know what to say. You know, it's sort of, there are people who don't come off very well. I assume that since they haven't sued me that they are fine with it, although not ready to call me and congratulate me. Again, they're difficult men. I don't assume David Chase is going to be sending you, you know, flowers or anything. Although, you know, frankly, I got to like them all and I would, you know, I've spent probably the most time with David Chase over the years. And I have great affection for him. I tried in every one of these cases, even with, you know, Matthew Weiner of Mad Men comes off probably the worst. David Milge comes off as the most absolutely batshit crazy, just in writing, you know, and a tough guy, very combative, very, you know, test you as soon as you get in there. And he's talking. He's a very singular character, even among these singular characters, you know. But I actually grew, in every case, to have a significant amount of affection for them, even while I think I portrayed them fairly honestly. I mean, that's my goal in whatever I'm writing about is to be compassionate and honest. So honest may not have gone over as well as compassionate in this case. To be honest, he might have stuck in their crawl more in the compassion. Do you think David Chase ever goes back to TV? Well, he's a little old at this point, so otherwise I would think for sure. I mean, you know, Chase, in some ways, as I say, is the main character of the book. And his, in some ways, the kind of mystery is, you know, will he ever come to terms with his achievement? Because he's, you know, almost ludicrously continues to berate himself for not being a film director, and instead settling on this corrupt, you know, prostitute himself. Prostituting himself for television, exactly. And in some ways, you know, I call him the reluctant Moses of the Golden Age, because he's the guy who led all these people to the Promised Land and yet couldn't enter himself. And every time we met, I would go back to him and say, you know, well, so are you happy now? I mean, have you gotten, have you come to terms with this? And, you know, without giving too much away, I mean, this, that's not a huge revelation. I think he, I think he does come closer to being satisfied. And I think part of that was the fact that his first, when he finally got to direct a feature, he found it. Not as easy as he is. Not as easy. Well, not knowing, not as satisfying as, as his TV work had been. For obvious reasons, which is that, you know, being the master of a 90 hour epic is different than a two hour, you know. Yeah, I remember many years ago, David Duchovny, when they were doing an X-Files movie, another show I never watched, mentioning that he went into it thinking, well, it's just going to be twice as long as a regular episode. This will be easy. And then discovering, oh, movies are a lot different than television. Yeah. He just went into it, no, no grasp of how bad it was going to be. Well, he also, I mean, you know, the, you, you grow accustomed to a certain amount of power. I mean, this, in many ways, institutionalized by David Chase, you know, these guys become really masters of the universe. They've become, I mean, it's, it's, it's not just a movie, it's a corporate division. And it's, and it's a massive enterprise in over which they have full creative control and in any movie, that's just not going to be the case. So, so I do think that you, I think you would go back to television creatively. It's also an incredibly difficult job. He's probably his mid 70s, richer than he'll ever need to be, whether he feels like he has got the energy to, I don't know. I hope so. When you mentioned the, the master of the universe thing, one thing that comes up in the book, several of the creators go on to create other shows afterwards, and at least two instances, they were almost incomprehensible and awful acts of storytelling. Tremé, for all of its, its praise is also very difficult show to watch. And Matt Zoller cites recently made a comment in a New York magazine review where he said one of the big problems has been that every shot in every scene was given equal weight. And as though there was no grasp of what was meant to be important, nothing was signaled to the viewer, which seemed to me to be some sort of aesthetic choice on David Simon's part. The other one is John from Cincinnati by David Milch, which as you pointed out, even the people working on the show had no idea what it was about and why it was going. Literally day to day. Yeah. No, no, no clue. Yeah. Do you think there is that sense of these guys, once they get too big, you know, almost doing this sort of David Foster Wallace, I've got to completely change the mode in which stories are told, not quite understanding that an audience is not going to get that? Well, I think that, I think that is, as in any commercial art form, some break on anyone man's or woman's kind of creative power is a good thing. I think that's one of the reasons why the writer's room is a good writer's room has some resistance to the, you know, for all this omnipotence that I'm ascribing to these creators. If they're smart, they have smart people telling them no in their room and just to start with David Simon, you know, one of the things I come to in the book is that without taking anything away from his genius, which is now institutionalized in capital G, I think that Ed Burns, who is his partner and really the inspiration for McNulty, ex-cop, ex-teacher, in some ways all of the characters that are heroes in the wire are versions of Ed Burns. I think they, I think he's this sort of secret sauce that made the wire what it was, and I think you see that in the fifth season of the wire, which I argue is awful, and Ed Burns was not around for. I think you see it in the Tremé, and I think that it's not a terrible thing to say that they sort of need each other. And that David needs that bounce, as he calls it, somebody to sort of keep him from his most romantic impulses. David Milch is just a very unique case. I don't know what to say about John Furson's Cincinnati, I found it unwatchable. I liked luck more and more as I watched it, but that was a case in which he was, his power, at least on set, was severely limited, and it forced him without going too much into it, one of his MOs, in order to keep himself sort of the most central character, it's this incredible kind of narcissistic setup, which is that he would rarely, if ever, complete scripts on, even on Deadwood, and certainly at the end of NYPD Blue, which he had created. And he would be on set literally dictating extemporaneously as the scene went on, which is a beautiful way to make sure you're indispensable. When Luck came around, he was working with, why is the name escaping me? Michael Mann. Michael Mann. And part of, and who is, of course, used to being in film where the director is the king, and this is the perfect sort of metaphor for the collision of these two power systems. And what they did was they kept Milch offset, which meant he had to complete scripts. And so there was some limit put on him there. As far as the more general question goes, it's really hard to do this twice. It's really hard. I mean, they're a great novelist, certainly, who have more than one great novel in them. It's probably, I can't think of an example off the top of my head of somebody who's replicated their best work out of these guys. I'll be excited to see what Matt Weiner and Vince Gilligan do next, they're at the right age to have a whole other chapter. That's the other thing you have to remember, is that Chase, Simon, Milch, all were relatively old by the time that they undertook these massive shows. So whether they, you know, and they'd been telling stories in other ways for a long time before that. And as you pointed out early on that every great TV writer has an awful resume. All these guys had to come up for years under a system, which struck me about Matthew Weiner in particular being so young when pitching Matt Ben in a way that most of these guys were 40s, 50s. Right. Well, part of it is that the world had changed. Part of it is what Chase had allowed to happen. And Matt Mann doesn't have a prayer before, you know, there was a reason that, I mean, that's one of the nice things is that you see these men, particularly, you know, suddenly, I mean, in some ways the book is what it is about is writers who had resigned themselves to a career finding private satisfactions and shit work. Suddenly being given this opportunity by an accident of history in some ways to work with unfettered ambition. And you see them fall upon this, like starving men, I mean, certainly, whiner does. And that's, you know, sort of inspiring, I find it very inspiring. The difficult man behind all the difficult men I found in the book, and maybe I tend to read these things a little too deeply, is the former HBO executive, Chris Albrecht, who green lights the sopranos, I believe, and sort of starts the ball rolling for a lot of this, who turns out to be a very conflicted and difficult man himself. Right. Did you sort of envision that or see him in that light or, you know? Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, I think that as much as I talk about authors, I believe that this golden age is the product of a system and sort of good decision-making and big brains on every level, including the executive level. And Chris Albrecht and his right-hand woman in the original series office named Carolyn Strauss were absolutely crucial to empowering David Chase, and then later Alan Ball, and actually all of the big HBO shows, and certainly the wire, all came out of there. And you needed, in some ways, Chris Albrecht had a model in a man and grand tinker who was another unique executive who created MTM Studios, this is what I call the second golden age in the book, and was one of these rare guys who was talented, Hugh G. Goat and believed at least at one point in his career that he wasn't better writer than his writers. And that's surprisingly difficult to find, and Albrecht, at least for a long time, was smart enough to empower the creative people around him, and that's as crucial a decision and as crucial to the success of this golden age as anything that David Chase did, for sure. Now we talk about the end of this golden age, or at least it's tail end, Albrecht ends up in trouble because he has a thing from beating up women, you may or may not, but beat up a woman and got into trouble. And you also portray the networks themselves, HBO and subsequently AMC and FX, is almost becoming sculrotic, becoming tempted by their own success and beginning to cover their asses and stop making innovative bets. And to me, I only watched the first season of Boardwalk Empire and felt that it was almost a paint by numbers attempt at being that next sopranos that they were kind of, it almost felt commissioned, that they wanted to just kind of repeat that thing as a success. Do you see, where do you see that risk taking place now? I see it somewhat in Netflix deciding to go with original programming and some of the choices it's made, but where do you see it going in future? Well, I think you're right. I think, I mean, the problem is that it's incredibly difficult to maintain the conditions of success once you've had success, is that it requires a certain desperation, it requires relatively low stakes, it requires a kind of throwing up your hands as Carol and Strauss described doing a green line in the sopranos, they just, "All right, we'll give us a shot." And that's incredibly hard to do once you've had the success, almost perhaps impossible. And so the way I've been describing it is that it's like a gas flame where you can get a flame burning and keep it burning and it can be, and I think FX is a pretty steady flame now. I think HBO is a pretty steady flame. I think AMC tries to be a steady flame and there will be quality on those networks for a long time. What you can't get is the kind of heat and light and spark of that first ignition. It's very hard to get that back. And that's why you've seen the best work move around the dial and now beyond the dial. I think that effectively, I think you can have a whole discussion about the ways in which Netflix, Hulu, streaming, all these services have kind of changed the game, but from my purposes, I think of them as a network, I think of them as a channel. And they're doing, they're looking at original programming for exactly the same reasons that HBO did or that that AMC. Well, I think very much Netflix is patterning itself after HBO that they want to have a paid system. Well, you remember HBO showed movies and they realized that sooner or later that's not going to be the only way we're going to survive, the only way we're going to be indispensable in this massive cultural landscape is by having something that nobody else has. And I think Hulu is doing it, I think Amazon is doing it and I think that's the best case for hope is that those conditions will exist somewhere for a long time because the fragmentation of the media is not going anywhere. So somewhere out there, somebody is going to be throwing their hands up and taking the big bet and just have to kind of keep our eyes open to where that's going to be. Oh and if that was interesting that you point out in the book, all of these shows are with a male lead. There's only one that had a female lead in damages and that women for some reason were getting the half hour shows while men were getting the full act. Women get weeds, shows light and still, yeah. With Netflix, one of the big jumps out of the gate was Orange is the New Black. Yeah. Which, you know, it's a very interesting show I, you know, sat down with and realized this is not, you know, Grey's Anatomy in a prison. Oh no, not at all. It's really. Yeah, no, and also came from, I believe it came from the weeds, the creator of weeds. Absolutely. I mean, there's no question that there's a certain amount of difficult men fatigue out there. When you see the ones that came out, you know, they're still trying because this is what happens in Hollywood. I want more of that part. They're still trying to, yeah, trying to, exactly. They, you know, so there was a show called Low Winter Sun and there was a show called, you know, with, you know, the, the Ray Donovan, which, which were greeted with a kind of derision as though this era may be coming to an end and, and, and I think that there's no question that it's time for more kinds of stories, more kinds of, more kinds of, of heroes, heroines. I would point out that Orange is the New Black, that the, I would argue that the, the male characters on that show are way more cartoonish and one-dimensional, certainly, than the women of the Sopranos, the, less so the wire because there just aren't that many, but certainly then I think there's no, there's no Carmel Soprano on Orange is the New Black. There's no, the women of Deadwood are, you know, are real characters. There's no Skylar White. There's no Peggy Olson on that show. And so I think just getting even is not a particularly worthy goal of television. I mean, ultimately, when we say anti-hero, what we mean is real character, right? I mean, that's, that's what it is. You know, we're talking about well-written characters. We're talking about well-rounded characters. And that should be the goal, not, not, not just simply replacing the, flipping the genders of them. We should be after stories that are, are real and complicated. And I think that that hunger isn't going anywhere now that it's been proven to be there. You know, I, I do think, and I think that it's to the good that we, it doesn't really have to sneak in under a Trojan horse anymore. You know, there is no, there is no genre to really breaking bad, for instance. There was no real, there was, it didn't, it didn't, no, it was no obvious TV, TV genre that we're going to flip around on that. I think for me, if for all it's false, is another one. It's not, it doesn't fit any genre at all, it luck didn't fit any genre at all. No, Game of Thrones fits a genre and it is awesome. And my wife adores it, I've never read them, so I have a question for them. I haven't read them and I don't ever want to read them because it's a TV version. Yeah, I mean, I guess a lot of other books to read and they're making a great TV show out of this one. So why would I ruin it for myself? Yeah, so, and there's some amazing women on that as well. But I do, I do think the goal is, is good art, not necessarily gender equity, although it's to the good that there would be more and more voices out there. Speaking of great books being out there, who are you reading? I'm just reading, I'm finishing Liz Gilbert's book, called, which is like a number of me and Oprah and everybody else, which I'm enjoying immensely. Well, I'm starting a new book about chefs, which is in some ways the same story as this story, which is about a kind of revolution, a creative revolution in a business, you know, sort of the passage of, in our lifetime, the job of chef from sort of anonymous tradesperson to artist and what's, and celebrity and what that's meant for a particular generation of chefs as they sort of try to locate themselves somewhere on this spectrum of. Is there a grant tinker figure at the top of that show? Well, I'm writing about the, the family tree of two restaurants in New York, Danielle and Cafe Bouloud. So in some ways, Danielle Bouloud is my kind of patriarch of this group. But if you, out of that, out of those kitchens come David Chang, Andrew Carmelini, and a whole bunch of chefs, all of whom are in some ways trying to locate themselves on this, on this continuum. And, and then, and then if you go back further beyond that, in some ways the story of, of chefs from the beginning has been reckoning with this tension all the way back to a scofie who was the first person to say that the chef has an identity, has, has, has, has, is an author. So would you say our terrorism is a, a through line for your work or is it just coincidental? Well, I think, I think, I think the confluence of art and commerce is one, the, the role of, you know, of, of, of an artist in that commercial world and, and what that means is, is interesting to me. I seem to deal with, I seem to spend a lot of time being hectored by big egoed men in my career, and I don't know what that's about, but I, I anticipate a lot more of that. But I find workplaces fascinating, and I find particularly, you know, and I come out of magazines. I, I'm, I'm somebody who, who gave up fiction writing quickly and early while getting an MFA in it. And in part because I realized how much I enjoy that crucible of, of I like working for money. And I like, but I like doing good work for money. And I like, I like, I'm fascinated by, in some ways that's a more interesting artistic process to me is, is doing it within a, some sort of commercial confine and pushing against that and being limited by it, et cetera. So I think those are the things that connect those two books. And we went to the same college, which is a very hippie-trippy, non-conforming sort of school in Hampshire. Anything about that education when you look back at it, prepare you for who you are and what you do now? Oh, certainly. Yeah, I had a very good experience there in terms of, I mean, I can't, you know, I wish I knew more classics and I wish I knew more math. But I, but I, there's no question that, you know, the, the, the, the, well, the, as you well know, the two, the two strains of educational theory at Hampshire are being multiple disciplinary and being able to see move between disciplines and sort of see the connections between them, which serves any journalist in good stead. And then independent work, which is, you know, in the ability and sort of confidence to, to pick up the phone when necessary or to, to undertake big projects. And certainly, I've tried to do that through my career. So, so I had, I had a positive experience there. There are holes in my classical education, but I mean that in the kind of broadest sense that I regret, I sort of, and so I went to St. John's College for my masters. Oh, did you really? Yeah. St. John's is sort of the perfect. Yeah, the absolute opposite of, except for the kind of, am I right in thinking it's, it's not Harvard either. It's, it does, it does reward and does value kind of independent study too, doesn't it? Yes, right. But it's all with the same curriculum for everybody as opposed to finding your own way. Yeah. And I would, I would, I would envy that to some extent, although, but it's taught me to be a, a learner, which is a, is a very important thing. And besides Game of Thrones, what are you watching? I watch a lot of baseball. Honestly, I did, I, I did take a brain. I mean, it was, it became a, it became a bit of a, you know, television became work and anything you turn into work sort of sucks. I, I am watching that. Like I say, during the season, I watch baseball every night. So that takes up a lot of time. That's so, really? Yeah, the Mets, yeah. I mean, you can actually put yourself through it. You can't choose, you can't choose. It's not, it's not a decision. I mean, I, I let the Yankees kind of slide. Yeah, I know. I'm from the other side. I let the Yankees slide this year just had the, yeah, you know, they're lucky to win these games. They're not going anywhere. I don't have to watch every night. It's, every night is its own little drama. You know what? You can, you can watch for the big, you can watch, it's, it's like an episode of Sopranos. So think about it now. You can watch the whole season and it's got a certain arc, but, but any individual episode also has its pleasures. And my brother, I have sent a copy of your book too. He will write back almost immediately to ask where lost in 24 are. I know their network and not, not cable. Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, I just, they're, they're important in that they were, they were, they did represent the network trying to catch up and trying to figure out, you know, and, and, and in some ways, very intelligently using this, the new freedom of these shows. I don't, I don't personally love either of them, which is really ultimately the, the, the arbiter here. I mean, Battlestar Galactica is another one. I get a lot of, you know, you know, I could, and in many ways it fit my thesis beautifully. I mean, it was, it defined a network. It was, it was wildly ambitious. It had, it had that kind of character. I, I just wasn't to my taste. And, and I had to draw parameters. The easiest answer is that I only did cable shows in here. But I don't think either of those measures up. Honestly, that's my, my personal feeling. I don't think either of them. And certainly, I mean, lost, I never, I didn't watch the entirety of the loss. But, but what I gather is that it didn't wrap up in a way that, that justified the, the, the, you know, one of them before, exactly. I still tell people the only thing I've seen of the Sopranos was the first season and the final episode. And I, I believe 20 years from now, people will still talk about the final episode of the Sopranos as much as it was hated at the time and as many issues as there have been, whereas most other shows we can barely remember. Yeah. Anything about how they did that? I think, I think it's, I mean, you know, it's a, once you're attempting a kind of, you know, this kind of storytelling, it, it adds a whole nother kind of burden to, to the, to wrapping it up. I mean, it means, you know, you really have to decide what kind of story you've been telling. And I think in retrospect that, that, that, that was the only ending that, that, that could be on the Sopranos. And that's, that's, that's what we look at it. And to me, it makes absolute sense. But you wouldn't have done it yourself because you wouldn't have had the balls to, you know, but it wouldn't have been my story either. That's sort of the thing. You know, it is, it's, you know, you don't, it's so strange. You know, we went through this just recently with, with Breaking Bad and it was coming. The, the finale. It's the one I haven't watched yet. Right. Okay. But the finale was happening right around the time when, I guess my book had just come out. So I was talking about it a lot and I was, you know, I interviewed Vince about it and Brian Cranston about it. And I thought it was weird. I think it's strange that everybody was talking about what they wanted to happen. You don't do that with a novel. You don't say, oh, you know, what, what do I want to happen? What to this, you know, to this, you know, to this, you know, to the only little nail. I mean, I would have kept her around. Yeah. My feeling, and then their anger, you know, my, my, my feeling when I'm watching these shows is, is very much the same as, you know, I'm in their hands. It is their story. And Breaking Bad ended, I'm not going to tell you how, but it, in a way that is, was unexpected to me. But which I immediately accepted as, as the ending to the story. And I think we'll be satisfying ultimately to people. I mean, I don't think, I don't think you're right. I don't necessarily think people will remember the wires ending. I do think that the sopranos will be remembered well. Yeah. And how do you think the field of TV criticism has changed given, and you say you're not a TV critic coming in as a journalist, but with the nature of these shows, I was reading a Reddit Q&A with David Edelstein recently, movie reviewer at New York magazine, and he was asked about TV. And he said for the first time in his career, you know, he's jealous of the TV critics now, because there's so many more interesting things going on there than he was seeing on screen for the last few years. But with that, you know, as a plus on one side and the negative being this insane level of fan interaction and engagement, do you think that area of criticism is, is well served or is changed in, you know, it certainly changed. I think, I think there's some incredible, I think some of the best critical writings being done on that side. I think some of the worst is being done on that side too. I find it as somebody who's been subject to it in some ways and, you know, sort of aligned closely. I have found it often overwhelming and exhausting, and other times inspiring and exciting. You know, just the sheer bulk of writing about every episode of every show, in real time, I think that it, that only, that most people can't do that with any kind of perspective and intelligence, you know. There was a review last year that tried to compare community without Dan Harmon to the sensation of losing a family member to Alzheimer's. That was my moment of, wow, you guys are really taking TV in way too serious. I mean, you know, I wouldn't say that, you know, good writing is good writing, however often it comes out, et cetera. I have had a complicated because, as I say, and my own insecurities have come into this as well. There have been times when I've had to turn off my, all those Twitter feeds because I just, it's just too much noise. It's too much, too many voices that are not, you know, that I've found myself unable to shut them out. And other times that I've found myself enjoying swimming in the stream, I'm glad it's not my job. It's not, I'm not inclined that way. I don't really like watching television enough to watch all the television that I'd have to watch to do that job. And I think that there's been a, I think that it is, it sustains a kind of, I think there's a rush to consensus to, to, I think that people really enjoy loving things and loving things in the community and, and, and sort of staying up late talking about them. And I've been accused of being condescending about this and I really am not. I, I do find that it does, I don't feel that impulse personally. And I do think that it has led to things being over praised. If I had to point to one major problem with the kind of new critical world is that there's just a desire, anytime there's a vacuum in a true, you know, back, it's sort of break in truly great shows, something gets anointed as, and probable, and, and pushed into that position. I think, for instance, I show like the Americans, I don't know if you ever saw the Americans, is a perfect example of a show that just should be better than it is. I liked, and it got outlandish. I felt episode after episode, you're, well, this, they wouldn't be doing this. It's a super spy show. It's not. And, and it didn't, I'm personally, I didn't, I thought it, but, but whatever you think of it, it perfectly solid show. I thought it got, I thought it, it, it got the benefit of this kind of vacuum of, of consensus at that moment that it came out. And, and I thought it was over praised. And I think that that happens fairly frequently. You also felt that with Louie at sea, I do feel a lot about Louie, although I think that's just a little bit different. I, I admire, I have tremendous respect in some ways for Louie CK. And I think he's done what, what he's done is amazing. And he's changed to the model for comedians and how they produce stuff. I think that the show, I think it's over praised. I think, I think it's, he's, he's, he's sort of secular, St. Hood is a little over the top at this point. But I do think that it, it has been important on TV and, and we'll, I'm excited to see what comes next. Brett Martin, you get back to the Mets, you get back to dining. And thank you so much for coming on the virtual memory show. Thank you. It's great to be here. And that was Brett Martin. You can find difficult men in your favorite bookstore. It's a compulsively good book. And if you've got any interest in those great TV shows and the personalities behind them, I implore you to pick it up. You can find more of Brett's writing through his website, Brett Martin.org. It's B-R-E-T-T-M-A-R-T-I-N. And that's it for this week's virtual memory show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Emily Rabato, author of Searching for Zion, The Quest for Home in the African diaspora. Until then, do me a favor and go to our iTunes page and post a review of the show. Or hit up our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. And if you've got ideas for guests, just drop me a line at Groth at chimeraobscura.com, or VMSPod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. Until next time, I'm Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
