Few people will debate the fact
that when the New Golden Age of TV started, it was led by three of the greatest
writers in TV history who at HBO created three of the greatest series in TV
history. By pure chance, they all happened to share my first name: David. Chase
created The Sopranos; Simon created The Wire; Milch created Deadwood.
At the time, every critic and
viewer recognized that these series were breaking ground that had never been
explored before on television, when it came in terms of profanity, violence and
subject matter. Most of us also recognized that these were the kind of stories
that had never been told on television before. We had never seen a series which
features mobsters fighting over turf with such immorality; a police procedural
where the slingers were as fascinating – and in some cases, more moral – then the
cops chasing them, or a Western where the man who wore a white hat and
represented the law had to make deals with a man who had no compunction about
slitting anyone’s throat.
But because it takes a while for
even the most brilliant minds to realize connections, I don’t think it was
until years after the fact that we realized the larger stories that all three
men were trying to tell, and certainly not the basic similarity between all of
them. A larger analysis of all three series is obviously required (and have
indeed had multiple volumes written on each story) but it’s now clear that each
one was in a sense telling a saga about the failure of the American Dream. The
Sopranos told the story of the cynical nature of humanity and how most
people, left to their own devices, will do the thing that requires the least work
on their part, no matter how much violence it involves to others. The Wire believed
that the institutions that have been established grind down whatever goodness
an individual might have. Both shows are about the death of the American Dream.
Deadwood is, in a sense, the most optimistic as it argues that selfish
and the criminal can come together in service of a common goal, but it is
heavily balanced by the fact that civilization and capitalism will at the end
undo all of it.
(I spent a lot of time raging
against Succession because I argued that all three of these series had
told that same story before and better. In hindsight, I did not see that Jesse
Armstrong was, in his own way, writing a natural progression of all three
stories. In the Roy family we see people whose wealth has corrupted them to the
point that they don’t even have connections to human beings {this was seen
particularly in George Hearst on Deadwood} that the family was as
incapable of change even though they had all the privilege that no one in anyone
in The Sopranos had, and that even though they all had more power than
anyone in The Wire could hope for, they had no idea how to use it.)
All three of these classic shows,
in a sense, have had major storylines that foreshadowed the labor strike going
on in Hollywood as we speak. I think its fitting to start with The Wire because
Simon actually dealt with this the most directly. (There’s a deeper irony to
that which I’ll get to at the end of the article.)
The second season of The Wire has
never been granted to same respect as the other four because the investigation
has almost nothing to do with everything we spent Season 1 dealing with. But it
is by far the most pertinent to where America is today in a way that some of
the more groundbreaking stories just don’t realize.
At the center of Season 2 is Frank
Sobotka (Chris Bauer). Frank is the head of the Baltimore dockworkers union
which, like all labor unions, has been struggling and is nearly collapsing. As
a result in order to survive Sobotka has been allowing containers to arrive on
his docks from a Russian enterprise that contain contraband such as drugs and illegal
prostitutes. Like most of the criminals on The Wire, Sobotka is a
sympathetic one: he does not take his money out of greed but has put every cent
of it towards keeping his failing union going forward. The lion’s share of his
money has spent towards obtaining political influence, both with a lobbyist
friend and trying to reach out to political figures. He has spent all of his time and energy on
protecting his union on dreams – he spends the entire season desperate to make
sure the canal is dredged so more ships might come – that it has blinding him
from the reality of the world around him. When he sees that machinery is likely
to take over most of the worker’s jobs he is horrified because he knows it is the death knell of his union. At one point he shouts
that: “it breaks my heart there’s no future for the Sobotkas on the waterfront!”
and it’s particularly telling because he has fundamentally neglected his family
as a result, including his own son Ziggy.
The irony is Sobotka could no doubt
have gotten away with his crimes and no one would have cared. What brings him
down is the vanity of a rival of his Lt. Valchek. Valchek is upset that he can
not get a window of a policemen at a critical position in his church because
Sobotka made a larger contribution to get one of a dockworker there. Sobotka
has, to be clear, made these donations because the monsignor is a colleague of
then Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski and he wants to get face time with her.
Valchek wants the window out of pure ego, and it is for that reason that he
demands a detail to investigate Sobotka.
Another irony is that Sobotka is
small fry compared to what the detail discovers: it’s clear that there is an illegal
smuggling operation going on and it is connected to fourteen homicides.
Sobotka, as we learn, doesn’t even know the real names of the ringleaders. But
when Valchek learns the case is now ‘bigger than Sobotka’ his pettiness gets in
the way and he calls in the FBI. By this point in the series we know the Bureau
doesn’t care about things like drug dealing but union racketeering is a major
deal. Their involvement ends up compromising the integrity of the investigation
but Valchek never cares. All he gives a damn about is getting to slap cuffs on
his rival and perp walk him before the cameras.
At the time, few viewers cared
about the depths of the story because they didn’t realize the scope of what
Simon was trying to tell: in the second season, he intended to tell the sage of
‘the death of work’. Near the end of the season after he has been arrested
Frank tells his lobbyist friend: “You know what the trouble is…We used to make
shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our hands in the next guys
pocket.”
In that sense, Simon presaged the
labor struggle in Hollywood. In a narrow sense that’s what streaming is. It is
doing for the entertainment industry what so much of the regular industry has
been doing for years: it has been outsourcing its chief rivals (which include HBO)
and providing it for a cheaper rate to the American public. The fact that it
has become clear recently that so many of these streamers such as Netflix have been
lying about their viewership for years and now face financial turmoil mirrors
so much of the way that blue collar jobs were outsourced to other American
industries. And as a result, the worker on these shows – the writer and actors –
have become to starve.
Left out of the saga on The
Wire was how this happened in the first place. If the lead of the show was
Baltimore, why did it fall on hard times? Simon never gives an explanation, but
implied is that so many Americans don’t care about actual change but the
illusion of it. We see this in just how badly broken the policing and political
systems are in Baltimore, but its clear in so many other ways, not the least of
which is the rest of the country is indifferent to it.
We get another version of this in
what would be the final season of Deadwood. During that season George
Hearst (Gerald McRaney) uses almost all of his time and energy to manipulate
and destroy the power structure in Deadwood. You could see Hearst as the
living embodiment of all of the corporate bosses that are willing to let the
writers and actors starve. Hearst is detached from humanity in a very basic concept:
the only things he cares about are ‘the color’ (gold) and bending the
population to his will. In what would be the series finale, when he has finally
managed to obtain the last major claim he has spent all season trying to obtain,
Seth Bullock tells him he’s scared, Hearst replies with detachment:
“You mistake for fear what is in
fact preoccupation; I’m having a conversation you cannot hear.”
In the audio commentary on this
scene on the DVDs, Milch says something chilling: “That’s what Rupert Murdoch
tells himself every morning.” You can imagine so many of the billionaires
running the studio telling themselves the same things.
Interestingly while this
storyline was unfolding, a theater company would arrive in the camp led by Jack
Langrishe (Brian Cox!). While this overarching storyline is considered a
weakness for the third season (the kindest thing most fans will says is that it
was laying the groundwork for a fourth season that never happened) at the time
and afterwards Milch thought that it was just as important as Hearst’s presence:
“When the bosses seem in charge,
there’s always room for art as a contemporary dynamic. I think that what we do
in our society, the best of us as storytellers, present an alternative to the
story the bosses are calling.”
I don’t know what the bigger
irony about that statement is: the fact that fans responding to this concept so
poorly or that Deadwood was cancelled because of a conflict between the
storyteller and the bosses, mostly out of the same financial reasons driving
Hollywood today.
The final part of the saga of our
problem can be found in The Sopranos. Throughout the saga of Tony and
his crew, Chase consistently made it clear that not only were the New Jersey
Mafia small time to other mafia, but to the rest of the world. Indeed in the
final season, this was compared to Hollywood itself. Christopher, who is trying
to get his slasher film made travels to Hollywood to try and get Ben Kingsley
to star. He is dismayed to find just that a movie star’s lifestyle is far more
gluttonous than a wise guy could dream of. (Daniel Baldwin eventually is cast
in the lead.)
This story, like almost every
major story in The Sopranos, deals with the dissatisfaction of one’s lot
in life and the fundamental inability to do anything to try and change it for
the better if it means doing something difficult. That this is usually shown in
terms of violent action was clearly by design by Chase, but it’s clearly just
an extreme example of everything that happens on the show. Throughout the
series we see every major character refuse to make any sacrifice that would
make their lives better in favor of the choice that involves the least work.
And that part combines to get to
the heart of why the writers and actors strike is ultimately doomed to failure.
The reason that this strike is
happening is because of how streaming works. It pays a lot short term and almost
nothing long term for the creative forces.
One does not blame them for not being able to foresee the future; no one
could have told this would be an obstacle. The larger issue can be found in the
underlying theme of all three series.
The Wire foresaw how this battle of
blue-collar and outsourcing of jobs would lead to the conditions today. Deadwood
showed us a world where capitalism will run roughshod over our best
ambitions. The Sopranos told us that humanity does not like change. And
all of these combine to the real obstacle the creative forces have.
The viewing public, which at its
core is exactly like the indifferent society that plagues The Wire and
is find with letting the bosses run the show in Deadwood as long as they
get their art. As for raising a fight and support, like everyone in The
Sopranos, it would take too much work. And because we live in a society
where the worst thing for many of us is an inconvenience, it is an inevitability
that they will turn against the strikers. They had little sympathy for getting their
entertainment being delayed during Covid, why should they care if they starve? I’ve
read more than enough articles on this site where the public increasingly doesn’t
want to pay for its entertainment at all. They don’t care about the writers or
actors who might be making less than some of them.
And if you think the bosses are willing
to only sacrifice the rank and file, here’s a story you might not have heard yet.
David Simon walked the picket line in the early days of the writer’s strike. Not
long after that HBO officially cut ties with him. Never mind that Simon had
worked for them for twenty years, had created some of their greatest work, and
more or less made them what they are today. HBO cut him loose with less
affection than Frank Sobotka showed for his union in Season 2. Why are we
surprised that they’re willing to let the strike carry on until most of the writers
are on the verge of losing their houses? As far as they’re concerned, it doesn’t
matter what you contribute to us. You’re a worker and you better get in line. Simon
might have been angry to learn this truth, but like his colleagues who helped
essentially make HBO what it is, he can’t have been surprised. As he famously
told us at the start of The Wire: “This is America.” And we all know the
America Simon - and Milch and Chase –
lived in.
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