Free Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin

do some interesting stuff.’”
    • • •
    B y most normal standards, David Chase was doing interesting stuff himself in the early 1990s—working for a pair of young writer-producers who would likely have found themselves working on cable had they started ten years later. Josh Brand and John Falsey had been barely thirty when they created
St. Elsewhere
for MTM. They departed the show soon after its debut, thanks to an ugly struggle for control between Brand and executive producer Bruce Paltrow. At Universal, they had created a miniseries called
A Year in the Life
for NBC, which was then picked up for one critically acclaimed season. They then struck improbable gold, or at least fairy dust, with an eight-episode summer replacement called
Northern Exposure
, about a neurotic New York doctor stranded in an eccentric Alaskan town. With its blend of comedy, soap opera, and a kind of hip, literary sensibility (Falsey and several of the writers he recruited had studied fiction at the University of Iowa), the show was an immediate hit with critics.
    “They were very conscious of wanting to do something that was not like television,” staffer Barbara Hall remembered. “There were constant references to short-story writers and playwrights, not TV episodes.” Robin Green, also a writer for the show, was sent home the first week with a collection of John Updike stories to study. Surprisingly, the show was also a ratings hit, which bought Brand and Falsey something approaching a free pass on whatever they wanted to do next.
    “Back then, before HBO and cable were players, the networks would set aside an hour or two a week for a show that wasn’t going to be a ratings winner but that they could be proud of,” said Falsey. “With
Northern
, Josh and I had reached that niche.”
    What they filled it with was
I’ll Fly Away
. Set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the show centered around Sam Waterston as a southern district attorney navigating the moral and legal displacements of the civil rights movement, and on Regina Taylor as his African American maid, Lilly, caught in the same currents. Brand said the show’s inspiration was a scene in
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
in which Atticus Finch asks his black housekeeper to stay at his house while he attends to business: “I thought, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be interesting to see it from her point of view.’”
    Brand had admired
Almost Grown
, so when James Garner sang David Chase’s praises one day over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air, he and Falsey brought him in for a meeting.
    “He was David,” Brand said. “You know, not the most cheery person you can meet. When he left, we looked at each other and one of us said, ‘He’s an odd duck, man. But he’s a really talented writer.’ So we hired him. Frankly, we didn’t give a shit about his personality.”
    Henry Bromell and Hall rounded out the small writing staff, though Chase emerged as the star. “I remember we each went off to write our first scripts and then passed them around,” said Bromell. “Mine was pretty good. I remember reading Barbara’s and thinking it was really good. But David’s . . . David’s was like Chekhov.”
    In “The Hat,” which became the second episode of
I’ll Fly Away
’s first season, Lilly retrieves and fixes a cowboy hat that her young white charge, John Morgan, has lost out a car window. Before she can return it, though, Lilly’s daughter falls in love with the hat, forcing Lilly to pry it away from her to give it back. In the final scene, as Chase wrote it, John Morgan cavalierly discards the hat again.
    “It said everything,” said Bromell. “About the two families. About money. About power. About how Lilly couldn’t say ‘Fuck you’ to her boss. I said, ‘David, that’s really good. In any medium.’ And he said, ‘Eh. I don’t know.’”
    Brand said, “If you came to see David in his office, he’d kind of look at you like you were trying to pick his pocket. You’d