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 Page A

say, ‘David, it’s nothing! I’m just trying to have a conversation!’ He’d be, ‘What? What?’ Just very suspicious. But I really liked him. I thought he was funny, because he was so intense.” Brand paused and smiled. “Though, you know, I always thought Richard Nixon was hysterically funny, too.”
    Chase was proud of his work on
I’ll Fly Away
, but that hardly meant he was happy. His battles with enemies both internal and external continued—the latter camp represented largely by the powers at NBC, on which the series aired. Network commercials for the show featured Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World.” The spots drove Chase crazy.
    “If I’d had a gun, I would’ve killed somebody,” he said, as worked up about it in 2010 as he was in 1992. “What fucking wonderful world? Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi civil rights workers being murdered, housewives from Detroit being gunned down in their car, black kids being lynched? They were trying to sell a series about human pain as a cute story about some cute little boy and his nanny. And it fucking made me want to puke.”
    Hall remembered Chase bringing a woman in the network’s standards and practices office to tears over the number of times the word
nigger
would be allowed in an episode. (“What kind of person does your job?” he asked her over and over.) Another time, a young staffer gushed about how important their work was. “It’s not TV, it’s art,” she said. Chase fixed her with his hooded eyes: “You’re here for two things: selling Buicks and making Americans feel cozy. That’s your job.”
    Some of Chase’s worst opprobrium was reserved for the show being produced right across the hall. “The people who worked on
Northern Exposure
thought they were curing cancer and reinventing drama,” he said. “The premise of the show, as I found out later, was that it was a, quote, ‘nonjudgmental universe.’ Huh? That’s something I couldn’t understand. To me it was so precious, so self-congratulatory. It strained so hard for its whimsy. We’d go to the Emmys every year and they’d get these awards and we’d get nothing. It wasn’t that we really wanted the Emmys, but that show was being celebrated to the hilt and I felt it was a fraud at its core.”
    By the end of 1993, Chase had taken over
Northern Exposure
as showrunner.
    • • •
    T hat bizarre turn of events had been immediately precipitated by the cancellation of
I’ll Fly Away
after just two seasons. PBS subsequently rebroadcast the series, along with a ninety-minute coda,
I’ll Fly Away: Then and Now
—an early intimation of how alternatives to the traditional networks might be better suited for serious storytelling.
    After their meteoric rise, Brand and Falsey’s partnership was faltering. Brand had stayed in day-to-day control of
Northern Exposure
while
Falsey concentrated mainly on
I’ll Fly Away
. While both shows were on the air, Falsey had pushed Brand to start yet another,
Going to Extremes
, a somewhat transparent copy of
Northern Exposure
’s
fish-out-of-water formula, this time about med students on a tropical island. Falsey’s dream was to be the first producer with three shows nominated for an Emmy in the same category, but shortly after the show launched, in September 1992, he began to fall apart. Soon, he would withdraw completely into a decades-long battle with alcoholism, during which he and Brand had no contact for nearly twenty years. Brand, burned out by his partner’s life dramas as well as increasing conflicts with
Northern Exposure
star Rob Morrow over his contract, decided to leave the show after its fourth season
.
    Universal handed the reins to Chase along with husband-and-wife writing partners Andrew Schneider and Diane Frolov. Predictably, given Chase’s feelings and the odd three-headed showrunner structure, things didn’t go well.
Northern Exposure
left the air two seasons later.
    “The studio asked me, ‘Who can run this