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 B

thing? David?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m sure he
could
. He’s a great writer. But I don’t see David having any affinity for this stuff whatsoever,’” said Brand. “Only he would have the answer to why he said yes.”
    Indeed, Chase did. “I did it for the money,” he said. “The only time I ever did that.”
    • • •
    M eanwhile, at HBO there had been a changing of the guard. Michael Fuchs had been fired and Jeff Bewkes, previously the CFO and president, became CEO. With his ascendancy came that of his head of programming, an executive who would have as much influence over the Third Golden Age as any writer or producer: Chris Albrecht.
    In the early 1990s, the comedy troupe the State performed a sketch on MTV called “Doug & Dad.” Michael Showalter played Doug, a teenager intent on rebellion despite being afflicted with a cool father. (Sample dialogue: “I’m Doug. And I’m not going to stop having sex in the parking lot behind the supermarket just ’cause you said that I can do it in my own bed!”) Similarly, the showrunners of the Third Golden Age ritually railed and fumed against the destructive influence of network “suits” in a way that suggested mere habit or a kind of Kabuki ritual, since they generally enjoyed the most simpatico talent-executive relationships in the history of the medium. Albrecht, himself as big a personality as the artists he empowered, would eventually prove to have serious problems and idiosyncrasies of his own. But he, along with his right-hand woman, Carolyn Strauss, set the template for the generation’s enlightened executives.
    The Queens-born Albrecht had started as an aspiring comic. He quickly ended up employing them instead. In 1975, he became manager and eventually part owner of the Improv, New York’s premier comedy club, where he developed a reputation as a smart spotter of talent and a hard partyer with the likes of Robin Williams. Albrecht’s comedy pedigree, like that of Bernie Brillstein of Brillstein-Grey, seems important to his eventual role in the TV revolution. If there is any true, pure auteur art form, rising and falling entirely on the voice of one performer alone onstage, it’s stand-up. The value of those voices could not have been lost on anyone spending night after night in a comedy club, nor could the recognition of how the new, genuine, and unexpected could affect a crowd.
    “The way I learned it in the clubs,” said Albrecht, “was that the highest form of stand-up was someone who had a point of view. Having a point of view was a necessary element of original voices.”
    In 1980, Albrecht became an agent at International Creative Management (ICM), representing Billy Crystal, Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and Eddie Murphy, among others. In 1985, he joined HBO as the West Coast senior vice president for original programming.
    At that time, HBO’s center of gravity was still very much its New York City headquarters—and it would remain so as long as Fuchs, a volcanic figure in his own right (
Esquire
once dubbed him “the most potent, feared and hated man in Hollywood”), was in power. “I think there was an ingrained suspicion from a lot of the New York folks to the people in L.A.: ‘Those
Hollywood
people,’” said Albrecht, who spent the first half of the 1990s developing projects that HBO produced for other outlets, Ray Romano’s sitcom
Everybody Loves Raymond
the most successful among them.
    It was frustrating, too, to those in the network’s fledgling original series department, which Albrecht oversaw. “You were always struggling to make the case that this was the way to keep subscribers,” said Susie Fitzgerald, who worked there at the time. “In order to eke out money, we were saying, ‘We need continuing characters for the audience to fall in love with, so when they move or something, they don’t just disconnect.’”
    Bewkes, who took over from Fuchs in 1995, was a different kind of manager, more willing to