Man of the House The United States of Television: America in Primetime

This programme contains some strong language

It's a Thursday evening in the United States of Television.

The soap stars and the news anchors have come and gone.

The chat-show sofa-kings are coming up - but that's later.

Now, it's primetime in America.

Even in this age of hash-tags and likes, primetime is still

at the centre of small-screen life for nearly 300 million Americans.

It can be drama or comedy, sitcom or serial,

live action or cartoon.

Or even one of those live-action cartoons,

known as reality shows. But whatever's on, primetime remains

a vital piece of cultural real estate,

as potent an idea as Hollywood,

Broadway, The Billboard Hot 100 or the Great American Novel.

We know the products of primetime as those

US imports that, since the days of I Love Lucy,

have added spice to our home-grown schedules.

Forged by the commercial priorities of sponsors and advertisers,

moulded by the social attitudes of their times,

crafted by the aspirations of their creators,

and powered by the charisma of their stars,

these shows have helped us to imagine

the kind of place that America is.

But before they reach our screens, these shows have had to prove

themselves in the most competitive television

marketplace in the world. A focus group the size

of a continent, and not just for a year or two or a score of episodes.

For a successful primetime show,

episodes can number in the hundreds, played out over a decade or more,

a scale of creativity unimaginable in any other country.

Over the next four weeks, we're going to be diving deep into

the world of primetime, from the three channel, black and white 1950s

to the more colourful choices on offer

in today's multichannel universe.

We're going to discover what makes primetime tick,

and we're going to start with one of its most iconic figures.

You know the one - he comes home every evening,

goes through the front door, takes off his hat and says...

Hi, honey, I'm home.

I'll be right there!

Television is most certainly here to stay.

He doesn't need much more than his couch and his television

and some potato chips and the ball game on.

He's a man surrounded by children who just wants to take a nap.

He's where the buck stops.

He wants to be happy at work,

and when he comes home he wants his wife to want to have sex with him.

He goes out, every day, earns a living, comes home.

He's struggling just to keep his head above water

in the world of relevance.

He's a rotten husband in every respect, except the occasional

ability he has to follow simple commands.

He just wishes he could get a little bit of quiet once in a while.

They used to always have a guy on Ed Sullivan,

he seemed like he was on every week, the guy that spun the plates.

All that plate spinning and

inevitably plates start dropping. Modern living is crazy like that.

Ten more minutes on the meatloaf.

Or crazy like this.

-Hello, there.

-Ben, Sarah, dinner!

-Taste.

-Mmm.

-Potato salad.

Meet Bill Hendrickson, husband of three,

father of nine, a polygamist and a Mormon fundamentalist.

Just your regular primetime family guy, in other words.

A guy trying to be married to three women and to try to

satisfy their emotional and physical needs and raising

children and trying to have a career and trying to support everybody.

It starts getting kind of stressful.

You know, coming in the door, and saying, "Honeys, I'm home,"

It's a little bit like Father Knows Best on acid.

It just becomes an endurance contest,

trying to keep all this together.

-HE SIGHS

-It feels like

everything is spinning out of control.

I don't think anybody has an easy life these days, I really don't.

I think we're longing kind of for a simpler, uncomplicated,

more innocent time in this country.

We've gone off the tracks.

Primetime masculinity used to be a lot simpler.

I'm home!

I'm home.

'50s television, I think, made me feel good.

Well, hello, dear!

I think that depiction of American dads from the '50s, I think

most of what was depicted on television in the '50s has

-nothing to do with reality at all.

-HE LAUGHS

It may not have had a lot to do with what was happening

really in homes around the United States.

-Hi, honey. I'm home.

-I'll be right there.

Well, well, well.

How are the most wonderful children in the whole world?

Everybody knows nobody lives like that.

Everybody knows there's no families like that.

But no matter what was happening in homes around the United States,

they were watching those shows.

Literally they had a show called Father Knows Best.

And the father was the be-all,

end-all god of the household.

And he was the one that you took your problems to

and would always have this wise solution to a problem.

Kathy, remember yesterday when it rained all day

and you wanted to go outside and play

but you couldn't leave the house, remember how unhappy you were?

Well imagine Mr Quigley being locked up like that,

all the rest of his life, just like in prison.

Daddy?

Yes, kitten?

Open the window.

The great shows of the '50s defined the classic gender models.

They were like the television bible of how your family was meant to be.

But when people were in your living room, you thought,

maybe that's the way all people are or should be.

And I know I've had a lot of people who had the feeling that

perhaps they were deprived.

I didn't have the picket fence. Or, you know, for me

it was being gay. I didn't fit into that perfect son mould.

Leave It To Beaver was situation comedy.

There were no families like that.

All families had traumas, they had problems dealing with each other.

People say its candy coated, it's not real,

but it speaks to something in human beings.

The United States is taking initial steps tonight to neutralize Cuba...

..risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even

the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.

But neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.

You think about what this country was going through

in terms of the Cold War, in terms of the Cuban missile crisis.

Tony knows that the bomb can explode any time of the year, day or night.

He's ready for it. Duck and Cover!

You can understand why TV would provide comfort food.

All right, now just simmer down, now just take it easy.

Reel her in nice and easy. Come on, that's a boy.

Hey! You got a nice one!

Andy Griffith used to say, openly,

even though the show was ostensibly set in the '60s,

this was the small town southern America of his youth, the '40s.

So it was already nostalgic when we were doing it.

They did make me feel safe.

The father did always know best.

And the mom was always home.

Bye, Mr Quigley, come back and visit.

But alongside all the wise husbands

and their impossibly perfect families, there were some

more subversive hints about the true nature of homodomesticus.

Men run this world, Alice!

Men! They're responsible for the shape the world's in. Men!

Well, I'm sure glad to hear one of you admit it!

Bus driver Ralph Kramden is primetime's original bad

man-about-the-house. A bully. A blow-hard.

A wife-baiter and a mother-in-law hater. The Honeymooners

lasted for just one season 39 classic episodes.

But it lives on and on in the after life of syndicated repeats.

It also lives on in every small-screen shirker,

tyrant and slob who came after. Archie Bunker, Homer Simpson,

Tony Soprano, all of them carry the Kramden chromosome.

When I was a kid,

my family used to go to my grandmother's house in Newark.

And my grandfather would hold forth in Italian.

No-one knew what he was talking about.

My grandmother was not allowed to speak.

And when it was over, we would go upstairs to my Uncle Lenny's house.

And we would watch The Honeymooners. And I just...

The strange thing about it was, was that the Kramden apartment

was kind of like my Uncle Lenny's apartment.

Now look, let's get something straight right now,

right here and now.

A man's home is just like a ship.

And on this ship, I am the captain!

And it was all, in a way, a continuation, because

there's Ralph Kramden bellowing and carrying on and behaving like a

big infant, just like my grandfather had been doing moments before.

Bang, zoom.

If you look at The Honeymooner's,

we loved Ralph BECAUSE he was such a mope, a dope,

you know, couldn't have screwed up more!

There's an early episode where Ralph

finds a suitcase full of counterfeit money

and immediately goes on a spending spree.

And that's exactly the kind of thing that Homer would do.

Hamina, hamina, hamina!

I can't understand a world you're saying, Ralph!

-Hamina, hamina, hamina, ma, ma, ma!

-What are you getting excited for?

-Hamina, hamina, hamina, ma, ma, ma!

-Hamina, ma, ma, ma!

Ralph Kramden resonates through all TV husbands,

only because he's the most raw form of that guy.

It's so lasting and so memorable and there were only 39 episodes.

A lot of people don't even realise that.

You can watch that show with the sound off and you're laughing.

You know, Ralph Kramden was always with the why me?

Tell me, Norton, why me?

How could you do such a terrible thing?!

How could I?! How can you think so little of our relationship!

Charting a course between the schmaltz of Father Knows Best

and the angst of The Honeymooners, came a sitcom that verged on the

autobiographical. The Dick Van Dyke Show could have been subtitled

Confessions of a TV Writer.

A lot of television at the time was battle of the sexes,

and that bothered me.

Husband against wife, always fighting.

I mean Lucy, they had no relationship you would want

to live in, and by the way, they didn't, those two people broke up.

Laura and Rob had the relationship my wife and I did,

we agreed about most things.

That, I think, came through. People realised he respected his wife,

even though they argued about certain things.

The situations were taken

from real life, and from my father's real life,

in his working, you know for Sid Caesar and working

on a variety show.

Rob Petrie was me.

He would work on weekends, many times in his den.

He wrote like 60 out of the first 90 episodes, by himself,

sitting in that room, writing.

On days when all of a sudden the typewriter would stop clacking,

he would come into my room.

And I was a young kid, and he would say,

"Anything new in your life lately? Anything hap..."

I knew he was trying to find anything to mine for the show.

The only thing that felt unreal was the fact that we were

sleeping in twin beds.

-Good night.

-Night.

If you ARE in the same bed, at least one foot has to be on the floor!

They gave me every reason in the world. "People don't make love.

"People don't screw," they said, I think.

Maybe they don't! Anyway, there was no winning that. I couldn't win that.

We couldn't say pregnant! We actually, we got in the habit,

of writing something really obnoxious into the script,

a red herring, and then fight them to the death over it, and finally

give in, and then whatever we wanted to slip through we got through.

-Where is Rich?

-He's in the bathtub, why?

Well, I didn't want him popping in on us suddenly.

Oh, what did you have in mind?

I didn't do the show to push any boundaries or anything.

I just did a show based on what I felt about situation comedy,

about husbands and wives.

And I was told later that I pushed boundaries.

A lot of things changed in the 1960s.

It's important to remember back, as we look at our culture today

and we believe that our culture is fragmented and torn apart,

and that we're in the midst of a culture war,

that in 1968, there were a lot of people who thought

we were going to have a civil war.

And we were killing people, you know, like Bobby Kennedy

and Martin Luther King.

Things were pretty bad by the end of the 1960s.

And America was fractured in many ways, and going through

a kind of a birth pang of a different consciousness, frankly.

You saw marriages breaking up all over the place

and people trying drugs and the whole sexual revolution

and all kinds of things happening by the end of the 1960s.

When we started seeing the rise of the counterculture

or the rise of civil rights or the rise of feminism

or the rise of these other points of view, the straight down,

patriarchal, father knows best idea wasn't really holding water anymore.

And when you have people getting assassinated

and all of these things that are entering

into the consciousness, you pave the way for kind of alternative views.

Maybe it was inevitable, but I give Norman Lear

a lot of credit for sort of walking right in the middle of that.

Isn't anybody else interested in upholding standards?!

Our world is coming crumbling down.

The coons are coming.

All In The Family, which premiered in 1971,

was created by Norman Lear, but British audiences will have

no difficulty in recognising where Archie Bunker comes from.

You said he was born in Manchester,

well he ain't a proper blackie then, is he?!

The ones I'm talking about are your proper blacks! The ones

that was born in the jungle, your natives.

Don't tell me they're educated! Half of them

are still eating each other!

Alf Garnett had been giving offence on the BBC for more

than five years, before producer Norman Lear persuaded CBS

to grow their very own blue-collar bigot.

Compared with Alf, Archie was a bit of a pussy-cat,

but his views on race, sex and politics were bracing

compared to the warm-bath liberalism the networks liked to swim in.

In fact Archie Bunker was deemed to be so shocking

for American audiences he came with a health warning.

The show came on on a Tuesday night with the big disclaimer,

not just because of the sex, but also

the political and racial overtones to the show.

And there was a big disclaimer saying, basically,

"Don't watch this show.

"We know we're putting it on, but we'd really rather you didn't

"watch it, so we don't want to have anything to do with it."

-Mom!

-Gloria, you married the laziest white man I ever seen.

All right, all right.

My father called me the laziest white kid he ever met

and I would scream at him that he

was putting down a race of people just to call me lazy.

Implying that the blacks are even lazier!

Oh, now, wait a minute, meathead. You said that, not me.

I never said your black beauties was lazy.

It's just their systems is geared a little slower than the rest of us.

That's not what I'm doing, he would scream back,

and you're the DUMBEST white kid I ever met.

I never said a guy who wears glasses was a queer.

A guy who wears glasses is a four eyes, a guy who's a fag is a queer!

Archie Bunker, he was constantly losing control of his house.

He thought he had it under control.

But the rules kept changing every single day.

And he could not accept that.

And that was kinda the fun of seeing him

insisting that he was the king of his castle, not realising

it wasn't even a castle anymore, it had been rezoned as something else.

Why didn't Lionel's father come over here?!

-You don't want to know the answer to that.

-Yes, I do!

All right. He said he ain't never stepped into a honky's household

and he ain't about to start at the bottom of the heap!

He just was very suspicious. And everybody was out to work

some kind of a scam, you know what I mean?

Black people, white people, handicapped people,

gay people, Jews, Muslims,

everybody's workin' some angle.

There were around 200 million people in America.

And 45 million of them every week watched

All in the Family. That's almost a fourth of the country.

So, it created this kind of national dialogue that doesn't exist

now from any television show.

The fact that the show had been successful,

freed us to let these people be themselves.

You know, so we were able to write them from inside out not outside in.

Hold it. Hold it. Hold it! What are you doing here?

-What?

-What about the other foot?

-There ain't no sock on it.

-I'll get to it.

He stopped me in rehearsal and said, "What are you doing?"

I said, "What do you mean, what am I doing?"

Don't you know that the whole world puts on a sock

and a sock and a shoe and a shoe?!

We got into this improvised discussion about it.

I like to take care of one foot at a time!

The directors and writers were writing it down and taking it.

That's the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life.

I mean, that had nothing to do with anything that was

going on in the time. That's just human, that's just human behaviour.

It still holds up, because that's just rich character stuff.

I'm a serious person, I take life seriously,

I see the comedy in it, I see the foolishness of the human condition.

I delight in it and I've used it.

I don't think the audience missed the point that these people

loved one another.

First of all, Archie's reaction to Gloria having a miscarriage.

Gloria lost the baby.

What are you talking about, what do you mean by that?!

But the doctor says she's going to be fine.

When he found she lost it, that scene...

Oh, gee.

I could cry thinking about it now, all these years later.

I think that's what was appealing about him,

was that dichotomy of these terrible things

he would say and this kind of sad, sweet person underneath

who again was just trying to figure out what was going on in the world.

The getting puffed up and getting the air sucked out of you, it's just

so tragic and touching and funny and sad and it's just so human.

It's difficult being a human being, and they showed that.

The next important variation on the manhood theme was everything

Archie Bunker was not - successful, middle-class,

professional and black.

But it wasn't just the colour of his skin that set

Dr Heathcliff Huxtable apart from the other sitcom males of the '80s,

it was an attitude that hadn't been heard in primetime

since the glory days of the 1950s.

Television comedy was born looking at nuclear families,

and yet even in the early '80s,

the few situation comedies that were about families, the dads were

kind of weak and bumbling or fairly politically correct.

And along comes Bill Cosby,

with a get-outta-my-way,

I-have-a-point-of-view attitude.

Son, your mother asked me to come up here and kill you.

There was something in the zeitgeist that allowed kids

on television to be portrayed as being really quite strongly defiant.

The night we taped the pilot for The Cosby Show I was

sitting in the audience and there is a scene where Theo makes

a speech about just being regular people.

So what you are saying is, your mother and I shouldn't care if

you get Ds because you don't need good grades to be regular people?

Right!

You're a doctor, she's a lawyer, it's not me, I'm just a regular guy.

Maybe you can just accept who I am and love me anyway...

..because I'm your son.

APPLAUSE

The audience clapped because they were somewhat conditioned to

clapping for a boy that stands up to his father.

Theo. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.

It's no wonder you get Ds in everything!

I felt in the audience, rolling through the audience,

this roar of approval.

Now, I'm telling you, you are going to try as hard as you can.

And you are going to do it because I said so!

I am your father. I brought you in this world and I'll take you out!

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

And it was thunder.

Oh, my God, the parents have taken back the house.

Finally, a dad who had some balls.

I mean, The Cosby Show's an example of father knows best, you know?

He knows best.

Dad has spoken.

Bill Cosby made it seem effortless, but as the go-go '80s gave way

to the uncertain '90s, vulnerability began to eclipse certainty.

For the baby boomers who'd never had it so good,

it turned out to be Dark Night Of The Soul time.

The theme that cuts across all of American male life,

is not living up to some standard.

So much of the image of masculinity in our generation took place

in the shadow of feminism.

Well, we thought, what would happen if father didn't know best?

What would happen if father actually was ambivalent?

It's just...

..that I have been so angry,

and I don't know, embarrassed,

because I feel like a two-year-old.

There are a lot of people to this day,

and I include members of my own family, who look upon that

kind of introspection as absolutely pointless.

It made a lot of people uncomfortable to see

this in a public sphere, on television.

They live in a house and they have food on the table and jobs,

and just shut the fuck up and get on with it.

We could have called the show Ambivalence

because it was an exploration of the fact that you can have

different feelings about the same thing.

I don't see what it is that's wrong!

What is it exactly that you're upset about?!

You're upset because your business is doing well

and you have to rent a space so you can film a commercial?!

At the very beginning, the network was very concerned,

and they would call and say,

"Well, don't you think these storylines are too depressing?"

And we would say, "Yes."

It's not a lawyer. It's not a doctor.

You mean the episodes are just going to be about their lives? What does that mean?!

Mostly what they were upset about is that the shows were

so difficult to promote.

Tonight on Thirtysomething, Michael and Hope try to get a babysitter.

HE LAUGHS

The notion that anybody watched, or that anybody paid attention,

or that then, it began to be talked about in the way it was

talked about was an utter shock to us.

The truth was finally out. Men weren't just weak,

they were pretty useless too...

HE SCREAMS

Being a man in today's society means having to defend yourself a lot.

And you're sort of fair game.

-But YOU, sir, are a baboon!

-HE GASPS

It's not really fashionable to be a man these days.

And in some sense, there's the misconception

that men run the world.

And in reality, nobody runs the world.

Lisa, tell your father.

Mr Bergstrom left today.

-Oh?

-He's gone, forever.

And?

-I didn't think you'd understand.

-Hey!

Just because I don't CARE, doesn't mean I don't understand.

If Ward Cleaver and Cliff Huxtable are the ideal fathers,

I would call Homer a catastrophic father.

It never occurs to him that his kids should come first in anything.

Look, Homer, Lisa's taking her first steps.

-Are you taping it?

-Yes.

I'll watch it later.

Homer's maybe worse than my father was.

I've always had this theory that people really want

the mother in the family to be stable and not a buffoon.

But the father, you can really get away with a lot.

I think on some level, we like to be on a couch being

selfish lugs, selfish, pleasure-seeking lugs.

It's not a horrible credo.

I mean, somebody should be able to start a cult with that.

Are you hungry senor navel? Si!

All right, here you go, buddy.

Ray Barone's an exaggerated version of me or any other guy.

And Homer Simpson's a super

exaggerated version of Ray Barone.

Is Ray TOO stupid in this scene?

Well he's not Homer Simpson, we would say.

It doesn't matter if you laugh or not,

I'm just happy to be out of the house, I'll be honest with you.

It was finally when I got Letterman, I did my first Letterman.

David Letterman said, there should be a show for this guy.

They set about looking for writers to create a show for him.

And I met Phil Rosenthal.

And I said tell me about yourself.

And he said, "well, I come from Queens."

"I have twin boys, a daughter, a brother who was a cop."

"My parents live close by, and they're always bothering me,

"and my brother's a police sergeant, he's always jealous of me.

"In fact he saw an award I won for stand-up and he said,

"'it never ends for Raymond, he said, everybody loves Raymond.'

"And I said, 'Well, there doesn't seem like

"'there's anything there we can use.'"

It's a pretty simple premise,

a guy lives across the street with his family from his parents.

What happened?

Grandma and Grandpa stopped by.

That tension of trying to get away from his family

while at the same time loving his family, is something

that I think a lot of men can relate to.

Maybe if you were around a little more, Michael could cut paper.

A-ha! I knew it was right there, under the surface.

So I should go to work AND raise the kids.

It should be all me! Yeah! And what do you do all day?

I'm sorry!

When I would get the scripts and read them,

it was crazy the way they were immediately reflecting what

was going on at that moment in my life and in my marriage.

Whenever we were stuck, I'd tell the writers, "Go home,

"get in a fight with your wife and come back and tell me about it."

And that's what they did. And one of our writers, Steve Skrovan,

he said, his wife could tell in the middle of a fight.

He'd get that look in his eyes like...

And she'd go, "This is not for the show!"

I wrote a show called Tissues which begins with him

wanting more control over decision-making in the household,

and ends with him lighting the kitchen on fire.

Last week I sent you for a simple garden hose,

you came home with that tiny thing, it's totally useless!

What?! That's a good hose!

It's two feet long! The water doesn't even reach the plants!

You squirt it over there, you use your thumb! That's what people do!

He finally takes control and does the grocery shopping,

and brings home these moisturised Kleenex,

and everybody starts giving him grief about it.

She can't help but point out "Well,

"those aren't the ones that we normally buy, but it's fine!"

He overreacts and starts to make dinner for himself

while putting the tissues near the stove, which catch on fire.

And Deborah comes in with the fire extinguisher,

which is kind of like just this sort of phallic extension of her.

She sprays the fire.

I mean, she even like takes over this, you know,

this man thing and saves the day.

So, once again, he has no power.

In this day and age, the man being in control of everything,

and the decision maker and the rock, is really hard to come by.

Life has changed.

Family sitcoms bring up the best issues in life.

Because they're issues you HAVE to deal with.

You didn't CHOOSE your family. You GOT your family.

Yeah, my sister's on drugs. That's OK.

Some of your family members are messed up too.

What am I supposed to do?

Allow these three kids to go to the state, or some foster home,

or some white couple?

Now, hold on. This ain't about race. It's not about race.

I just don't want to hear them talking all proper like that, you know what I'm saying?

Hey, kids. It's your uncle Bernie!

AHHHHH!

What the hell was that?!

The whole idea of the show. I said, "This is real simple.

The show is Bernie Mac's taking care of these kids. He sees the kids as terrorists.

Bernie Mac says, "I do not negotiate with terrorists."

No, boy. Don't flush it!

HE FLUSHES AHHHH!

The Bernie Mac Show was appealing because he was so frank

and he was... His emotions were

so nakedly laid out there, that your heart just kind of went out to him.

You keep on talking to me with that attitude, little girl,

I may not BE your daddy, but I'll whoop your ass just LIKE your daddy.

And you'll go to jail like you was my daddy too!

HE BANGS THE DOOR

SHE BANGS BACK

I always felt the theme of the show wasn't how hard it is to

raise kids, but really, the heartache of raising kids.

The emotional, simple taking care of kids

was enough to just overwhelm Bernie

and his world of freedom that he had to give up to do this thing.

Something is lost for men.

# They party's over... #

It's reflected very interestingly on television a lot.

# It's time to call it a day... #

Not that I would change the way things have

gone for women at all in this country, but something has been

lost for men in terms of what they think their place is.

It's very complicated to be a man today.

You can't just come in and read the paper,

because there's too much to do.

Who's supposed to do what?

It's shared responsibility. Everybody's working.

I'm still expected to work very hard as a father and be a great provider.

We're expected to participate in a completely

different way than our fathers did.

But at the same time, I'm expected to be there for every practice

and every soccer game.

And I'm expected to come home and clean up the kitchen.

Everything is changing and we're on shaky ground, all of us.

Not even an alternative lifestyle can deliver the contemporary

primetime male from the uncertainties of his role.

Oh, Cam!

-Oh, my God, do you love it?

-Yes!

What the hell is that?

I had Andre do it while we were gone.

Is that us, with wings?

We're floating above her, always there to protect her.

Well THAT'S reassuring, right, Lily?

We tore you away from everything you know but don't worry,

things are normal here, your fathers are floating fairies!

We wanted to have sort of a gay couple that would read to America

as being like THEIR mom and dad.

-In many ways, they're a very traditional couple...

-I'm home!

..Cam and Mitchell.

Mitchell goes to work. Cam is a stay at home parent.

But there are a lot of gay couples that are like that.

I think maybe on the page you could say that Mitchell is the father

and Cameron is the mother if you had to, like, classify them.

But that is completely putting them in boxes that they don't deserve to be in.

-Get in your car and drive away.

-Is there a problem here?

What the hell are you?

I'm the ass-kicking clown that will twist you like a balloon animal.

I will beat your head against this bumper until the airbags deploy.

SO apologise to my boyfriend RIGHT NOW!

-Apologise? Boyfriend?!

-APOLOGISE!

OK. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Cameron will change a diaper just as quickly as he'll kick your butt,

if he has to.

When we went first in front of the press, there was

almost nothing written about, "Oh, it's a gay couple."

It was, "Oh, they're adopting this baby

"and does the father accept the baby?"

You never know if we're a product

of tastes of the television audience

or are we in someway shaping the tastes or direction of television.

That's a tough one.

Utility poles are used to carry the coaxial cable to the homes

in the community,

and connected to the antenna leads of the home owners television set.

With a notional audience of 300 million to please,

and with wary advertisers

and their billion-dollar brands to keep sweet, American networks

are in the super-tanker league when it comes to changing direction.

But alongside these lumbering giants swim the small fry of cable TV.

Originally designed to deliver a clear TV signal to rural America,

cable channels began to get into original programming

in a big way in the 1990s.

Supported by subscription rather than advertising dollars, they were

free to probe the darker side of the American male and never more so

than in a drama that brought a whole new meaning

to the phrase family values.

-The Sopranos.

-The Sopranos.

-I loved the Sopranos.

-The Sopranos.

-Tony Soprano.

-The Sopranos.

-The Sopranos.

-Yeah, I loved it. Loved it.

I started watching The Sopranos at a time

when a situation comedy I had done for ABC had been cancelled.

When it got cancelled I thought, "I hate television, television sucks,

"you can't do anything in television," and then I started

watching The Sopranos, which sort of kind of changed my idea, along

with a lot of people I believe, in terms of what television could be.

The original conceptual joke of the Sopranos was...

-Mr Soprano?

-Yeah.

..there was so much selfishness and me-firstism in America,

it was making a mobster sick,

the guy who actually invented me first.

It was even too much for him.

Any thoughts at all on why you blacked out?

I don't know. Stress, maybe.

The Sopranos tells the story of an Italian American mob family.

But when David Chase sat down to write it,

he wasn't thinking Vito Corleone,

he was thinking Ralph Kramden, the godfather of all

dysfunctional primetime males.

I knew when I was writing the pilot,

and even later on, that there were Kramden-esque aspects to Tony.

Striding around the table bellowing, you know.

He was filled with self-pity.

Everyone in that show was filled with self-pity.

You think my life's a fucking picnic?!

Oh, poor you.

Oh, poor you!

Sucks to be you.

You could watch that show just as a family drama

and take all the mob stuff out of it, and it would be as interesting.

People would say, "So, you know, you're in this mob show," and

I never thought of it as a mob show.

I thought of it as, you know, about a family,

or about a man and his family.

But what the mob stuff does is it adds that element of urgency

and life and death.

And people always get caught up in the mob part of it.

But the heart of Tony Soprano was your basic, you know,

family man going through these problems.

To me, it was about a guy going about his day.

And his day was waking up, having breakfast with his family,

going to work, eating, eating, more eating, some more eating

-and then going to bed.

-Remember the first time I came here,

I said the kind of man I admire is Gary Cooper.

The strong, silent type.

And how all Americans, all they're doing is crying

and confessing and complaining, a bunch of fucking pussies.

Fuck 'em. And now I'm one of 'em, a patient!

I liked the characters, I liked the tension, the thing

that at any moment everything can go wrong, and you worry.

And it's a draw, it pulls you in.

Those people were murderers, philanderers, cheaters and bores.

And we loved them, we loved them all, we wanted to tune in each week,

we watched biting our finger nails wondering what was going to happen.

-HE GASPS Carm.

-What?

Ms Soprano, come on in.

We'd done three episodes. And this is the truth, I was already bored.

It had bothered me that he hadn't killed anybody.

One of the first and only times that HBO got a little freaked out.

Oh, my God!

Tony and Meadow went to look at colleges,

and Tony whacked that guy.

-Tony?

-Yeah, look, I'll call you back from the motel.

And it was the first time that HBO said, "Wait a minute.

"This might just be going too far."

They said to me, you've created like the most dynamic,

game-changing character, in the last 20 years of television

and you're going to kill him right now.

Good morning, rat.

I said, "If he doesn't kill that guy, he's ruined."

I still like him.

How did they do that?

You just look at it going, "My God, the things I assumed

"about what television had to be,

"maybe aren't necessarily true."

It seemed to me that in an hour of dramatic television you

didn't see human beings the way they appear in life.

I couldn't stand that.

People in TV, it seemed, always said exactly what was on their mind.

Especially in a family situation. But people don't.

We all know that, we've all been to Thanksgiving dinner.

I would say 98% of what Tony said or Christopher

or Pauly or any of them, was not the truth.

If Tony says yes, he means no. If he says no, he means yes.

If Tony says, "No, I'm in a good mood," you know

somebody's going to go down in about three or four seconds.

All the stated emotions are fake.

For a writer, for certain kinds of writers, I guess, that's fun.

Tony was looking for something bigger. He was looking for meaning.

And he wasn't finding it.

Tony Soprano is not just feeling the loss of control of his home,

and his family.

He's representative of...

us all feeling like we've lost control of the entire world.

It's always what YOU think, isn't it? It's never how I feel.

Oh, poor you.

Into the territory opened up by Tony Soprano stepped a very

different kind of role model. Suave, articulate, good looking

and super-cool. An alpha-male from a different era

when being a man was as simple as, "Honey, I'm home."

But of course on primetime today, nothing's simple anymore.

There's a shot of the ceiling with the fly trapped in the light.

And that's been analysed as like, Don has this creative problem

and he's like a fly trapped in a light.

That's not what I wanted.

I wanted to say was, "There's no period here.

"We still live in those dropped ceilings, the lights look

"exactly like that, and the fly is not from 1960, it's just a fly."

Mad Men is about an advertising agency in the early 1960s

and a kind of archetypical American hero, a person with

a completely invented identity who was succeeding in this world.

This man is in a panic inside and he is falling and scared

and he is out of control.

But he has the appearance of ultimate confidence.

My first job, I was in-house at a fur company.

With this old pro copyrighter, Greek, named Teddy.

And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is new.

My original interest in this character of Don Draper was

based on people like Lee Iacocca and Sam Walton and Bill Clinton.

Dick, it's me.

It's Adam,

your little brother.

It's Don.

And their ability to start in one place, completely hide that

childhood that was filled with shame, and invent a person.

That's the American dream.

He is, at his foundation, lying about who he is.

And so that affects his day-to-day existence

and yet he needs to, for his own wellbeing,

not just personally, but professionally, represent this

very confident, very forthright, very strong-willed person.

But as we see, his actual self is very much the opposite of that.

Teddy told me that in Greek,

nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound.

It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.

It really for the first time explored that time period

in a very honest way.

And has shown it in a gritty way, in a sad way,

and has really shown that it wasn't all perfect.

One of the things I love about Don Draper is the tension that

exists between what he knows he should be and his need to sort

of, like, just really actively, you know, shit all over that.

Early in the first season, he's out there putting together

the playhouse for his daughter's birthday.

But he doesn't feel connected.

He drinks a bunch of beers in the garage, he sits and smokes

and drinks and then he goes to get the cake and doesn't come back.

So it's a man who can't live in his own house,

he can't be the man of his house.

Happiness is a fundamental desire in human beings.

But it has to be earned through a far deeper connection

with your life and the people in your life.

It's called a carousel.

It lets us travel the way a child travels.

Around and around and back home again...

..to a place where we know we are loved.

Good luck at your next meeting.

Pretty much everybody I talk to between the ages of 40 and 60,

at some point in that area,

gets into a mode where they just start thinking about everything.

And where are they and where are they going?

And did I achieve everything yet?

And or maybe was that thing I did five years the best it's ever

going to be for me?

They don't call it the Y chromosome for nothing.

But the answers coming from primetime about the dilemmas

of masculinity have become increasingly extreme.

For every desperate housewife out there, there's a rogue male

who can more than match her in the desperation stakes.

I think when we first meet Walt,

he is a man who is working very hard to keep his dignity.

He's living the life that he feels that we all should live.

Molecules change their bonds.

Elements, they combine and change into compounds.

He's making his best effort to be that person, but is he really?

He's struggling. He has to have two jobs to pay his bills.

He's got a special needs son who needs expensive therapy

that's not covered by insurance.

His wife has an unexpected baby that's due.

He's not the man of respect that he wishes to be.

Hey, Mr White!

Make those tyres shine!

Oh, my God!

Mr White.

Mr White?

Yes?

You understand what I've just said to you?

Yes. Lung cancer. Inoperable.

After that comes resentment, and comes anger and outrage.

Fuck you AND your eyebrows!

That anger that bubbles up in him, leads to this decision.

Yes, yes, it's a stupid idea.

You want to cook crystal meth?

Walt decides to use his knowledge of chemistry to cook crystal meth.

He made this decision, it was a rash decision, it was bold.

The irony is that it requires bold action behind it.

And that bold action developed a sense of empowerment for him.

Adrenaline is pumping in his veins for the first time in two decades.

Even fear is better than feeling nothing.

Breaking Bad I love, because it is about a man who has nothing to lose,

who is just trying to do something good and is digging himself deeper

and deeper into a hole that seems to be leading straight to disaster.

He's breathing oxygen, clearly, and he's feeling things.

That mountain of emotions has been broken.

That's right.

Daddy did that.

The irony is that he's more alive now

since he received that death sentence than he was before.

It's mesmerizing.

The irony of our show is that the one thing that's most

important to Walter White is family.

It's what he is ostensibly doing what he does, for.

He's trying to save his family and yet in the process, he's ruining it.

-Anything you say, dear.

-Atta girl.

The real role of man of the house

has changed in a lot of ways from the '50s.

A lot of us are feeling levels of confusion that we didn't

feel before.

When you want TV to be an antidote for that, you still have

to find ways to reflect it, otherwise,

it feels like complete fantasy.

So suddenly it's not relatable anymore if it's not complex.

It must be very complicated to be a man today.

Because you are expected to be very sensitive, and respectful,

and nurturing, and parental.

But at the same time, you're also still supposed to be,

you know, the aggressor, in a lot of ways.

Television now has taken on the role that movies had,

of actually being more challenging, more psychologically astute.

Because they're not trying to wrap stories up

in the framework of 20 something minutes or 46 minutes

if it's an hour show, instead they're serialising.

That's what television does best,

is to present itself in an elongated form.

TV is becoming literature.

It's a new page in sort of our sense of what we need from a show.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd