The Crusader The United States of Television: America in Primetime

Television is most certainly here to stay.

New eyes, new vision for the world.

'All right, take it easy, just take it easy.'

Primetime is the showcase for the best in American television -

the place where the most popular dramas and sitcoms

are seen by tens of millions of viewers.

It's also the place where America manufactures its fictional heroes

crusaders who seek the truth, protect the innocent

and do the right thing.

But the line that separates the hero from the vigilante,

the lawman from the outlaw, can sometimes be a fine one.

And this ambiguity at the heart of heroism

has inspired some of primetime's most potent shows.

We're drawn to heroic characters,

whether they're more traditional or otherwise,

because there's a fundamental appetite for a saviour.

He's part hero, he's part everyman.

He's definitely one of those people who believes

that if you don't stand for something you fall for anything.

He is that American trope of, "I will not take no for an answer,

"I will do what I think is justifiable."

Part, sort of, righteous do-gooder.

Jack dramatised, in one person, those issues and questions

that the country has been, and continues, to wrestle with.

He was a lone gun, a man with his shotty, you know?

And he took on, you know, whoever he wanted to take on.

You need to open this door, man, 'fore I huff and puff.

He's on the side of the angels without being an angel.

He's not easily broken down into a simple mathematical formula.

And that, after all, is how human beings are.

Dexter is a sociopathic killer,

he had this unquenchable thirst to kill.

And ultimately, Dexter's killing is compelling only because

he can justify why he's killing that person.

How far can you go in fighting evil without becoming evil?

As it turns out, Jack Bauer will always go as far as he has to.

But he always pays a price for that.

It's one horrible decision after another,

is what Jack Bauer's life is about.

I gave him my word that we would protect him.

-I

-didn't.

Curtis, please, don't do this.

'So, he does a lot of very, very difficult things.'

Please.

'He is a dark character.'

But in another way, he's a very pure character.

I can't let this animal live.

GUNSHOT

He will always do what needs to be done for the greater good.

He will always do that.

This is a man who's tortured,

who's fighting inside himself as well as outside himself.

I guess the only advice I can give you is...

..try to make choices that you can live with.

We tried tap into that,

those complications - those emotional complications

and psychological complications

that come along with doing things that normally are forbidden.

Did you torture Mr Haddad?

According to the definition set forth by the Geneva Convention, yes, I did.

We were several episodes into the season when 9/11 happened.

And we asked ourselves,

first of all, is it even appropriate to have a show on this topic on TV,

when the real thing is happening, so tragically and so shockingly?

And second of all, will people watch?

The truth, Senator, is I stopped that attack from happening.

By torturing Mr Haddad.

By doing what I deemed necessary to protect innocent lives.

Jack dramatised, in one person, those issues and questions

that the country has been, and continues, to wrestle with.

When crazy things are happening in the world

or terrible things or shocking things,

one of the ways we make sense out of

it is by telling ourselves stories about it.

Sorry, Ryan, we've got to do this.

I don't think you've seen traditional heroes

go as far as Jack has gone.

All right, there's no way around this, right, Jack?

We don't have any outs here.

Not that I can see.

Jack Bauer has to kill Paul Schulze to stop a bomb from going off.

You can almost say he takes the sins of the community on himself.

He does things that have to be done but no-one else will do,

in order to keep everyone safe.

God forgive me.

Poor old Jack! Things used to be so much simpler.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War,

American TV knew what a hero looked like

and how a hero was supposed to behave.

In America's first age of television,

there were white hats and black hats and few shades of grey in between.

Never fired a gun, or seen the ocean, or been off the ground...

It's an accident of history that television came of age

in 1948, 1949, 1950, just after World War II.

To me, the 15 years after World War II

was a very strange cultural backwash

about what took place in World War II.

And certain things were accepted as a given

that, in fact, needed to be questioned.

One of them had to do with the ideal of male heroism,

the fact that television was overtaken by westerns in the 1950s

and all these guys were these rugged heroes.

Am I breaking the law?

Am I doing something wrong?

Just your being here is wrong.

'I was growing up in the '50s.

'At that point in America, we were feeling so muscular'

after World War II, and that the American way of life

was the only way of life, and the best way of life.

Truth, justice, and the American way.

There were these expectations,

since we had won the war and we had acted heroically and all of that,

that all men were supposed to be heroic.

Kind of, I think, reinforced

what we all believed about America at that point.

That's what a man was.

He was a guy who did the upright thing and stood up

and was brave and strong and knew everything.

But I think most men did not experience that in their lives.

Matt Dillon, John Wayne, you know -

you did what you had to do and you didn't worry about it.

But I don't know how realistic that is.

And that's probably why they were popular,

because we wanted our folk heroes, our TV heroes to be reflective

of our own image of ourselves as a country.

I was a boy during the Second World War.

And pretty much what you saw in the movies was the heroics.

It simply would not be done to show an image

of the day-to-day suffering that goes into it.

They say that we are mired in stalemate.

Seems the only realistic if unsatisfactory conclusion.

But it wasn't just reporters and anchormen

who helped to shape perceptions of the war.

An off-beat sitcom, one of the most popular in the history of primetime,

used a conflict from another time and place - Korea in the 1950s -

to deliver some timeless truths about the real heroics of war.

M*A*S*H is, to me, still a phenomenon.

That in the middle of the Vietnam War,

we would watch a show about another war,

set in Asia, as brutal as Vietnam was.

I was watching M*A*S*H at five or six years old.

And it was all about war and people dying

and I wonder how I interpreted it.

I'll take him first. Put him ahead of him.

Hawkeye didn't want people to die, he tried to keep them from dying.

-Step on it.

-How dare you contradict me!

Hey, hold it, he's a commie, that's North Korean.

-What's he doing ahead of my buddy?

-Dying.

'It was very anti-war,'

but with this character who was like Groucho.

I loved Groucho.

That goon tried to kill us and now you're going to save him?

Yeah, the whole thing's ridiculous, isn't it?

On some level I knew,

"This is someone who's speaking out against hypocrisy

"and that it's wrong to hurt people."

And I assume it just wired my brain

for almost a compassionate way of looking at the world.

That seems kind of...full of crap, but it is true.

When you're watching Mash two times a day

from the time you're like five years old, for ten or 12 years,

what you're soaking in is the humanity of Larry Gelbart

and his way of looking at the world.

When the BBC showed M*A*S*H, they showed it without laughter.

there was no laugh track on it, so I suppose an English audience,

we tended to look at it in a rather more dramatic way.

Some people think he was very liberal.

But he was also a traditional conservative.

I mean, he wanted nothing more than to have people leave him alone

so he could enjoy his martini, you know?

Government should get out of his liquor cabinet.

Oh, this is sensational.

You're my kind of girl, Nancy -

drunk.

There's no better doctor than Hawkeye.

I remember thinking, even him drunk,

I'd rather him be my doctor than somebody sober.

When authority got ridiculous, he reacted to that.

He didn't like the idea that he was sewing them up

so they could be sent back into the sausage mill and get shot up again.

We're really not so far apart.

No, he's got a point. We're all in the same business.

As surgeons we'll sacrifice some tissue to save the whole body,

and you'll sacrifice a few men in order to, er... To, er...

'There was an officer'

that kept taking his soldiers into battle unnecessarily.

So we took out his appendix just to keep him sidelined for a while.

At the rehearsal for this, Mike Farrell said,

"I'm playing a doctor who takes this seriously,

"and I will not operate on a patient

"who doesn't need the operation, that's mutilation."

And we started an argument that lasted about an hour that day.

And at a certain point, we said,

"You know what, this is what we ought to be doing on camera,

"because this is a serious conflict."

Suppose you get him relieved of his command, what about the guy who replaces him?

-He's going to be better than this guy, he's got to be.

-You don't know that for sure! Do you?

I'll take them one at a time, what have I got to lose?

Just your self-respect, that's all.

You're a doctor of medicine. You cut into a healthy body

and you'll hate yourself for the rest of your life.

I hate myself right now.

I hate me, and I hate you, and I hate this whole life here.

And if I can keep that maniac off the line by a simple appendectomy,

I'll be able to hate myself with a clear conscience.

'The ongoing appeal of the show, beyond the great characters,

'was that it sort of stayed in pace'

with the zeitgeist of the country,

and was asking the same questions that we were all asking.

We openly dealt with all the sides of the war.

We were exploring things that were not neat.

There was no right, and there was no wrong.

But it came out of passion and disgust and anger

and upset at being where they were

and going through what they were going through.

And that's, I think, more useful to know

than to see what I saw as a kid,

where, when they would shoot down an enemy plane,

then they'd all laugh and cheer.

There's more interest,

human interest, in looking at the real cost

than there is in just skimming across the surface.

Yeah, I loved Hawkeye.

You know, people fall in love with characters,

people fall in love with shows.

And when that happens,

people then become fierce in their devotion.

I think we all want to believe

that those people that are protecting us

and saving our lives are really...

Are really extraordinary and that they'll be there

when I'm faced with that same problem.

Pick up the New York Times.

It's enough to drive anybody crazy, if you read the first three pages.

I mean, there's so much out of our control.

So, when you are creating an environment,

at least fictionally speaking,

you know, somebody has to be in control of that environment.

Hello, sick people, and their loved ones.

In the interests of saving time

and avoiding a lot of boring chitchat later,

I'm Doctor Gregory House. You can call me Greg.

If you just sort of read the specifications of the character,

the sort of design brief, you would think, you know,

this is a character who's going to be hard to love.

The thing is, though, that I loved him right from the first moment.

Just take a swab and get it tested, OK?

Sorry, already met this month's quota

of useless tests for stubborn idiots.

Would you rather have a doctor

who holds your hand while you die

or who ignores you while you get better?

We should start broad spectrum antibiotics.

Yeah, you might want to add some chicken soup.

It'd be just as useless, but it's got chicken.

This is a very odd and unusual combination

of characteristics and emotions driving this character.

The man's in a coma.

He doesn't mind.

Not only does he not care when people don't like him,

he doesn't care when people like him.

I didn't mean him to be a dislikeable guy,

but he clearly has very, very antisocial qualities.

What drives this guy? I don't think there's a simple answer.

I hate simple answers.

And I rationalised - very effectively to myself,

I'm still convinced of this -

that once I'm able to summarise the character in a brief period of time

then the character's dead.

In some film and television drama, there's a...

Can be a tendency to paint the people in single colours

to assume that the...

The hero is unendingly heroic.

I can't do it.

Nobody I've ever met conforms to that sort of...simplicity.

You son of a bitch!

He's on the side of the angels without being an angel.

He's not easily broken down into a simple mathematical formula.

And that's part of the fun of it, because...

And part of the truth of it as well, because that, after all,

is how human beings are.

I think, ultimately, the only thing drives House

is a search for the truth.

An individual truth, and a broad truth,

and truth about everything.

The thing that rouses him from his slumbers in the morning

and propels him through the day

is the solving of problems.

He wants people to see their own nature.

He wants people to see their own predicament.

I just want to die with a little dignity.

There's no such thing.

Our bodies break down,

sometimes when we're 90, sometimes before we're even born.

But it always happens. And there's never any dignity in it.

I don't care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass. It's always ugly.

Always.

You can live with dignity, you can't die with it.

All heroic deeds require a cost, otherwise they're not really heroic.

There has to be a dragon, there has to be a risk,

there has to be pain.

And he endures that pain and fights that dragon.

He pays that price in lots of different ways

and he pays it for the sake of seeking after this bigger truth.

I don't believe in relative morality.

I do believe there is a truth.

And I do believe there is a right way and a wrong way.

What I don't believe is that it's simple.

There's something still, I find, very exciting about his...

His bravery, his solitariness,

the fact that he is prepared to sort of stride out

into the lonely cosmos without...

Without a partner, without an ally, without a friend, and...take it on.

I find that...

admirable and compelling.

And roll sound.

Who...

..do you work for, you pretty little girl?

I think it's possible that you don't see

as many lone female crusaders because...

..maybe there's a perception that these stories

speak mostly to men.

Not to get all Women's Studies on you,

but maybe the idea of a hero with a straightforward goal

is particularly male.

The female crusader may not have found a home in primetime

as readily as her male counterpart,

but this makes the exceptions to the men-only rule

all the more remarkable. One of the most notable

owes her inspiration to a very British prototype.

The Avengers was a show that I loved.

And, in a way, you can sort of see a little bit of the similarity

between Mulder and Scully and John Steed and Emma Peel.

At the very beginning, not sure many people know this,

but I was meant to walk a few paces behind Mulder,

when we got out of our cars,

when were going up to a house to expose our FBI badges,

I was meant to be a few paces behind him

as he walked up the steps to the house.

You think, "You've got to be kidding me."

That was the antithesis of the character that Chris Carter created,

which was this young woman with incredible chutzpah

and, eventually, over time, it just became natural

that we reached the front door at the same time.

Even though Mulder is really the sort of hero in the show,

it's really Scully's point of view in which the stories are told from.

It's the sceptic's point of view.

It's the rational point of view.

She's a medical doctor. She's a scientist.

She's a forensic pathologist. She's sure of herself.

Her belief about the world of the paranormal

or extraterrestrials, or whatever it was,

it was just... It was not real.

There was no question about it.

You don't honestly believe this is some kind of extraterrestrial?

This is somebody's sick joke.

I'm not crazy, Scully. I have the same doubts you do.

People talk about the '90s and the paranoid '90s.

The fallout from Watergate,

the fallout from the '70s and '80s

was still apparent in the '90s.

And we were still distrusting of our government.

At the base of... Of these two very different,

very disparate characters,

was, you know, ultimately a desire to get to the bottom of something,

to get to the truth of the matter.

We are interested by the Don Quixote characters

who have great passion, great drive to do something.

And against all odds, they proceed toward their goals.

I think that is always going to be interesting to an audience,

whether it was back in the '50s, or the '30s, or...

3,000 years ago, or today, or tomorrow,

or 1,000 years from now.

It's over, Scully.

-But you have to lodge a protest. They can't...

-Yes, they can.

What are you going to do?

I'm...

..not going to give up. I can't give up.

Not as long as the truth is out there.

We saw them, despite their differences,

drawing closer and closer together,

to the point where they were each the only person

that the other could trust.

There was something very romantic

about this platonic - mostly platonic - duo.

I've always said that the secret to The X-Files was simply this -

Mulder loves Scully and Scully loves Mulder.

You know, just the image of seeing them

in their two different apartments on opposite sides of town.

What it did is it developed this longing.

It added to the desire for the two of them

to come closer together in that loneliness.

There's an old saying on Broadway that happiness writes in white ink.

It leaves no trace, in other words.

That's why one of the most successful drama series of all time,

12 seasons in all, wrote in darker colours.

Blacks, greys, and NYPD Blue.

Loneliness is a very compelling element

to a lot of lead characters.

There's not a ton of drama in happiness.

And you see that in life all the time.

You see people who just don't know how to get out of their own way.

There was a wonderful poem by Stanley Kunitz who said,

"At times like ours, the heart breaks and breaks

"and lives by breaking."

And it's not an accident that, over time,

the most compelling character in NYPD Blue

was the one guy who was always trying to connect to life

and always coming up short.

Leon. Hurt me - twice.

This has got to stop, Andy.

-What's got to stop?

-This.

You're getting stiff every afternoon now.

Hey, look, I don't recall

requesting any career counselling session from you.

Sipowicz was a guy who, er... Was a trailblazer

in some very old clothes...

I think it's pretty apparent that he is not your average hero.

..with some very bad habits.

He comes across as such a schnook.

I mean, he's a alcoholic, he's a womaniser, he's...

a racist.

That's not your typical hero.

He's a bigot and he's a slob and he's a drunk.

Well, I'm a bigot and a slob and a drunk,

so it was very easy for me to...write the character.

But, which is to say...

Let me retract so that I'm allowed into my home tonight.

I am capable of imagining myself as a bigot and a slob and a drunk.

I have been all of those things.

But I try not to be them simultaneously

because it's just too busy a world.

Get your hands off me. Get your hands off me!

Let's go somewhere.

David Milch had such a sense of that character,

and such an affinity for him.

I make my living not only hearing what people say

but simultaneously having a sense of what they mean.

Are you saying I queered that guy's tyre?

I'd say "res ipsa loquitur" if I thought you knew what it meant.

Hey! Ipsa this, you pissy little bitch.

Andy Sipowicz is representative of a certain kind of cop.

They're not tolerant of the politics...

of police work.

A little girl was taken from Washington Square Park this morning.

We know you were involved.

I don't know what you're talking about!

You're going to tell me what happened to that little girl.

-I want a lawyer, you can't do this!

-No, this is just us, Ken.

There ain't going to be no lawyer. No court, no wrongful conviction.

Cos you're going to take care of this right here!

He's not, under certain circumstances,

averse to beating a suspect.

And he'll justify it on the grounds

that he never beats a suspect that he doesn't know did the crime.

Cops are asked to shield society

from certain of its most fundamental contradictions.

You know, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

All people are created equal -

we know what that means.

So you going to tell me the truth now?

Or are you going to make me happy?

Tick-tock, Victor, what's it going to be?

I'm missing happy hour.

The truth is - and what a cop is taught is -

you know, if the guy says, "I want a lawyer," you know?

And the cop says, "I always wanted to bang Marilyn Monroe, you know?

"I never got to bang Marilyn Monroe.

"And you ain't gettin' a lawyer."

Now, that isn't what always happens,

but it's been known to happen.

A soul pays the price for that sort of thing.

The exposure to that reality

grinds characters,

you know, like stones.

People were able to recognise, in Sipowicz,

a spirit which spun against the way it drove.

It was the portrayal of a soul very much in conflict with itself.

In his irreconcilable complexities

we came close to experiencing

a character as a member of our family.

In primetime, only the strong survive,

and by virtue of returning season after season, episode after episode,

they only get stronger.

Eternal themes are re-examined

and topical themes are opened up for exploration.

Mainstay characters mature or retire.

Supporting players come to the fore.

New characters are introduced.

And it ain't over till the Nielsen ratings say it's over.

For the creators of these open-ended shows,

the long haul has attractions

that go far beyond the reassurance of a regular paycheque.

I make my living in television,

so take what I say with a grain of salt,

because I'm biased and I admit it.

But I think we are indeed

in a new golden age of television.

I think TV today, pound for pound, storytelling-wise,

is more interesting - there, I say it -

than Hollywood movies.

And I think it's because

television is first and foremost about storytelling.

When you create a TV show,

what you hope is that, by virtue of the writing,

by virtue of the actors you have cast,

or the situations the characters find themselves in

are so interesting, so dramatic and perilous

that you want to keep coming back for more.

TV has been where the great drama is.

It's where you can write characters,

and you can explore them over multiple episodes.

One of the things I love about being able to write on a series,

a long-running series,

as opposed to writing a movie or a play

is that the scope is so much bigger.

In a way, it's superior to film.

I mean, how much can you learn about a character

in two hours of a movie?

It's the difference between a well-written novel

and a well-written short story.

Five years of a bunch of characters

is better than two and a half hours. Why?

You really do have the time to spend with people

and see them actually grow and evolve and change.

We say that television is more novelistic

and it lets us go into those characters in such a deep way.

But, you know... Mildred Pierce...

You weren't deep in that character?

Of course you were.

We used to be deep into movies all the time.

And movies in two hours, and two hours and a half,

told us everything we needed to know about every character in it.

We didn't ask for Casablanca One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six.

We knew about Rick. We knew about Ilsa. End of story.

The big screen is being more and more reserved

for the 3-D spectacle.

Movies have stopped trying to make these kinds of films

because I think TV's doing it better.

I think TV's better than movies.

And, you know, I think we are living in a golden age of TV.

I also love the fact that TV gets produced.

It gets done.

I produced and directed a movie

that I wrote between Six Feet Under and True Blood

and it took about three years.

And I just was sort of baffled by the amount of time it took

because I'd been spoiled by working in TV.

The place in primetime that was once reserved for the cowboy

is now occupied by the cop.

Back in the 1950s, cop shows were simple affairs.

After the crime, the car chase and the confession, it was case closed.

But the modern cop show aims to leave their audiences

with the uneasy feeling that things are rarely that clear cut.

Television has a long history of cop dramas, you know,

going back to Dragnet.

There is a reason why those kinds of shows dominated TV for a long time.

There's a wish-fulfilment factor. In an unpredictable world,

you can turn it on and you can feel pretty comfortable

that Joe Friday is going to handle that situation

in the next half an hour.

You know something, Cop, I think I play the part better than you do.

I'm going to tell you something, mister...

'They want to watch a character who's not going to let them down.

'There was some comfort in watching that.

'And I think that's one of the bigger differences

'between TV of the last 15 to 20 years and TV that preceded it.'

I would say that the TV that preceded it

oftentimes showed its heroes making a choice between right and wrong.

And the audience knew that the choice would be right.

You didn't watch Gunsmoke thinking, "These guys are going to

"make the wrong choice

"and sort of steal some cattle today." You know?

You watched it knowing that they were going to do the right thing.

Must be a hard choice.

To turn against your own kind.

I'd like to know what makes a man do that.

It's far more interesting to put your main character

in a position where he or she has to choose between two wrongs.

Whatever I did, it would've been wrong.

Those are the questions within the shows that get me excited.

It's like you said, Marshall, a man makes his choice.

When you're on the edge, when you're on those ethical boundaries,

what is the right thing to do?

Without setting that table

and without setting that as the model,

you couldn't have shows later on break the model.

I think there's something in the last 15 years going on in this country

where these new kinds of shows

speak to the audience in that way.

There's only so much of that clear-cut, good guy versus bad guy

that you can watch before it all becomes predictable.

For a more sophisticated audience, certainly, people want more.

They want to peel away layers of an onion.

You shot at me!

I'm done!

We were always trying to examine whether pure evil existed,

or can you blame it all on something psychological?

Or is there something much more inherent, much more tribal

about violence and murder?

I like to believe that, and certainly the shows I do,

that character trumps everything.

For me, the process of discovering who that character is,

is you have to go, "OK, how does he or she think,

"what kind of education, lack of education?"

You start here, you go here, what do they believe?

What makes them cry, what makes them laugh?

And then, you go a little lower,

and you go, "Well, who do they want to sleep with?"

And, you know, if you can answer those three pieces of a character,

you pretty much can write him or her after that.

The work itself is the most important thing.

What we do is important.

We speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves.

We were dealing with some characters who were quite interesting,

and were motivated by things

that weren't on the surface

and didn't seem to be kind of archetypes, cop archetypes, you know.

They were moody and suspicious and petulant.

And, you know, and sort of like, very much like real people.

I'll meet you in the garage.

Oh, happy day(!)

Pembleton doesn't play well with others.

He's prickly, you know what I mean, and self-righteous and stuck-up.

He is the kind of most righteous,

you know, blindly righteous character that we have.

Deus nobiscum quis contra.

What's that?

With God on our side, who can stand against us?

'Pembleton's sense of justice evolved over the life of the series.

'He started out'

being there for the dead,

'bringing justice to those who had been murdered.'

'There's a kind of, um...

youthful belief in right and wrong.

And a belief somehow that Pembleton has the power to make things right.

'His need to speak for the dead

'comes out of his own sense of inquiry

'about the meaning of life.'

And so each death is a reflection of his own search.

There's something about the fact

that you believe that you know what's right.

And life is just so complex

that it can't be what you think it is.

It's not simple.

God, please.

I swear I will do anything.

'We were trying to explore...'

Let him live.

..what is the moment where they go, "I can't do this anymore."

I'm done.

"I've seen too much, I know too much,

"I don't want to know any more."

Look, this is not your fault.

Yeah, it's mine. And I'll carry it.

He's so certain about what's right and wrong,

and each and every one of these episodes reveal to him...

more depth about our human journey.

'He had ended up becoming'

the ultimate priest who people went to confession to,

but he could not absolve them,

all he could do was give them prison time.

The fixation on the belief that we're powerful,

that we can do anything. Like, I can keep crime down.

He began to understand that justice is not an absolute,

that it is an imperfect thing.

I can avenge, you know? That I'm doing God's work.

That somehow I'm an instrument of His will on Earth.

Well, I'm too fragile a vessel for that, you know?

It's not possible.

We were very lucky with Homicide,

that David Simon wrote a non-fiction book called

Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets.

Homicide was the show

on which I learned to write television.

And I learned it at the foot of Tom Fontana.

Tom is a playwright.

And the guys working for him

were either playwrights or television writers...

They knew drama.

And what they were trying to do is get to the human condition.

And I really respect the end product.

But Tom's impulse was not journalistic. And mine kind of is.

What I'm interested in

is politics and sociology and economics.

The Wire is an argument about who we've become as a people,

and what we're capable of, and what we're no longer capable of.

That sounds highfalutin, but we were left alone

and given 60 hours of television.

And at that point

it's kind of incumbent on you to have something to say.

You the man with them jumbo sixes?

How many you fuckin' want?

I'll take about three or four, honey.

Damn!

HE LAUGHS

All in the game, yo.

It was a show about the rigged game of modern life.

Omar coming! Omar coming!

Everybody was a participant in something of a fraud,

and Omar seems to recognise this,

and he insists on operating on his own terms, for his own purposes.

He's a guy who robs drug dealers. He's a gunslinger.

He was a lone gun, a man with a shotty, you know?

And he took on, you know...

whoever he wanted to take on.

You'd better open this door, man, 'fore I huff and puff.

Come on now, by the hairs of your chinny-chin-chin.

Omar, you best roll out. We're up in here with a MAC-10.

Oh, I thinks not, Terrell. I thinks not.

And he's the most romanticised character

because he is unbeholden to any institution

in a show that's about people being beholden to institutions.

Whether it was the police department or a drug organisation

or the school system or City Hall,

the institutional imperative triumphed over human dignity

at almost all points.

It's pimps and hos, you know? It's straight-up pimps and hos.

You've either got somebody in the corner, or you're on the corner.

He was like, "You know what, since the game has been rigged

"to take, take, take, take from people, let me take from the game."

So you're my eyeball witness? So why'd you step up on this?

Bird trifling, basically. Killing everyday working man and all.

I mean, don't get it twisted, I do some dirt, too,

but I ain't never put my gun on nobody who wasn't in the game.

A man must have a code.

Oh, no doubt.

He's beholden to nothing, other than Omar, and his own code.

Without a code, he's a sociopath.

"I have not put my gun on anyone who doesn't deserve it.

"If my gun is aimed at you, you're in the game.

"And if you're in the game,

"then we're playing, and you can't complain.

"And your moral code is not superior to mine."

He never robs a civilian,

and he never shoots anybody for whom violence

is not a last resort as well.

He's playing by the code of the West. He's playing fair.

He's playing by the rules such as they are.

'Having a code, having something that you believe in, that you live by.

'Let's be clear, Omar, you know, he killed people.

'Some people may feel he was cleaning up the streets,'

but, you know, murder is murder.

Well, get on with it, motherf...

'We start from the real when we're creating characters -

'that's our rule on all these shows.'

Write to the people who know the event.

Write to the homicide detectives,

write to the corner boys, if you're writing The Wire.

Unfortunately, growing up,

I've seen death in my neighbourhood, growing up in Brooklyn.

You have to desensitise yourself or you won't be able to deal with it.

I remember the last friend that I lost, that got murdered,

I was coming home from the movies and I saw him and his girlfriend -

it was the classic scene.

She's screaming over his body,

he caught a couple in the head and he was laid out.

There's no music playing in the background,

or dramatic music to push the emotion.

He's on the floor, you know - blood, they chalk him out,

they put the yellow tape up and you keep it moving.

The fairy tale of American existence is the transcendent individual.

I mean, going back to our view of our own manifest destiny.

It's the guy who blazes the trail out West, or who vanquishes the bad guy.

There were moments where

we actually used the Western motif of the stand-off

because Omar is of that world.

And in a way, it's as if we placed the myth of the American individual

in the actual America, and then said,

"Let the chips fall where they may."

And for a while he has a pretty good run.

But eventually, what happens has to happen.

He's not living in 1860, you know, Indian territory.

He's living in Baltimore in the 21st century.

I need a pack of Newport. Soft pack.

The way Omar went out, you know,

it goes back to that classic Western saying, "Live by the gun."

I think that if had he done anything different it would have rang false.

-Let me get one of them, too.

-GUNSHOT

CASHIER SCREAMS

What I've tried to do is have violence be abrupt

and uncertain and disturbing.

I have no problem with the depiction of violence,

but I want it to mean something.

You know, the reality of the fact

is that you have 12, 13-year-olds in Baltimore

running around with bodies on their belt.

It's not... It's not fiction.

It's a different America. It's not the America of manifest destiny.

Omar, he's doing all the things that usually triumph in an American story.

He doesn't get to win because few of us do in this world any more.

There's a better streak and more sophisticated streak

in American storytelling

than the good guy beats the bad guy and gets the girl.

This world is no longer kind of so simple, you know? It's changed.

This is my own theory, but I believe there's almost a passivity

that's going on in America right now,

where people actually enjoy seeing a very, very active character

being put into situations. I mean, let's face it.

Everybody's lives - or so many people's lives, I should say -

are kind of consumed by, you know,

Facebook-ing, or Twitter-ing, or whatever they do.

This kind of networking, which really makes you wonder

how much they're actually producing. What are they really creating?

And when you've got a character as compelling as Dexter or Jack Bauer,

or Vic Mackey or Tony Soprano,

who are actually involved in the world

in a very intimate kind of way,

and are making decisions that will impact everybody else,

that's a hell of a lot more active and interesting

than just calling up somebody you met 20 years ago

and you decided that you want to reinvigorate a relationship

that you probably should've forgotten 20 years ago anyway.

In this age without heroes, the antihero is king

and they don't come much more anti than Dexter Morgan,

a forensics expert who is also a serial killer.

His one saving grace is that he only kills other serial killers.

We've come a very long way indeed

from the world of black hats and white hats.

We live in a world that's greyer, less black and white.

There's a value in that

that you don't get

if you're being presented with a pure villain or a pure hero.

Everybody has a shadow self.

everybody lies in bed thinking, "Oh, what if?

"What if I could get my revenge? "What if I could get even?"

We've all thought that,

the difference is we don't act upon that.

Dexter is a character that does act upon that.

His shadow side is pretty significant.

-You'd better be a cop.

-No, forensics.

I don't think Dexter, initially, is targeting criminals

because of some sort of sense of himself as a crusader.

But Dexter could be seen that way -

cleaning up the messes that the justice system leaves behind.

Dexter, in many ways, is Batman.

Can't tell the truth about who he is,

was forged in the death of a parent,

and is channelling his rage and compulsion for good.

The mask he wears is more during his day-to-day life.

He's unmasked when he's doing his thing.

All of the great comic book superheroes

are a throwback to the classics.

They are all very flawed characters. They all have their kryptonite.

They all have been born out of some horrible tragedy.

Watching his mother get chain-sawed into pieces in front of him

when he was basically four or five years old -

from that point on in his life,

how do you make your life make sense?

Dexter recognises this darkness in him,

and instead of taking his own life,

he takes the lives of people

who haven't taken the responsibility for their impulses

in the way he imagines he has.

So he's arguably saving more lives than he's ending and he's also...

..extinguishing the darkest part of himself.

There's a bluntness about the character being

an overt serial killer.

You know, there's no kind of hiding behind that fact.

Dexter is a sociopathic killer,

he had this unquenchable thirst to kill.

And ultimately, Dexter's killing is compelling

only because he can justify why he's killing that person.

I think audiences relish being given the opportunity

to identify with someone who is, on paper at least, reprehensible.

All bets would be off if he was killing indiscriminately.

The fact that he targets terrible people opens the door

for the audience to identify with him in some way.

Don't test me, Sergeant. I could have killed you.

I didn't.

You didn't because you can't.

I've had time to think about this, Morgan.

I don't fit that code you were talking about, do I?

He needs to know that he's doing the right thing to the right person.

Not letting the people who deserve justice slip through the cracks.

He is finding those bad people and getting rid of them.

Who doesn't want to get rid of the detritus?

Who doesn't want to get rid of all this kind of seemingly madness

that goes on every once in a while?

You leave pain wherever you go.

You kill me...

what do you leave behind?

A world without you.

Look at that - steady as a surgeon.

You know, it's a very, very intriguing television series,

but it's one of those shows you go, like, "Eeeh."

Early on in the show, people who were watching it would approach me

and say that they kind of felt guilty about the fact they liked the show.

God knows, I've written a lot of serial killers in my time.

But I've never asked the audience

to believe in the triumph of a serial killer.

There's nothing wrong with depicting violence -

it's part of the human condition.

I understand that their tongue is in their cheek, in a way,

and I understand it's an inside-out show,

but, frankly, as well as it may be made,

I don't want to be part of any show that would suggest

that there is a catharsis in violence and in serial killing.

People talk about the moral ambiguity these days

of the antihero and all that, but that's the world we're living in

and I think Dexter's argument is innately valid anyway,

since there are a lot of bad people out there who have escaped justice,

and he's just making sure that they don't.

I don't care how well you tell that tale,

there's nothing to commend that as an idea,

and ideas are important to me.

Do some people deserve to die?

And I don't know that the show comes down one way or another,

but it certainly tempts you into perhaps feeling that some people do,

and then you have to wrestle with the fact that you felt that way.

The coin never really lands.

It's just sort of spinning in the air.

I'd like to know what makes a man do that.

Audiences create these guidelines by what they choose to watch.

Artists need to be in the position to sort of push the boundaries

and let the audience speak back to them.

Most writers have always wanted to delve into the soul

and what makes us tick.

Bad guys don't think they're bad guys.

Good guys are good guys,

but they're human beings too, and they're complicated.

It doesn't really matter to an audience as much as it used to,

whether the character is a hero or a villain.

Full of sin or full of virtue -

it doesn't even matter what they are trying to do

as long as we feel their passion.

Storytelling is like making everyone part of a big family.

So that members of the audience

are able to identify with characters in their full complexity.

Television is part drug, it's part stimulation,

it's part love, it's part affection.

That type of deep emotional attachment

is what television at its best is capable of generating.

Ultimately, every great story is, "Know thyself and discover thyself".

We're all trying to figure out if we're living this life fully,

but also if we're living it meaningfully.

That's the way it works. That's the way art is supposed to work.

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