![]() ![]() Martin interviewed me back in the winter about my book, so it seemed only fair to return the favor. And though neither book was designed this way, I think they accidentally wound up complementing each other very well, providing a wide-ranging look at the internal and external lives of these series over the last 15-odd years. It paints a portrait, warts and all, of the complicated people (mostly male, as the title suggests) responsible for creating these shows. I’ve read “Difficult Men,” and liked it very much. Martin also focuses entirely on cable (and mainly HBO and AMC), while I also folded in network shows like “Buffy,” “Lost,” “24” and “Friday Night Lights.” We both cover the origin stories of the shows in question, but Martin’s narrative sticks to behind-the-scenes discussion as each show continued, while I’m focused more on the stories, the characters and what they meant. We both talked to most of the creators of the shows we covered (other than Matthew Weiner for both of us and Joss Whedon for me) and several of the key executives at each network, but Martin talked to a much wider range of people attached to each show. I’m a critic, and Martin’s a reporter, and that makes a very notable divergence in how we researched and wrote our books. Like those TV doppelgangers, both books were conceived independently years ago, with no awareness of the other’s existence, and wound up approaching the same subject matter in very different ways. As most of you know, I published a book last fall called “The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever,” about the transformation in television that happened as a result of groundbreaking new dramas like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Deadwood.” Very late in the process of writing it, I learned that another book about this same era, and many of these same shows, was in the works: “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad,” by magazine journalist and author Brett Martin. ![]() Even though many of these doppelgangers turn out to be fairly different in execution, something always seems fishy about the claims that the one show didn’t know at first that the other existed, and that “there was just something in the air” that led to them both existing at the same time.Īfter recent events in my own life, I may have to start taking these claims at face value. ![]() Over the years, it’s given me no end of amusement to witness how often two different networks will develop what seems at first to be the exact same show in the exact same season, whether it’s hospital dramas in Chicago (“ER” and “Chicago Hope” in 1994), adults traveling back in time to teenage years (“That Was Then…” and “Do Over” in 2002) or slackers with super powers (“Chuck” and “Reaper” in 2007). ![]()
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