Hit Man (Part 1)

It's a simple strategic insight that's easy to describe but exceedingly difficult to execute: Forget what's popular -- what's working now -- and start with what's good. Then ignore the conventions of the medium, and reject the received wisdom of the industry to follow the internal logic of each project. It's not a recipe for hits. It's a discipline for producing original work -- and for working productively with people who make stuff that makes a difference.

Albrecht and his team pull it off with a powerful combination of innovation, instincts, creative practices, and production values.

[Scene 1: "Fortunate Son," The Sopranos, season three]
TONY: All this from a slice of gabagool?
DR. MELFI: Kind of like Proust's madeleines.
TONY: What? Who?
DR. MELFI: Marcel Proust. Wrote a seven-volume classic, Remembrance of Things Past. He took a bite of a madeleine -- a kind of tea cookie he used to have when he was a child -- and that one bite unleashed a tide of memories of his childhood and ultimately, his entire life.
TONY: This sounds very gay. I hope you're not saying that.

"We decided to take the high road."
The Sopranos was the perfect storm of hits for HBO. The network, which started out broadcasting in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1972 as a pay channel that featured boxing, theatrical films, and stand-up comedy, had more than a decade of original programming under its belt. Some of it was groundbreaking: Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau's campaign mockumentary Tanner '88 and Gary Shandling's celebrated send-up of a talk-show host, The Larry Sanders Show. Some was less inspiring: The original original program on HBO was a polka-festival special. Primed by Oz (1997) and Sex and the City (1998) -- and thirsty for quality in a vast sea of reality TV, game shows, and Law and Order spin-offs -- critics unleashed a frenzy of praise for The Sopranos.

The audience followed in numbers that put HBO, which doesn't compete on ratings, on par with some of the most successful shows on broadcast television. While The Sopranos doesn't reach the ratings stratosphere of the top three shows on TV (for the 2001 - 02 season, NBC's Friends, with an average of 24.5 million viewers; CBS's CSI, with 23.7 million; and NBC's ER, with 22.1 million), it does regularly match the top 10 or 15 shows, with an average of 14 million viewers per episode. What's extraordinary is that HBO draws its viewers from a 27 million - subscriber universe, while the potential audience for commercial networks is every U.S. household with a TV set.

More than the numbers, The Sopranos' impact on the cultural conversation has changed the game for HBO. Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television, at Syracuse University, considers The Sopranos to be "the best drama on television." Says Thompson: "The Sopranos put America on notice. HBO is the place where great television is made." It also put the networks on notice. (Hollywood may be the next venue: Albrecht recently said that a Sopranos film may follow on the heels of the TV series.)

Soprano envy ranged from griping about HBO's "short seasons" (David Chase produces 13 episodes, compared with the typical 24 episodes for a network's hour-long dramas) to rumblings about the show's graphic language, violence, and sexual content. The industry chatter peaked in April 2001 with an infamous memo distributed by NBC chairman and CEO (and vice chairman of parent company General Electric) Bob Wright. One episode from The Sopranos' third season climaxed in the brutal beating death of a stripper. Wright sent a tape of that episode to 50 NBC executives, studio heads, and producers. The accompanying memo called for colleagues to help NBC "think about an issue I believe is having a major impact on our business -- the nature of the content in HBO's The Sopranos." Wright went on, "It is a show we could not and would not air on NBC because of the violence, language, and nudity."

While Wright claimed that his motivation was simply to provoke thoughtful discussion about The Sopranos, the "interestingly worded letter," as Albrecht puts it, pointed to another agenda. "We were confused, amused, and somewhat aggravated by what seemed to be an effort to direct negative attention to our show," Albrecht says. "It also missed the point. It's a fundamental misreading of the audience to assume that the show's success is based on its graphic content. There's no gold mine at the end of the vulgar rainbow." Still, he says with a smile, "it's a valid question they're raising: How are we going to compete with this?"