Hit Man (Part 2)

[Scene 2: "A Hit Is a Hit," The Sopranos, season one]
HESH: Music is music. Talent is talent. There's one constant to the music business: A hit is a hit. And this, my friend, is not a hit.
CHRISTOPHER: Why?
HESH: Christ, for reasons we couldn't comprehend or codify. Pathetic schlepper!

"You don't have to be a hack!"
When it comes to creating hits, there's TV -- and then there's HBO. The difference is that the last thing HBO programmers think about is making a hit. At the networks, it's the first thing (and, some might argue, the only thing).

The purpose of broadcast television is to keep you in your seat so that you watch the commercials. Networks make money by delivering as many of the right eyeballs as possible to the right time slot. That structural reality translates into an obsession with measuring those eyeballs (most network execs dial into dedicated rating lines at 6 every morning). It also produces an accumulation of rules and conventions about what kinds of shows work best to grab those eyeballs and how those shows should be made.

"The name of the game is, Whatever gets the largest number of people to watch," says Alan Ball, a self-described refugee from the network TV "gulag" and creator of the HBO series Six Feet Under. "What is that? It's a car wreck! It's Fear Factor. It's getting Playboy playmates to eat sheep's eyeballs. They're proud of that! 'Look at the numbers we got! Supermodels puked on each other and people tuned in!' " For a programmer facing extreme economic and performance pressures, the safest decision is to go with something that is exactly like what's successful now. As a result, television is polluted with imitation. Today, networks are producing derivatives of their own reality shows, such as NBC's Dog Eat Dog. Yesterday, it was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire clones. And there are always the ubiquitous cop/lawyer/doctor dramas and their spin-offs. Of course, the networks do very good business with these shows. What they don't do, however, is produce very good shows. And the reason has everything to do with the way the networks treat -- or mistreat -- the creative talent that is actually responsible for inventing the programs in the first place.

Alan Ball, whose television-writing career was mired in the frustration of writing and producing three network sitcoms (Grace Under Fire, Cybill, Oh Grow Up) before he won an Oscar for his American Beauty screenplay, is particularly eloquent on the subject of the central ritual of series television: the notes meeting, where work in progress is discussed. "There always seem to be twice as many people as needed at every meeting," Ball says. "The networks have so many people who have to justify their jobs that they sit in on meetings, trying to come up with some kind of accepted feedback. They use all of these recycled buzzwords they learned in some storytelling seminar that I don't even understand: 'We need a third-act reversal here' or 'Let's telescope the action here.' "

Almost across the board, the "notes" are a set of commercial decisions masquerading as narrative priorities: "Be nice" (the networks' internal moral police force, Standards & Practices, has such a grip on the writing process that writers learn to load up a script with extra "bitch"es and "ball"s that they can trade in for another "asshole"); "Resolve the A story with a neat emotional payoff, so that viewers can go to bed happy"; "Spell it out"; and "Dumb it down."

In contrast, HBO is in the business of selling itself. Attracting subscribers to pay for and keep the service is less about ratings and more about developing a mix of offerings that individually resonate with a certain segment of the audience and that collectively attract the largest number of paying customers. HBO doesn't make money off of any individual show; it makes money by increasing the value of the total network. HBO wins by increasing range and dialing up quality. "If we can come up with a whole plate of programs -- some of which have very narrow appeal -- at the end of the day, we'll have a bigger subscriber base," says Bewkes. "We want to deliver a real set of choices and a real range of sensibilities. At the same time, even if a subscriber isn't interested in a particular documentary about the Teamsters, but he hears it's good, he'll feel better about his HBO. So it's about excellence and range."