Bomba me lo paso cuando leo los periódicos angloparlantes y los
entiendo. Lo que sigue es un extracto de un artículo de The Guardian que
completo está aquí.
Difficult Men: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin – review
The inside story of how the best TV
series of the last 20 years came to be made.
(...) your hero can do a lot of bad things, he can make
all kinds of mistakes, can be lazy and look like a fool, as long
as he's the smartest guy in the room and he's good at his job. That's
what we ask of our heroes.
His essential argument is that most of these dramas are concerned with
middle-aged masculinity and its discontents; he's good on the balance of
domesticity and fantasy, identification and wish-fulfilment in shows
such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad; he contextualises them well in the Bush years, and the
economic slump. But what the reader mostly takes away from Difficult Menis its memorable description of the industry: the
writers' room, desperately searching for the episode's 18 "beats";
stressed-out character actors inhabiting their difficult parts for up to a
decade (James Gandolfini used to work himself up for his scenes by, say,
smashing a stereo in his trailer or smacking the back of his own head). Most of
all, the book leaves the image of the showrunner: the possibly unstable writer,
in charge of every detail of a massive artistic-commercial enterprise. As
one TV veteran remarks: "This isn't like publishing some lunatic's novel
or letting him direct a movie. This is handing a lunatic a division
of General Motors.
