You refer to the book as a history of the period: how do you think your position as a working television critic framed the kind of history you chose to tell? And did this inform how much of your own evaluative criticism made it into the history?

It meant that I was inadvertently embedded for the whole thing. I got that job at The Star-Ledger in part because of my NYPD Blue website. David Milch was one of the first people I interviewed as a 22-year-old newspaper intern. I grew up one town over from (and several decades later than) David Chase, and was writing for Tony Soprano’s hometown paper, for an editor who had been in the same freshman dorm at Rutgers with James Gandolfini. I knew David Simon before The Wire started, knew of Matt Weiner from the Sopranos days. I had a lot of pre-existing relationships that gave me access and/or insight into how the shows got made. And though pre-existing relationships didn’t determine which shows I covered in the book—I’ve spoken with Joss Whedon maybe three times, and I doubt he would remember any of them—it certainly made it easier to do, and put the emphasis on the creator/showrunners involved. But I also think that’s where you have to tell that story, which is what Brett Martin—who notes several times in Difficult Men that he’s not a critic and hasn’t been exhaustively covering these shows for years—chose to do. It’s the auteur theory come to TV, more or less, and these guys (and they are, unfortunately, all guys) were the auteurs.

You acknowledge it’s unfortunate that these “auteurs” are all male, and in choosing your criteria for inclusion you ended up with a book that primarily tells the story of great men who created great TV shows. Was there ever any thought to moving outside those criteria to try to offer something of an alternative to this narrative?

If I could have, I would have. I had already somewhat stretched the narrative to include Buffy and its female heroine. If there was a female-created drama during this period that matched the mold-breaking criteria, I would have jumped all over it. The business, and this corner of it in particular, was especially male-dominated over that period. Shonda Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy did debut the same season as Lost, and there are certain ways in which it’s different from what came before, but for the most part it is a really well-executed network hospital drama, with bits of Friends and Sex and the City grafted onto the bones of ER.

One of those shows I perhaps regret omitting from the prologue was My So-Called Life (though it’s mentioned briefly in both The Sopranos and Friday Night Lights chapters), but even there I likely would have had to blurb thirtysomething instead and refer to the other Herskowitz and Zwick shows that followed.

Shows like Grey’s Anatomy speak to an alternate history of the same period, one where shows that weren’t breaking molds were nonetheless a major part of television culture over the past 15 years. By choosing to focus on shows that were quote-unquote “important,” don’t we risk losing a sense of the broader televisual landscape during this time period?

Sure. I’m leaving out enormous swaths of what was happening at this time. Reality is mentioned in passing in the introduction, and in terms of pop cultural impact, Survivor and American Idol had a much bigger footprint than The Wire or Battlestar Galactica. I allude briefly to a few comedies, too. But when I say it’s a history, I don’t mean it as a comprehensive one about TV in this era, or else The West Wing, Sex and the City and a whole bunch of other shows were in there. It’s specifically about the, for lack of a better word, revolution in drama. If you don’t fit that, it doesn’t make you bad; it just makes you the subject of a much broader book.

On the subject of “revolution”: Given the precedents you outline in the prologue and the lengthy period over which these shifts took place, an argument could be made that this is an evolution in which various existing elements of television drama converged. Do we just call it a revolution because it’s sexier, or do you think there’s a more substantive reason why that word has showed up in both your and Martin’s titles?

I think NYPD Blue or Homicide coming from Hill Street Blues, or ER from St. Elsewhere, is an evolution. I think Tony Soprano and Stringer Bell were a revolution. There’s a difference between bending certain elemental rules of narrative and morality and just shattering them. The ’80s and ’90s shows mixed and matched elements that had already existed—Hill Street Blues is basically Citizen Kane, in that no single aspect of it was new, but the combination of it felt new—where the shows in the book were the sort of thing that would have gotten people fired for proposing in earlier eras. NYPD Blue is a great drama, but it also features a lot of compromises for the sake of the network audience; there are no compromises about The Wire.

Your book is one of countless instances where we speak of the “golden age” of television (I believe Martin refers to it as the “third” golden age, for example). Why do you think that idea holds such purchase with those writing about television?

I think people like to categorize things. Comic book fans go on and on about the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and however they choose to dissect the period from around 1973 to today. With TV, there was the clear golden age of Playhouse 90, The Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, etc. Then there was Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland” (albeit an era with great stuff like The Defenders and CBS’ ’70s sitcoms) before you get to the ’80s renaissance of Hill Street, Cosby, Cheers, et al. And now we’re either still living in the era created by The Sopranos, or else in the next era made possible by that one. I suppose ideally, we’d have separate names for each of them, but calling it “a new golden age” seems to explain the concept pretty quickly to the casual TV viewer who doesn’t keep track of separate historical epochs.

In this two-part interview, I spoke with Sepinwall about these two subjects in the hopes of further exploring where the book fits within both the field of television criticism and within larger discourses around how this period in television history is being memorialized.

What were the goals you set for yourself when you sat down to write this book?

I wanted there to be a kind of permanent record of the era in TV I’ve been fortunate enough to be covering. Yes, there are individual columns and reviews and blog posts, but they’re scattered across multiple websites (or sometimes not online at all), and are often focusing on the trees rather than the forest. A book has a sense of weight to it, but also a kind of compactness. I’m obviously not sharing every opinion I’ve ever had about The Wire, nor every Milch anecdote I know about the production of Deadwood, but you can read each of those chapters and get a very good sense of how those shows were made, why they were important, and how they relate to each other in the bigger picture of 1997-2012 or thereabouts.

That compactness speaks to one of the challenges of the book, which is the isolation factor: by necessity, you had to develop a set of criteria to narrow the period, the genre, and then the shows themselves to make the project manageable. Looking back on that process, were you satisfied with how it spoke to your goals for the project?

Pretty much. Every now and then, someone will bring up a show that had a good argument for being included either in the prologue (Crime Story came up on Twitter today) or as its own chapter. Six Feet Under was probably the toughest omission, in that it was a huge show for HBO (in terms of ratings, but especially in terms of brand) along with The Sopranos and Sex and the City at the time, and in that it’s not a genre show like almost every other one in the book. So there was a different part of the story to tell there. I just knew that I didn’t want the book to become too far-ranging, and as I looked at my tentative list of shows (which at one point also included Rescue Me, as what was going to be a catch-all chapter on TV and 9/11), I said, “Too many HBO shows.” Oz wasn’t going anywhere. Sopranos and The Wire certainly weren’t going anywhere. And at that point, I decided I’d rather spend the time watching, interviewing people related to, and writing about Deadwood more than I would Six Feet Under.

Overall, though, I feel good about how it lays out, both in terms of the period—which most people say began with The Sopranos in ’99, but which Oz made possible, while Buffy was off doing its own genius thing in another corner of the TV universe—and the mix of shows. It’s a very male-centric period and collection of shows—and would have remained so even if I’d included Six Feet Under, Rescue Me or several other contenders—but Buffy is still in there, and there’s a cross section of pay cable, basic cable, big broadcast network, small broadcast, and even in-between with Friday Night Lights. The goal was to write a history of this period, and while I may not cover every bit of it, I feel like a cultural scholar—or just an entertainment buff—could pick this thing up 50 years from now and get a sense of what was happening, and why.

Did those circumstances mean that became as much a history of your experience as a critic as it was a more basic popular history of this period in television drama given the inherently autoethnographic nature of television criticism (particularly in the dialogic, episodic space of criticism you developed at What’s Alan Watching?)?

There’s some autobiographical material in the book, but I tried my best to keep it only to things that pertain to the story, whether I actually became part of it briefly (the David Chase interview after The Sopranos finale that everybody dissected) or whether I was just there to witness a telling detail (Carlton Cuse’s reaction to my question about Jack and Claire having the same dad, or Milch’s TV turning on the horse race while we talked). And some of the first-person stuff is just me clarifying what material is new and what’s archival, which a book with more traditional footnotes or endnotes likely wouldn’t have needed, but which fit with my own idiosyncratic style.

Someone else can tell the tale of what role critics like me played in the way we viewed the era, but I think it would be incredibly arrogant and myopic if I tried to be the one to do it.

The choice to self-publish initially meant you had complete control over that style—do you think you would have faced pressure to skew more “traditional” in form/style if you had been working with a publisher from the beginning? Acknowledging it relies on a hypothetical, do you think the book would have changed much in the process?

I think that would have changed. I had to have a conversation with the copy editors at Touchstone, simply because that footnoting style flies so completely in the face of what they do. My argument—and the argument of my initial editor in the self-publishing stage, Sarah Bunting—is that this is the way I write and the way people are used to reading me. While there’s value to changing certain things for the sake of “An Important Book,” this didn’t seem to be one of them. Because the book had already been (self) published, and successfully, the Touchstone editors agreed with me. Would they have if it had been developed in-house? I don’t know, but I suspect that and some other elements would have been different.

In an odd way, I wound up being able to write the book in the same sort of environment that many of these shows were created: I had an editor who could tell me what she felt wasn’t working (and was usually right about that), but ultimately I had the power to write the book I wanted, in the same way the Mad Men pilot is mostly unchanged from the version Matt Weiner wrote on his own, or that Deadwood was made with a large degree of autonomy because of how Milch wrote.

I’m not comparing the quality of my book to the quality of their shows; it’s just funny that the process of making it mirrored them in that way.