The Basic-Cable Counterattack
What HBO proved was that television without advertising could film stories for adults. So were the channels with sponsors left to watch from the sidelines? That is where this band gets interesting.
FX raised its hand first. In The Shield (2002), the detective at the centre shoots a fellow officer in the first episode. A channel carrying advertising put a man like that at the centre. With so much that broadcast standards would not let them say or show, the dramas of this band sharpened the craft of telling by implication and tension — the constraint made the style.
The other lead was a channel whose very name comes as a surprise: AMC, American Movie Classics, which had spent its life running old films. In 2007 it stepped into original production with Mad Men, and the following year, 2008, it put out Breaking Bad. Two of the densest shows in television history came out of a channel that reran movies.
Why could it take the risk? Because a cable channel has two streams of income — advertising, and the carriage fee it receives from cable operators. Holding one talked-about show strengthens your hand in negotiating the second. Even without immediate returns in the ratings, there was a mechanism by which reputation became an asset. Prestige television was not born of ambition alone; it was also born of that shape of wallet.
That the counterattack landed is plain in the awards record. Cable first took the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in 2004 with The Sopranos — on subscription HBO. Four years later, in 2008, Mad Men took the same award: the first for a channel carrying advertising. Four years of distance, closed by a channel that reran movies.