Talent takes the stage

Cable World,  April 21, 2003  

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Perhaps this liberating sexuality is why slightly more than half of Queer as Folk's audience is straight, and a majority female. This surprised both Cowen and Lipman. "The success of drama on premium cable is [that] the audience is willing to accept more than [broadcast] network programs give them credit for," Cowen says. "I don't think an audience has to see good characters and have them pay for their misdeeds. I don't think that it has the puritanical attitude."

Queer as Folk may have an afterlife on DVD, but broadcast syndication is another matter. Granted, every network requires that producers do a double shoot that cuts out profanity and nudity. But, if you've ever seen an episode of Queer as Folk, you'd know how difficult it would be to edit out the sex scenes.

Even without syndication revenue, Lipman and Cowen won't be heading back to broadcast anytime soon. "It's like going back to jail," Cowen says. "It would be very difficult to give up the creative freedom."

Ilene Chaiken, producer and creator of Showtime's upcoming series The L Word, formerly known as Earthlings, also applauds premium cable's nod to creativity. By all accounts, The L Word inevitably will be seen as the lesbian version of Queer as Folk, she says. But it will focus less on the sex and more on the gritty details of life.

A program doesn't have to show a lot of sex to confront the strict guidelines enforced by broadcast television, says David Simon, executive producer of the HBO cop series The Wire. The series takes a dark, modestly angry position on the drug war, a stance that would never make it on the ad-supported airwaves, he says.

A former journalist, and writer for NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street, Simon weaves sociopolitical commentary throughout his series. He shows the minutiae of institutions, how the average cop has no power and, at times, no clue as to what's going on. "I take great pride that we manage to put on American television a cop show that has absolute contempt for the current drug war," Simon says.

The next season will shift from the drug war to the port of Baltimore, where unions battle with multinational corporations. With 56 minutes instead of the 44 minutes allotted for an hour-long broadcast show, Simon has more time for minutiae, such as scenes with two guys talking with their feet up on their desks. "The purpose behind that is to make something that feels very real," he says, noting that life doesn't have dramatic cliffhanger endings every 12 minutes to accommodate a commercial break.

As far as his compensation is concerned, Simon is getting paid just fine. "You don't exactly starve if you're writing for HBO," he says.

So creative freedom may win in the end. It's why David Milch, a creator of NYPD Blue, is coming to HBO to do a Western next year, says HBO's Strauss. And it's why Strauss greenlighted a series called Carnivale, about the tensions between a traveling carnival and a populist preacher in 1934.