"Do you want it now, or do you want it good?" John Landgraf asked a room full of TV writers and reporters here at the critics' news tour the other day.
The president of FX was answering a question about the next season of Atlanta, which got two Golden Globes days earlier, but won't return this year because its creator and lead actor, Donald Glover, has a major role in the next Star Wars movie. He was also referring to American Crime Story, which tackled the O.J. Simpson murder trial last year and was widely considered the best drama of that TV season. The announced second instalment, set to tackle the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, will not air until 2018.
Landgraf's rhetorical answer says a lot about FX. The U.S. cable channel isn't going to rush anything. Quality matters more than quantity. The we-can-wait attitude is, in the context of television, extraordinary. Time was, anything that got ratings, whether on network or cable, was rushed back into production.
FX is now considered the best-run channel in the business. Some call it "the best curated" channel. It has an extraordinary lineup of shows for an ad-supported basic-cable service. As Landgraf pointed out – not boasting, but just listing achievements – "In 2016 we received 56 Emmy nominations and had 18 wins, both cable records and more than any other broadcast basic-cable or streaming brand. We recently won four Golden Globe Awards, which is more than any other network or streaming service." Fact is, as far as many critics and some of the public is concerned, HBO is on the wane, struggling to find truly original, commanding, must-see TV. While almost everything that FX does is compelling.
The FX boss is a great favourite of critics. He pays attention to us, reads our reviews (he also remembers our names, which is ultrapolite in this racket) and studies them. He took some pleasure in pointing out that FX examined the year-end Top 10 lists of 152 critics for 2016. "FX just edged out HBO, although statistically we'd call it a tie, tallying 406 inclusions while HBO totalled 403, and Netflix ranked third with 344. The People v. O.J. Simpson was No. 1 with 128; Atlanta was No. 2 with 119; The Americans was ranked No. 3 with 91; Game of Thrones, No. 4 with 74 and Stranger Things, No. 5 with 73."
How does FX do it? There's no easy or concrete answer to that. But there are clues. Loyalty to talent is certainly a factor. FX has, for instance, given Ryan Murphy enormous creative freedom – and he delivers, with American Horror Story and The People v. O.J. Simpson. His next series, coming this spring, is Feud: Bette and Joan.
Outright reviews are embargoed right now, but I can tell you it is delicious, a dramatization of the making of the 1962 psychological thriller, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? that delves deep into the long-running feud between its stars, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Consider the cast. The panel to present Feud includes Susan Sarandon (who plays Bette Davis), Jessica Lange (Joan Crawford), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Olivia de Havilland), Kiernan Shipka (Sally Draper on Mad Men) and Alison Wright (who played Martha on The Americans). Also in the series are Judy Davis and Stanley Tucci.
Jessica Lange called Feud: "a microcosm of what happens to women generally as they age, whether they become invisible, or unattractive, or undesirable." She noted that Joan Crawford was a decade younger than Lange is now when she made Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, a movie that was difficult to finance because the two actresses were considered over-the-hill and simply unattractive. In the first episode of the series, studio boss Jack Warner is quoted as being dismissive of the project because, well, nobody would want to have sex with those women. Except that he puts it in much cruder terms.
A key aspect of FX's success, some would say, has been its shift away from shows aimed at young white men. (Its first real success was with the fine but ultramale series The Shield.) Landgraf made a point of telling critics that they take diversity and gender equality very seriously. Television and film are male-dominated arenas. In the movie industry, according to a recent report by the Hollywood Reporter, women directed just 7 per cent of the top-250 films of 2016, a 2-per-cent decline from the year before.
At FX, Landgraf said, "We had changed the composition of our directors from 88-per-cent white male to less than 50-per-cent white male. So, since then, now we've booked 170 directors, and 48 per cent are white male. We said we were going to do it, and we're going to keep doing it, and we're going to keep going until everything about our channel and every aspect of our channel is fair and better reflects the diversity of the population of the country we live in, and is not as skewed as the whole industry has been towards white heterosexual males."
Fargo can be cited as another huge creative success for FX. A new iteration is currently filming in Alberta and will air this spring. During the presentation for it, three of the actors in this edition, Carrie Coon, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and David Thewlis, admitted that when they first heard that a TV series would be derived from the Coen brothers movie Fargo, they thought the idea was terrible, utterly ridiculous. Now, of course, Fargo is a multiple Emmy, Peabody and Golden Globe-winning series.
It takes faith in creativity to allow the idea of the Fargo series to go forward. Patience with an ongoing series is also a hallmark of FX. The Americans was into its fourth season last year before it got recognition. Although critically acclaimed, the Emmy Awards and the Golden Globes had largely ignored it.
Why? The reason was clear – it's too damn bleak and the plot points are about heart-scalding betrayals. About Soviet spies in Washington in the 1980s, there's nothing uplifting about The Americans. The mainstream award-giving organizations cling to the traditional American fear of pessimism and are wary of celebrating work that details duplicity. FX isn't.
The channel was home to Louis C.K.'s remarkable Louie and is currently home to Better Things, starring Pamela Adlon and written by her and Louis C.K. The under-the-radar comedies Baskets and Man Seeking Woman are on the schedule, too, and while both are wildly uneven, they get better because FX has patience with them.
So when John Landgraf says, "Do you want it now, or do you want it good?" he means it. FX is interested in delivering quality, and it's working.