Giving a Wide Berth to Artists of Cable TV

[Commentary] We used to turn on the television to see people who were happier, funnier, prettier versions of ourselves. But at the turn of the century, something fundamental changed and we began to see scarier, crazier, darker forms of the American way of life.

Click on ambitious cable channels now, and you will find a high school science teacher who makes meth when he is not dissolving his enemies in vats of acid (“Breaking Bad”); a successful Madison Avenue advertising executive whose entire life is a lie (“Mad Men”); a forensics investigator who is a serial killer on the side (“Dexter”); and a New Jersey gangster, this one in Atlantic City, who is very much the family man (“Boardwalk Empire”). It has been a winning formula, but the execution risk is high. In “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution,” to be published in July by Penguin Press, the author, Brett Martin, suggests that the programming was produced by men who were as tortured and sometimes as despotic as the antiheroes they hung their plots on.