Henry Bromell and His Legacy of Literary Television
Henry Bromell passed away last week, and if you don't know this writer-producer by name, you surely know the trail of hit shows he left behind, including Northern Exposure, Homicide: Life on the Streets, I'll Fly Away, Rubicon, Homeland and many others.
It's fair to say that Bromell is among that handful of writers and producers — an elite group also including such artistic writer-producers as Tom Fontana, Barry Levinson, David Simon (and, more recently, Graham Yost and Vince Gilligan) — who took serial television beyond its accepted, conventional episodic limits at the time, shaping them into a more literary, novelistic style.
As reported by the LA Times, Bromell died of a heart attack on March 18 in Los Angeles. That story pointed out that Bromell, as a writing disciple of Fontana and Levinson on Homicide, was an important branch of the so-called "Family Tree" — writers and producers descended from the landmark MTM Productions series St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues that made modern dramas like The Sopranos and The Wire possible.
Those shows blazed new territory for television with ensemble casts, fractured anti-heroes, and interwoven plot lines that sometimes lasted an episode, stretched to a month of shows, and sometimes even carried on for years. There was plenty of tarnish upon the heroes, plenty of characters failing, and well, what everyman couldn't relate to that?
Bromell, with early success as a fiction writer, began publishing short stories in the 1970s for The New Yorker. He started writing for television in the 90s for Northern Exposure, then moved on to write for Levinson and Fontana's Homicide (co-starring Andre Braugher, right), where he eventually took over as executive producer in 1996. It's difficult to scan his writing credits, including the gritty Brotherhood and landmark Carnivále, without thinking he had at least one finger in almost every important series on television since he entered the field.
Bromell's background in short and long fiction shaped what he did in television — stretching out plot pace, and revealing deep facets of leading characters that weren't always complimentary.
This may never have been more true than on Rubicon (AMC's 2010 drama starring James Badge Dale, below). It was an ambitious show built on small steps, steeped in its novelistic, domestic spy-thriller atmosphere. Almost counter to the usual giant leaps television series usually take, Rubicon artfully inched forward, maybe losing part of its audience in the process.
Bromell's life, growing up with a father who worked at the CIA, gave him the background and experience for that series, as well as his last, the domestic terrorism tale of Homeland, for which he shared the 2012 Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in 2012 with Howard Gordon, Alex Gansa and Gideon Raff. The first season of Homeland, perhaps, was as pristine and well-crafted as any other series before it.
It's no secret around here that TVWW was an early, enthusiastic fan of Rubicon — writing about it in length. The show still has not been released on DVD, and hopefully, now that Bromell has passed, there will be more urgency to memorialize one of his greatest works.
It was, at times, a demanding show, but its literary power was its core strength. Cancelled after one season, it was gone too soon. And now, sadly, the same can be said of Henry Bromell.