banana. i mean, it s one banana, michael. what could it cost, $10? you never actually set foot in a super market, have you? you assumed the audience was as smart as the writers. what have you got there? don t be afraid to make eye not going to beat myself up over that. it was so clever. and more meta than just about any show that s ever been on television. your average male is in perpetual state of adolescence. that s the show. you could break all these rules and have a lot of characters on a comedy who were extremely unlikable. there are a lot more important things than jokes in comedy. jokes aren t the most important thing in a comedy. what s the most important thing? the character. take control. the body. all that. busy? yeah, keeping up morale.
which is a network problem. i think hbo altered everything for this reason alone, there were no commercials. we are dependent on sponsors. there is scotch we can do in terms of language, in terms of violence and in terms of sex. to a large degree executives were sanding off the edges of what was interesting. i think hbo is looking at the world and going, okay, how can we matter? for quite a long time, movies and boxing were the bread and butter of hbo. people watch a show because you re partly [ bleep ]. and i think what we ve learned through shows like larry sanders show, or oz, is that we could do serious television. there s something in the air. and it ain t love. oz was cutting edge in what it was willing to share with the audience. hit me. hit me. hit me in the face, brother. complicated characters.
volunteerism and sacrifice, both saved the world and were forever changed by what they did. a lot of those veterans were still alive, so we got to meet them. we got to talk to them. i ve seen my friends, my men being killed. and it doesn t take too many days of that and you change dramatically. the show premiered september 9, 2001. two days later, everything changes. people were concerned, should we stop airing it? because it s a war story, and now the country is at war again. it turned out to be something that was necessary because now almost every american, i think, felt as though they had enlisted in something that they had not enlisted in before. after 9/11, we were all part of something. we deserve long and happy lives and peace.
episode to think that maybe the bad thing will not happen to this person. but then the show wouldn t be the show. i m going to stay in dylan. i m going to be a father to this baby and to this family. i am going to coach high school foot ball and you and i are going to stay together. and that s the way it is. yes? no. what do you mean no? you ve got to go to austin. this is your dream. that s what i m telling you. what we wanted it to feel like was the audience was just being invited in to a very small town, very intimate setting. that s why i don t want to be responsible nor do i want to have this baby be responsible for you not living out your dream. that s what i m saying. you are my dream. i have walked with you all these years to get to this place. you and i together.
i ve seen this show before. i ve seen that movie before. we re talking about making a case that puts mackie behind bars a long time. then you get to the end of the tie lot and vick shoots terry in the face. there was some thought that hbo shows did well because they had no commercials. so when a basic cable show like the shield that did have commercials found an audience, all 6of a sudden it just opened the door and other original programming sprung up, like nip/tuck. when you stop striving for perfection, you might as well be dead. and rescue me. you son of a bench. and it was a whole new playing field.