ZEN AND THE ART OF SHOWRUNNING
I’M A LITTLE INTIMIDATED as I wait to meet Chris Brancato in his Greenpoint office. The room is large and full of sunlight, with a striking view of the New York City skyline visible over warehouse rooftops, and I’m not quite sure what to expect from the man best known for co-creating the gritty Netflix crime drama Narcos. His desk is topped with a nameplate that reads “DO EPIC SHIT,” and his bookshelf is full of books including the World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Gangsters of Harlem. As soon as Brancato walks in, though, I am put at ease by his warm handshake and eagerness to talk about his work. The books are there for research on his current show, the Epix series Godfather of Harlem, set to premiere this fall. Brancato and his team are hard at work on postproduction, and his passion for the show is palpable and contagious. “At the very beginning, Godfather of Harlem suggests a tradition of gangster dramas,” he says, but it’s made with an angle that “makes it feel just a little bit different than any mob show you’ve ever seen,” even as it draws inspiration from classics like Goodfellas and The Godfather. The series, which is inspired by true events, revolves around crime boss Bumpy Johnson, played by Forest Whitaker, and his friendship with Malcolm X. “The initial concept of the show—the vision—was: This is about the collision of the criminal underworld and the civil rights movement in early ’60s Harlem. Those two things, criminal underworld and civil rights, usually don’t go in the same sentence,” he says. This collision, in addition to
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making for a compelling pitch to network executives, allows Brancato and the team to explore themes that are not only historically significant, but also resonant today. “How do we use this friendship to create an examination of civil rights?” he asks, explaining that Godfather of Harlem sets out to look at the tropes of the traditional mob show through the “prism of crime” as a method of social mobility. “That’s what the show really is,” Brancato says. “It’s an examination of how different social groups—Italian, Black, German, Irish—move through an economic ladder to political, social, cultural significance.” The show also draws many implicit parallels between events of the 1960s and current news. “We’re not trying to be on the nose about it, but we’re just simply depicting stuff that happened then that hasn’t changed all that much,” Brancato explains. He names a few of those issues: “An opioid crisis of immense proportions. A political divide in this country between right and left. Fight for political representation. Police brutality. The beginning of a social movement that’s similar to Black Lives Matter, in terms of not only the civil rights movement, but specific protests against violence against Black kids in Harlem. So what we have is a show that’s making a commentary about a lot of stuff that we’re dealing with today, but has the safe remove of distance.” When Brancato invites me into one of several editing rooms, I watch as he works with an editor to fine-tune a clip of an interaction between Bumpy Johnson and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (played by Giancarlo Esposito). The
few seconds I see are of a conversation about tenant rights and money in politics—topics that are as relevant as ever in New York City. This kind of analysis comes naturally to Brancato, who studied history at Brown University. “I was a history major in college, so research and using research to support writing has always been part and parcel of my development as a writer,” he says. For Godfather of Harlem, Brancato and his team read a lot and conducted interviews with people in Harlem who knew the real Bumpy Johnson. The writing process for Brancato is “a combination of researched historiography, interviews with some of the players or people who knew the players, and the requirements of dramatic scene construction.” He adds, however, that it took him awhile in his career to come to projects and subjects that let him do this kind of work. When I ask if being a showrunner was always his ultimate destination in the industry, Brancato laughs. “Well my ultimate destination in this business was trying to make a living and put food on the table.” When he first came to Hollywood in the ’90s, he most wanted to work on feature films, as “television wasn’t known for the kind of excellence it is today.” But in an effort to get whatever work he could, he pursued jobs in both film and television. He gradually learned more about the role of the showrunner, which did not have the kind of visibility it does now, and was drawn to the combination of writing and producing that the job involves. “You’re actually really in charge of a massive endeavor,” he says. “Not just a two-hour movie, but a multiple-hour show, and you’re the creative arbiter of the final product as much as the feature film director is arbiter of the final product in feature.” So Brancato decided to focus on showrunning for both artistic and pragmatic reasons. “I was trying to ensure my own longevity in the business,” he says, by pursuing a position where he thought there would be more job opportunities. “And then what happened, somewhat through dumb luck, is that feature films became