If there could be said to have been a
Ghost
Whisperer DVD Robert Greenblatt moment in his
tenure at Showtime, perhaps it was the debut of one of his biggest successes,
"
Ghost
Whisperer DVD box set."
On paper, it didn't make much sense. Why
cast the
Ghost
Whisperer box set middle son from HBO's
"Six Feet Under," which Greenblatt produced, as a dangerous but
somehow likable serial killer other than the fact that Michael C. Hall had HBO
Ghost
Whisperer DVD season?
And yet just minutes into the opening
episode of "
Ghost
Whisperer DVDs" in 2006, it was clear
Hall was accomplishing a transition highly difficult to make on TV. He slipped
so effortlessly out of the character for which he was known into such a different
one that it was as if he was
Ghost
Whisperer 1-5 DVD amnesia on the audience.
Hall made it work, and by extension so did
Prison
Break DVD|
Prison Break,
who would go on to do it again perhaps even more improbably with Edie Falco,
who escaped the overhang of an even more iconic role on "
Prison
Break DVD Set" to take on "Nurse
Jackie."
And therein lies the genius behind the
Prison
Break DVD Box Set but still distinguished
Greenblatt era at Showtime: He may have recruited a lot of HBO players, but it
took a playbook of his own creation to score with them all over again.
Greenblatt, who is expected to stand down
after a
Prison
Break DVDs tenure, may not have been cable
original
Prison
Break complete box sets biggest success
story, but don't underestimate his feat: he summoned the sun into HBO's shadow.
He transformed the dynamic of the HBO-Showtime competitive dyad, remaking the
network's No. 2 status from the also-ran you
Prison
Break DVD Season to the underdog for which
you root.
To some degree, his success was less his
doing than the
CSI
New York DVD undoing of HBO. The waning years
of the Chris Albrecht/Carolyn Strauss administration were ones where the
network was flying so high its head got lodged in the clouds. Recall
thumbsuckers like "
CSI
New York DVD Season" and "John From
Cincinnati" and it's tempting to conclude HBO was blinded by its own
temporary Midas complex. It's as if the pay channel believed its subscribers
would watch anything as
CSI
New York DVD box set as they slapped the HBO
brand on it.
But at the very same time HBO was losing
its
CSI
New York DVDs, Greenblatt was refining the
formula for scripted originals. Premium cable has always worked by mixing the
profane and the profound, but it's tricky to figure out the right ratio. He
didn't hit home runs right
CSI
New York box set; there was an awkward couple
of years where "Huff" was passed off as the next big thing, but even
that forgotten drama got Showtime on Emmy's radar.
No, it wasn't until "Weeds" hit
the air in 2005 that
The
Simpsons Box Set truly refined the formula.
The drug-dealer comedy brought together the elements that he learned to bring
together again and again: strong, brand-name lead (Mary Louise-Parker), inspired
The
Simpsons dvd season (Jenji Kohan), an
avoidance of typical TV formatting (half-hour comedy, but not a sitcom) and a
premise that indulged Showtime's content liberties (drugs, drugs, drugs).
"Weeds" seemed all the more revelatory because it arrived precisely
when TV's comedy tank was running so low that
the
simpsons dvd box set seemed no one would ever
laugh at the medium again. Not an easy time to test the genre.
Greenblatt hasn't exactly avoided
comparisons to
the
simpsons dvd|the simpsons by casting his shows with HBO castoffs like Hall, Falco and
"Weeds'" Parker and Justin Kirk ("Angels in America"). But
it's simplistic to say he was imitating HBO wholesale; the Showtime series that
followed "Weeds" had a provocative charm that
the
simpsons dvds with the pretensions that
suffocated HBO for a while (but that's all over now in the post-"True
Blood" era).
What's more about Greenblatt's Showtime
the
simpsons seasons dvd was that they became a
destination for talent that may not have been A-list, but to even get the
B+-list is a feat on television, where actors primarily known for film once
rarely slummed.
the
simpsons complete dvd box set Rhys-Meyers
("The Tudors") and Toni Collette ("The United States of
Tara"), soon to be followed by Laura Linney ("The Big C") and
Jeremy Irons ("The Borgias") is really no small accomplishment, and
one where they've beat HBO, which tends to mint stars rather than hire
the
simpsons complete season.
