But just as complicated as the characters themselves, Martin argues, are the men who created them: David Chase (The Sopranos), Matthew Weiner (Mad Men), David Milch (Deadwood) and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad). Martin offers readers a look at the process behind the shows, headed by a group of ambitious, creative, and, yes, often difficult men.

The response to Gandolfini's death illustrates the extent to which The Sopranos marked a major turning point in TV history. Television in the first decade of the 2000s became "the signature American art form," Martin writes--"the equivalent of what the films of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, and others had been to the 1970s or the novels of Updike, Roth, and Mailer had been to the 1960s." I spoke with Martin about how this transformation has unfolded, how these shows humanize characters that would historically have been cast as villains, and whether there are any "difficult women" in television's near future.

What circumstances came together to bring us the Third Golden Age in TV?

What is usually required for this kind of revolution is a confluence of business, technological, and artistic currents, and that's what you had beginning around the time of The Sopranos. Television was becoming more and more diversified. The big networks were ceding some of their monopoly to cable. Cable was proliferating like crazy. Televisions themselves are becoming better all the time; they were something you could view cinematic work on. And the beginning of a stream of technologies that allowed you to watch at any time. So the network telling you when to watch was starting to fall away. And you could return to a serialized format. It was on DVRs, on demand, and so on--different ways that television came into our lives. These were the preconditions. The thing that had ruled television from the time it was born--the advertiser--and the need for massive ratings no longer is the most important thing. When you take away that, an enormous new universe of artistic possibility opens up.

You wrote a behind-the-scenes companion about The Sopranos for HBO in 2007. What was that experience like?

They were interested in doing a celebration of what the show had been, something that was commensurate with the status of the show, at a point when it was clear that the show would be remembered forever. I treated it like a reporting job, interviewed everybody, and found myself in this world of incredible artistry and incredible work. In a medium they had gone into without the expectation that they would ever be allowed to do that. The striking thing, which I said to David Chase, and I don't think he really understood what I meant, was that it gave me anxiety to be there, to be in the costume department. If it wasn't for this accident of faith, all these people doing this great work would have been doing it for shows I'd never heard of. I got to watch Gandolfini work, which was one of the great pleasures of my career. To watch him play that role was like watching a great violinist at the top of his game, or a great athlete. I left believing that I had been privy to something special.