Episodes of the extremely short-lived EZ Streets are now available on DVD and the web thanks to Brilliant But Cancelled. The series has been hailed as paving the way for The Sopranos, but Haggis takes little pride in the pioneer label. "I'm a petty fuck," he claimed. "I didn't even watch The Sopranos, I was so upset."
He explained he'd tried to sell EZ Streets to HBO after its cancellation on CBS. "They said, 'You know what, we could do this. But we have this script called The Sopranos. If that doesn't work, we'll call you.' So yeah, I've been bitter ever since."
Like The Black Donnellys, EZ Streets presented morally ambiguous characters the audience wasn't sure they should love or hate. Mocking his inability to pitch a show, Haggis recounted how he tried to sell the network on the series. "I said to CBS, 'It's about moral ambiguity.' And they just stared at me." Instead of trying to convince them of the brilliance of his idea, against their objections he went away and just wrote the script, which they ended up loving.
But audiences didn't.
"At the time, the Gulf War was on and all my good liberal friends were coming to me and saying 'we gotta go kick Saddam Hussein's ass.' And I said, 'I'm sure we do, I'm sure he's a horrible, heinous guy, but what about the horrible dictators we're supporting? Why don't we kick their asses?'" Haggis recalled.
"People, Americans especially, love to put a black hat on this guy and a white hat on this guy and that's all you need to know about these people. So I said, 'I'm going to do a series where you never figure out who's the hero and who's the villain.' And America took to that like a rock. They said 'OK, yeah, yeah, we hate that.'"
Though Haggis has lived in the United States for about 25 years, and uses the pronoun "we" to talk about Americans, he's proud to be identified as a Canadian, too. His career, however, is not quite as Canadian as it would seem from the Banff festival. He was honoured with the NBC Universal Canada Award of Distinction, "recognizing an individual who exemplifies achievement and advancement in the Canadian entertainment industry." But as he pointed out at his session, the one partially Canadian credit in his long list is Due South – a fine show, but perhaps not that fine.
Article comments
1 - Joan Hunt
Congrats! This article has been placed on Advance.net