Searching Cable for a New American Hero

Remember Tony Soprano's rant during his first visit with his therapist, Dr. Melfi, when he went on about the cultural death of the "strong, silent type" epitomized by Gary Cooper?

"That was an American," he said, referring to Cooper. "He wasn't in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do. See, what they didn't know is that once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings, they couldn't get him to shut up. It's dysfunction this, dysfunction that."

It certainly is — particularly on HBO and Showtime. Aside from the whack-happy Sopranos, a short list includes urban drug dealers ("The Wire"), suburban drug dealers ("Weeds"), a sympathetic serial killer ("Dexter"), disturbed undertakers ("Six Feet Under"), Hollywood playas ("Entourage"), and foul-mouthed pioneers ("Deadwood") — not to mention the sex-obsessed ("Sex and the City," "The L Word"), and the self-obsessed ("Curb Your Enthusiasm").

Little, in short, that would please Tony Soprano, or make him try something other than his beloved History Channel. As he said way back in the second season, it may be the late 1990s outside his home, but inside it's still the 1950s, and he plans to keep it that way. What makes Tony Soprano attractive is that he is a cultural reactionary — he mourns, and longs for, a lost American ideal even as he trashes it.

In Hollywood, however, the American ideal is largely lost and unmourned. Take the recent CIA movie, "The Good Shepherd." Screenwriter Eric Roth's vision of the agency's early days is so dour and funereal it makes John le Carré look like a happy drunk. The CIA comes off as so deadly dull it's hard to imagine why anyone would have joined it in the first place.

Which brings us to an intriguing fact about HBO and Showtime. Aside from the latter's "Sleeper Cell," now shelved, high-end cable has avoided espionage, a subject naturally suited to sophisticated, long-form, multiseason television. You can't get away from spies and counterterrorism squads on the networks ("24," "The Unit," "NCIS"), but on this subject, cable's big boys have been silent.

HBO has two new therapy-related series in the works, while FX offers us kinky plastic surgeons ("Nip/Tuck"), gutter journalists ("Dirt"), and itinerant con artists ("The Riches") — all of which, you'd think, would drive Tony Soprano even deeper into despair.

So here's one idea for how cable could add a touch of class and real contemporary historical American interest to its programming lineup: Adapt the espionage novels of former CIA operative Charles McCarry, whose admirers (in case you haven't heard of him) include Norman Mailer, Elmore Leonard, John Updike, and Richard Condon, and who was described in these very pages by Otto Penzler as "the greatest espionage writer that America has ever produced."

Of particular interest is the cycle known as the "Paul Christopher novels," of which the seventh, "Christopher's Ghosts," will be published by Overlook Press next month. Taken together, these novels, which include "The Miernik Dossier," "The Tears of Autumn," "The Last Supper," and "Old Boys," meld a fictionalized history of the CIA, from its beginnings in the 1930s to the present, onto a labyrinthine family saga, and we all know that families, whether actual or substitute, are what make cable television tick.

Rightly or wrongly, America's reputation in the world has never been lower, and whatever our political stance, it's making all of us depressed. Paul Christopher is the kind of American Americans were once proud of and whom foreigners once loved. Not Gary Cooper, exactly, but perhaps a "WASP Galahad," as P.J. O'Rourke called him. He is a poet as well as a spy, and he never carries a gun. He is well-read and multilingual, as

comfortable in the Sudan or Vietnam as he is in Geneva or New York. But that's not simply to say that he knows how to order a meal in Moscow or Berlin. Christopher is a gentleman and a patriot, and unlike the heroes of Mr. Le Carré's novels, he does not believe that there is some sort of moral equivalence between the CIA and KGB. Not that he's some sort of stiff. Like any screenworthy secret agent, Christopher can bed a beautiful woman or drive 120 m.p.h. down a dirt road at night with the lights off. His patriotism is resolute but skeptical, and he doubts 90% of the value of intelligence work. In "The Tears of Autumn," which contends that President Kennedy was assassinated in a Vietnameseplanned operation avenging the U.S.-backed coup d'etat against Ngo Dinh Diem, Christopher is pressed by a Vietnamese woman to explain what he believes in. "I believe in consequences," he tells her. Like so many lines in Mr. McCarry's novels (the book was published in 1975), it has an striking contemporary resonance.

The immediate consequence of Christopher's theory about Kennedy's assassination, however, is that he is forced temporarily to resign from the CIA. ("I won't have any son of a bitch saying what happened to Jack in Dallas was a punishment," a presidential aide growls.) In classic spy mode, he pursues the truth solo, a perilous quest that takes him from Europe to Africa to Vietnam.

The notion that this one novel alone wouldn't sustain a season's worth of top-flight HBO drama is simply not credible. Much of it reads not only like a post-JFK assassination novel, but like a post-September 11 one as well. Even when the chronologies don't match up, McCarry's themes always do. He wrote about Arab terrorists blowing up passenger planes over American cities … in 1979.

Mr. McCarry, who worked undercover for the CIA in Europe, Africa, and Asia between 1957 and 1967, probably has more real-world espionage experience than any spy novelist writing at a high literary level. His books are full of moving friendships, tragic love affairs, complicated family relationships, and, of course, betrayals. They are also immensely cosmopolitan, sweeping us from Paris to Saigon to the Atlas Mountains, from Berlin in 1939 to Moscow in 2003, while rarely striking a false note. "The Miernik Dossier," Mr. McCarry's first novel, includes a slave-owning, Cambridge-educated, Sudanese prince so outrageously self-confident and funny he would leave every Muslim currently on American television looking like a witless stereotype.

In the end, any putative series would stand or fall on Christopher himself, the kind of American we can be proud of. Theoretically, that should be a good reason to put him on TV. Unless, that is, we have come to prefer charismatic thugs like Tony Soprano. Could it be that he is now the "real American"? Over to you, HBO.

bbernhard@nysun.com