Terence Winter
Terence Winter is a writer, born 1960.
The back half of The Sopranos is where Winter learned the job. He joined in its second season and stayed to the end, which means he sat in that room through the stretch where the show stopped being a mob drama with a therapy premise and turned into something slower and stranger. He has two Primetime Emmys for outstanding writing in a drama series to show for the period.
Then HBO gave him a series of his own. Boardwalk Empire, which he created and ran from 2010 to 2014, took the house style back a century into Prohibition and kept the central preoccupation intact: men who explain their own violence to themselves as a sound business decision. It was expensive, patient television, and it took the better part of two seasons to become certain of what it was.
He also wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street. His second HBO series, Vinyl, again period, again about an industry that runs on appetite, did not last. That is the honest shape of the career: one of the better American television writers of his generation, with one undisputed masterpiece he did not create, one very good show that he did, and a couple of swings that missed. These days he appears on camera in the retrospectives, which is its own kind of tenure.
Movies (1)
TV (5)
Where to start with Terence Winter
Boardwalk Empire is the one with his name on the creator card and the right place to start, though give it a full season. The first half-dozen episodes are laying track, and the show improves sharply once it stops introducing people.
Vinyl is the interesting failure, worth your time if you enjoy music-business excess staged at enormous cost, and skippable otherwise. The rest of what is listed here is Winter talking about his own work, which is more useful than it sounds: Talking Sopranos is an episode-by-episode reconstruction of how those scripts were actually built, Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos is the polished documentary version of the same history, and The Final Shot: A Farewell to Boardwalk Empire is a short goodbye for anyone who stayed with that show to its last hour.