MANY years ago, in an era when the phrases "boob tube," "idiot box" and "vast wasteland" went unchallenged as television descriptors among the Discerning Classes, I sat in a pool of prospective jurors on a case involving a fancy jeweler. Aiming, apparently, to assess whether we were likely to confuse the actions of real-life rich people with those on "Dynasty," the defense lawyer asked each of us, "Do you watch TV?" "Nah," swore a majority of my exceptionally discriminating citizen peers. "Just a little." "Maybe some 'Nova' from PBS on a black-and-white TV."

Had counsel tried that line of questioning today, odds are she would have gotten a very different earful, including enthusiastic recitations of dialogue from "The Sopranos"; sophisticated analyses of Don Draper's character flaws on "Mad Men"; and celebrations of "Six Feet Under," "Deadwood," "The Wire" and the violent, amoral mayhem that drives "Breaking Bad." Today, those same potential jurors are more likely to say they don't go to many movies (see above re: "boobs" and "idiots"), because they're home watching good television, much of it on cable rather than network TV. We're in a fascinating moment in the creative cycles of popular culture, when television - OK, fine, the best of television - is embracing complexity, subtlety and innovation in storytelling with an exciting maturity. We're in a moment when the intricate structure and deep character development in long-form dramas can stand up to comparison with great literature. We're in a time when going to work for what the brilliant British television writer Dennis Potter once called "the medium of the occupying power" is a high calling. (Except maybe for David Chase, the cranky-genius creator of "The Sopranos." Hold that thought.)

Cultural survey of recent revolution

Following what the journalist Brett Martin identifies as a first burst of literary energy in the 1950s (when the medium was young) and a second in the 1980s (when the forward-thinking executive Grant Tinker's MTM Enterprises began the groundbreaking "Hill Street Blues"), this moment of ascendancy has become television's "Third Golden Age." In "Difficult Men," Martin maps a wonderfully smart, lively and culturally astute survey of this recent revolution - starting with a great title that does double duty. For starters, the antiheroic protagonists in what the author calls "the signature American art form of the first decade of the 21st century, 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," are indeed difficult men. (And they are all men.) The best-loved fellows in the Third Golden Age include suburban mobsters ("The Sopranos"), compromised cops ("The Shield"), touchy drug dealers ("The Wire"), lying ad execs ("Mad Men"), outrageous brothel keepers ("Deadwood") and even a relatable serial killer ("Dexter"). Not a nice guy in the bunch.

But the men (and they are all men) who created these works of TV art and have presided over them as show runners are difficult men, too - many of them pieces of work, it turns out, with sharp edges that contribute to their characteristic storytelling styles. David Simon, the itchy Baltimore Sun journalist who put his mark on "Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Corner," "Treme" and his masterpiece of Baltimore-as-cosmos, "The Wire," reveals himself to be a perpetually dissatisfied ranter who once chastised "Wire" fans for, essentially, liking his series the wrong way (i.e., talking about favorite characters rather than the show's larger political message). "Hill Street Blues" writer David Milch, the "wildly unpredictable" creator of... "Deadwood," set in the rich muck of late-19th-century gold-rush South Dakota and ripe with gorgeous, florid, filthy dialogue, is a mess of autocratic perversity and struggles with addiction. "If there was a method to this madness," Martin writes with a psychological insight that enhances his nimble reporting, "it seemed to be that of a fireman setting blazes only he is capable of putting out, thus ensuring his own heroic indispensability."

Happy family of 'Six Feet Under'

As for Matthew Weiner, who graduated from "The Sopranos" and went on to create that magnificent period-piece dirge to gray flannel suits we know as "Mad Men," Martin astutely notes, "Certainly it was not a unique question in the history of the arts: how someone capable of seeming insensitive and out of emotional touch in the real world could also produce work of exquisite emotional intelligence and empathy."

Not every boss man in "Difficult Men" is as maddening. Under the guidance of the show runner Alan Ball, the writers' room for "Six Feet Under" - the one about the dysfunctional family of funeral directors - "could lay plausible claim to being the happiest in TV." And Vince Gilligan, the creator and show runner of "Breaking Bad" - the one about the high school teacher with the meth lab - gets a warm shout-out as "someone who managed to balance the vision and microscopic control of the most autocratic show runner with the open and supportive spirit of the most relaxed."

But it is to David Chase of "The Sopranos" that Martin gives his fullest attention. This is no doubt in part a result of the generous access the author had to the show's production team and almost all the actors in connection with writing "The Sopranos: The Complete Book," an official companion tied to the unsettling conclusion of the series in 2007. (One exception: James Gandolfini, whose recent, sudden death now casts a shadow on these pages.) But also, clearly, something in Chase's complexity - I believe the Freudian (or is it mob?) term for that condition of perpetual discontent and agita is meshugge - provides an insight into everything that has come together to make ours such a rewarding moment in television storytelling. At least about men.

"David Chase's long, unfortunate slide upward into success" is how Martin archly describes Chase's progress during the not-so-golden ages of the medium, writing for "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" and "The Rockford Files," among other productions, while dreaming of becoming a New Jersey-bred Fellini or Godard. A screenwriter was what he had always wanted to be and still wants to be, a filmmaker, an artist. In the years since "The Sopranos" first went on the air in January 1999, many profiles have been written about this Dyspeptic Man Who Prefers Movies, with exaggerated attention paid to the haunting effect of his deceased mother, Norma, on her son's creation of Tony Soprano's fictional (monstrous) mother, Livia, as well as to all the other not-to-be-trusted women in the "Sopranos" universe.

But "Difficult Men" is the first time that Chase-ness takes on a larger meaning, as one man's urge to tell stories that will matter within the medium of the occupying power becomes emblematic of a whole cadre of buck-the-system storytellers who are doing the very same thing.