Politics & Power Quote by Gabriel Macht

Macht is drawing a neat little map of where creative risk is permitted to live, and it doubles as a subtle piece of industry self-justification. When he says cable has "more room" for "broader stories", he is not praising cable for being bigger; he is praising it for being looser. More episodes, fewer standards-and-practices landmines, less pressure to please everyone in America at once. "Broader" here really means: messier, thornier, morally ambiguous, allowed to linger on character rather than sprint toward the next ad break.

The dig at "mainstream" network TV is calibrated. He doesn't call it bad; he calls it "conservative", a word that signals caution, committee decision-making, and a fear of alienating the median viewer. It's an actor's way of naming a business model: broadcast networks sell scale, and scale punishes specificity. If you need 10 million people, you sand down the sharp edges. If you can thrive with fewer, you can afford sharper edges.

Context matters: Macht's public identity is tied to Suits, a USA Network cable hit that benefited from exactly this mid-tier cable sweet spot - glossy, accessible, but still more flexible than the big four. His intent is partly artistic (permission to deepen characters), partly reputational (positioning himself on the side of "serious" storytelling), and partly nostalgic for the era when cable was where TV went to feel grown-up.