TV Talk: Recently published books go behind the scenes of TV biz
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TribLive TV writer Rob Owen offers reading tips for recent books about TV.
One of the pitfalls of writing about TV in the #peakTV era is that if you don’t make a point to take a break from watching screeners of TV shows, you’ll never find time to pick up a book.
For the past five months, I decided to consciously make that effort (the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes and the end of #peakTV certainly helped make that possible). Even though it was often just 30 minutes before bedtime, I started reading again — first for fun, and then I dug into several worthwhile books about the TV business, listed below from most to least informative and enjoyable.
“Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever” ($29, Putnam) by Matt Singer explores the influence of the most influential movie critics on the motion picture industry, but Singer’s quick read is just as much about the behind-the-scenes machinations that brought Chicago newspaper critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert to national prominence via TV. Easily the most entertaining and revealing TV book among those I’ve read this year, Singer depicts Siskel and Ebert with humor in a warts-and-all style that doesn’t shy away from their petty combativeness (counting lines of dialogue to make sure one didn’t have more dialogue than the other during a “Saturday Night Live” sketch) or their grudging respect for each other that ultimately became a mutual appreciation and recognition that their brand relied on. One could not thrive without the other.
“Show: The Making and Unmaking of a Network Television Pilot” ($19, Cutting Edge) by Daniel Paisner is a reprint of a 1992 book titled “Horizontal Hold: The Making and Breaking of a Network Television Pilot.” The new edition includes an afterword by veteran TV writer Phoef Sutton, who contextualizes the book in the streaming era. Regardless of its age and changes to the industry over the past 30 years, “Show” gives one of the best glimpses behind the curtain at how TV gets made that I’ve read. Paisner doesn’t just observe — although there are some real eye-openers, including actor John Dye’s request for an assistant to stamp and mail his bills that leads a producer to conclude he’s a prima donna and may not be right for the part. He also critiques the producers and executives involved in the making of the failed 1990 CBS pilot “E.O.B.,” created by Bruce Paltrow (“St. Elsewhere”), Tom Fontana (“Homicide: Life on the Street”) and John Tinker (“When Calls the Heart”). “Show” is a must-read for TVphiles and offers cautionary tales for those working in the business.
“Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile and Greed Upended TV” ($33, William Morrow) by Peter Biskind begins with a remedial history of television that quickly turns into a dishy glimpse behind the scenes at the “Game of Thrones”-like rivalries among those running HBO from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s and the rise of originals on FX (a co-worker of “Justified” star Timothy Olyphant calls the actor “deeply insecure, not that talented and a bully”), AMC (described as “a snake pit of writhing egos”) and Netflix (an odd corporate culture of “radical transparency”). The contours of the book rehash hundreds of newspaper, magazine and trade publication articles that chronicled in real time the rise of cable and later the ascent of streaming, but some of the nitty-gritty castigations — offered by media executives on the record and, more often, anonymously — are new. The abundance of poorly behaved, terrible characters, including “The Sopranos” ill-tempered creator David Chase, pairs well with…
“End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood” ($11, Zibby Books) by Patty Lin takes readers behind the scenes and into the writers’ rooms where Lin worked — “Martial Law,” “Friends,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Breaking Bad” — and it’s a fascinating ride as viewers see just how unglamourous it is to make the Hollywood sausage. To hear Lin tell it, except for “Freaks and Geeks,” all her Hollywood writing experiences were terrible. Even “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan, who has a better reputation in the industry than some of her other bosses — like Carlton Cuse (“Martial Law”) and Marc Cherry (“Desperate Housewives”) — receives a withering critique. Many of Lin’s specific examples of showrunners making life difficult for a new writer (Cuse forcing newbie writer Lin to critique the script of a veteran showrunner; Cherry rewriting scripts in a frenzy while unable to articulate his vision for the show) ring true. But the totality of the experiences she recounts are so negative that one wonders, was Lin also part of the problem?
“:10 Seconds to Air: My Life in the Director’s Chair” ($28, The Unnamed Press) by television producer/director Don Mischer offers a collection of breezy essays on the assorted live television broadcasts Mischer produced and directed. They’re thoughtful, optimistic, uplifting and offer a Zelig- or Forrest Gump-like jaunt through some of the biggest pop culture moments with the biggest stars (Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Barbara Walters) of the past 70 years.
“The Fresh Prince Project: How ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ Remixed America” ($29, Atria Books) by Chris Palmer goes back in time and behind the scenes to explore the development and making of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” including a chapter dedicated to the departure of the show’s first Aunt Viv, played by Janet Hubert-Whitten. For fans of the 1990-96 NBC sitcom, it’s a worthwhile account, although some passages that suggest Palmer was an eyewitness to events 30 years ago seem a tad unbelievable.
“Fascist Lizards from Outer Space: The Politics, Literary Influences and Cultural History of Kenneth Johnson’s V” ($20, McFarland) by Dan Copp came out in 2017, but I only discovered it this year upon the 40th anniversary of the premiere of the NBC sci-fi miniseries “V,” an alien invasion allegory for the Nazis in World War II. The book is sloppily copy-edited, but it’s the only book I’ve found that goes behind the scenes and explores the themes and making of the original miniseries, its sequel and two disappointing weekly series.
“Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring” ($35, Oxford University Press) by Jon Burlingame updates and expands his previous book, 1996’s “TV’s Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes from Dragnet to Friends,” with this compendium of music for television, explored chronologically within 11 genres. It’s more of a reference book than it is a narrative story of TV music, with brief anecdotes from composers and showrunners about assorted TV show music and theme songs.