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Televisions: One Season in American Television
Televisions is an in depth examination of a single season. A year thar saw Fawell versus Asner, Snyder versus barrett, labor versus management, cable versus network, lots of drugs and lost of money.
179 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1983
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 19, 2017
Horribly written book that supposedly is about the 1981-82 TV season. It's instead one writer's anti-conservative rant as he starts and ends with ridiculing the Moral Majority (which had an impact the author fails to admit). Along the way he fills the tiny book with small items he pulled from magazines and an interview with Garry Marshall. None of it is interesting and it feels thrown-together by a guy who doesn't know what he's talking about.
It's a tiny book, 75 double-spaced 8 1/2 x 11 pages once you take out all the ratings lists he includes (that have no real purpose or context). Not sure how it got published, it's like a bad college term paper by a student that rushed to do the research a couple hours before it was due. The main problems are the many errors in the book--a lot of them. He calls the main TV boycotter "Robert E. Wildmon" and of course the famous minister's name is Donald Wildmon. Then suddenly at the end of the book he calls him the correct name! He calls the famous "Heidi Bowl" "the Heidi affair." Huh? Throughout the book he claims Hollywood "calls" things certain names that just aren't true. He has a section where he claims to get the opinion of a TV executive about St. Elsewhere, but it's actually fake quotes taken from a bunch of people he talked with involved with the show. Another chapter is a "friend" who was a TV star that was hooked on cocaine and now is penniless--but there is so little detail that it sounds made up. Then there's the chapter on Fred Silverman--which has a few paragraphs about the great programmer and the rest is a silly excursion into Rona Barrett and the Tomorrow Show. Didn't this guy have an editor that would force him to make sense of all this or hold him accountable to journalistic standards?
Knowing that he has written other books I would now say don't trust a thing the guy writes. He just does some research, tosses in his slanted opinions (though he slams Ed Asner just as much as he does Jerry Falwell), and then fills the thin book with singular "items" because he's too lazy to actually write a narrative. A poorly written waste of time.
It's a tiny book, 75 double-spaced 8 1/2 x 11 pages once you take out all the ratings lists he includes (that have no real purpose or context). Not sure how it got published, it's like a bad college term paper by a student that rushed to do the research a couple hours before it was due. The main problems are the many errors in the book--a lot of them. He calls the main TV boycotter "Robert E. Wildmon" and of course the famous minister's name is Donald Wildmon. Then suddenly at the end of the book he calls him the correct name! He calls the famous "Heidi Bowl" "the Heidi affair." Huh? Throughout the book he claims Hollywood "calls" things certain names that just aren't true. He has a section where he claims to get the opinion of a TV executive about St. Elsewhere, but it's actually fake quotes taken from a bunch of people he talked with involved with the show. Another chapter is a "friend" who was a TV star that was hooked on cocaine and now is penniless--but there is so little detail that it sounds made up. Then there's the chapter on Fred Silverman--which has a few paragraphs about the great programmer and the rest is a silly excursion into Rona Barrett and the Tomorrow Show. Didn't this guy have an editor that would force him to make sense of all this or hold him accountable to journalistic standards?
Knowing that he has written other books I would now say don't trust a thing the guy writes. He just does some research, tosses in his slanted opinions (though he slams Ed Asner just as much as he does Jerry Falwell), and then fills the thin book with singular "items" because he's too lazy to actually write a narrative. A poorly written waste of time.
February 26, 2015
An in-depth look at life in American television for the 1981-82 season. That was the start of cable TV, so things have changed considerably since this book was written. But it's an interesting insight into how TV used to be made, and, in some cases, still is.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews