With a New Introduction Unsurpassed since its first publication, Inside Prime Time is the only book to take us behind the scenes to reveal how prime-time shows get on the air, stay on the air, and are shaped by the political and cultural climate of their times. Using more than 200 interviews with network executives, producers, writers, agents, and actors, as well as months of on-set investigation during the networks' more prosperous years, sociologist and critic Todd Gitlin takes us into a frantic world searching for hit shows. The result is both a lucid picture of the mechanics of prime time and a series of vivid stories of what succeeded or failed, and why. His analysis includes a blow-by-blow account of how the exceptional police series Hill Street Blues succeeded against all odds before eventually succumbing to formula itself.
No one else has analyzed, as Gitlin has, the inside track that links executives and producers, or the efforts of worried advertisers, hopeful writers, and the lobbyists of the fundamentalist right to shape America's waking hours. In a new introduction, Gitlin describes the elements of the new television order, and argues that the proliferation of cable channels and the decline of the old networks have not fundamentally changed the business mentality that guides decisions about the entertainment that will fill Americans' leisure time.
"This is very likely the most concentratedly intelligent book yet written about television. Gitlin immersed himself in the industry and yet somehow managed to preserve an independent, thoughtful viewpoint. The result is a delightfully concrete account of recent production from the inside which does not become captive of the usual trade assumptions." -- Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly
From the Publisher
"Perhaps the best book ever written about the thinking of the insulated men and women in the executive suites of Century City, Burbank, and Television City."--The Los Angeles Times
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Todd Gitlin is the author of fourteen books, including, most recently, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (with Liel Leibovitz); The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals; other titles include The Intellectuals and the Flag; Letters to a Young Activist; Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives; The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Inside Prime Time; The Whole World Is Watching; Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (co-author); two novels, Sacrifice and The Murder of Albert Einstein; and a book of poetry, Busy Being Born. These books have been translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. He also edited Watching Television and Campfires of the Resistance.
In February 2011, Counterpoint will publish his novel, Undying.
He has contributed to many books and published widely in general periodicals (The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Boston Globe, Dissent, The New Republic, The Nation, Wilson Quarterly, Harper's, American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, The American Prospect, et al.), online magazines (tnr.com, prospect.org, openDemocracy.net), and scholarly journals (Theory and Society, Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, et al.). He is on the editorial boards of Dissent and the Progressive Book Club, and a contributing writer to Mother Jones.
He is a regular contributor to the blog TPMcafe.com and the "Entanglements" and "The Book" blogs at The New Republic online.
He has been a columnist at the New York Observer and the San Francisco Examiner. During the 2008 campaign he is wrote a weekly "Sunday Watch" column for Columbia Journalism Review online and the Huffington Post. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Yale Review, and The New Republic.
In 2000, Sacrifice won the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for books on Jewish themes. The Sixties and The Twilight of Common Dreams were Notable Books in the New York Times Book Review. Inside Prime Time received the nonfiction award of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association; The Sixties was a finalist for that award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
He holds degrees from Harvard University (mathematics), the University of Michigan (political science), and the University of California, Berkeley (sociology). He was the third president of Students for a Democratic Society, in 1963-64, and coordinator of the SDS Peace Research and Education Project in 1964-65, during which time he helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War and the first American demonstrations against corporate aid to the apartheid regime in South Africa. During 1968-69, he was an editor and writer for the San Francisco Express Times, and through 1970 wrote widely for the underground press. In 2003-06, he was a member of the Board of Directors of Greenpeace USA.
He is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia University. Earlier, he was for sixteen years a professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at the University of California, Berkeley, and then for seven years a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. During 1994-95, he held the chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been a resident at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California, a fellow at the Media Studies Center in New York, and a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Oslo, the University of Toronto, East China Normal University in Shanghai, and the Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis in Tunisia.
He lectures frequently on culture and politics in the United States and abroad (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Greece, Turkey, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Morocco). He has appeared on many National Public Radio programs including Fresh Air as well as PBS, ABC, CBS and CNN. He lives in New York City with his wife, Laurel Cook.
This review is from: Inside Prime Time: With a New Introduction (Paperback)
Written in the early '80s, Inside Prime Time was long considered to be one of the quissential books to be written about the business about how a small group of insiders shaped American culture through television. The book has since become quite dated. Author Gitlin, best known as a former '60s radical and a co-founded of the SDS, is highly complimentary of what -- at that time -- was then the dominating creative forces on television, the socially relavent comedies of Norman Lear and the humanistic dramas -- like Lou Grant and the White Shadow -- that came out of MTM productions. As such, many of his predictions for the future of television would be blown out of the water by the advent of such comedies as Seinfeld and, to a lesser extent, less topical dramas like ER and the rise of HBO programming like the Sopranos, OZ, and Larry Sanders Show. That being said, the book still remains an interesting look at how television shows were sold and produced during the '70s and '80s and his argument that television is essentially controlled by a network of "insiders" and "social friends" who go out of their way to prevent any outsiders from getting a hold in their industry (and therefore prevent anything new or unusual from reaching the screen) remains relavent and, probably, accurate. Less succesful are Gitlin's attempts to argue that the entertainment industry, despite all appearances to the contrary, is actually a right-wing institution with a strong Republican bias. In these chapters, it appears that Gitlin allows his own political feelings to get in the way of serious scholarship and his own rather paranoid prediction that the then-recent election of Ronald Reagan would somehow lead to an artistic wasteland on television have since been descredited. (For all the dark portense that entertainment folks seem to use when talking about how Republicans equal censorship, it was during the Reagan/Bush administration that networks were actually willing to risk airing quality but hardly widely popular TV shows like St. Elsewhere, thirtysomething, Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, Moonlighting, and Twin Peaks.)
However, its perhaps unfair to condemn this book for making a few incorrect predictions. Afterall, hindsight is 20/20 and certainly, its easy to forget just how much of a mystery Reagan and conservatives in general were back when the '80s were just beginning. The book's true value remains in its two most interesting chapters. Since these chapters are both histories as opposed to analysis, one can simply focus on Gitlin's lively and witty writing style and enjoy the way he makes even the most mundane details seem like pivotal moments of human drama. The first of these chapters tells the story of American Dream, a forgotten, one-hour drama that lasted for only a few episodes in the late '70s. American Dream, produced by future Cagney and Lacey producer Barney Rosenzweig (who is widely quoted in the chapter and becomes a vivid character as a result; one is torn between sympathy for his obviously sincere artistic intentions and disgust by his banal attempts at self-promotion), was the story of a white man who decides to move his family to a widely black section of Chicago in order to teach his kids what real life is like. It sounds like a typical '70s television show and, despite Gitlin's claims to the contrary, it also sounds like a rather annoying, typically elitist example of '70s liberal chic (while many people are quoted in the chapter saying that the show had to be toned down to appeal to the widest possible audience, nobody seems to wonder what the point is of making a "realistic" television show about life in a black ghetto where all the main characters are white). Anyway, what were told about the show and the scripts make it all sound terribly banal and the chapter, despite Gitlin's intentions, becomes a rather compelling look at how entertainment insiders often delude themselves about the value of their product. Beyond that, however, the detailed stories of the conflicts that doomed the show (from the miscasting of Ned Beatty as the lead to the firing of the head writer and the eventual forcing out of producer Rosenzweig) make for interesting reading and should serve as a strong cautionary tale for anyone who wants to make it in the industry.
The other chapter deals with the creation of Hill Street Blues and remains the most important and detailed analysis of what made that show ground breaking television. Drawing from revealing interviews with men like Steven Bochco and Brandon Tartikoff (at the time, neither was as well known as they'd become), Gitlin reveals how sometimes the insider politics of the tv industry somehow conspire to create something special and groundbreaking and its rather inspiring. After the discouraging portrait painted by the failure of American Dream, Gitlin's analyis of Hill Street Blues is a nice reminder that sometimes, somehow, things actually do work the way they should. Though Gitlin admits that he felt Hill Street Blues eventually sold itself out in the name of ratings, he still shows why the success of that show proves that television actually can play an important and positive role in the American culture it has so often been accused of corrupting.
Inside Prime Time isn't perfect but its must reading for anyone planning on pursuing a career behind-the-scenes entertainment or who occasionally watches the flicking onscreen images and wonders what chaos raged behind-the-scenes to create the slick world they're now viewing.
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
current programming, dream gone astray, top network executives, pilot commitment, far righteous, packaging fee, programming executives, pilot script, fundamentalist right
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Lou Grant, Hill Street, American Dream, New York, Grant Tinker, Los Angeles, Bitter Harvest, Fred Silverman, Bob Wood, Brandon Tartikoff, Preview House, Aaron Spelling, Barney Rosenzweig, Ron Howard, Arnold Becker, Garry Marshall, Broadcast Standards, West Coast, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Daniel Boone, United States, Brandon Stoddard, Danny Novak, Michael Kozoll, Jonathan Axelrod
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