Theme Song for an Old Show [Hardcover]

Jeffrey Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2007

A deeply felt homage to classic television from the author of Meritocracy and The Conference of the Birds.

One of the most beloved programs in the history of television, the cop show Northie, has fallen into a ratings slump. Will it be cannibalized by unscrupulous studio executives for one last burst of high scores? Or will it be allowed to conclude its run in dignity?

These are the questions faced by the protagonist Louie, now a television producer, in this third volume of Jeffrey Lewis's "Meritocracy Quartet". Zacky Kurtz, the "King of Television," who is obsessed by the possibility of being the first producer to get "bare ass" on network television, drives the plot toward a conclusion that is as passionate an indictment of our mass culture's coarsening as American literature has recently produced.

Yet Theme Song for an Old Show is about more than dirty business on television. It is an elegiac tribute to the medium, and to the kind of show of which Louie was a proud part, and to Louie's father, a television producer of an earlier, more naïve era.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lewis's diverting third novel, a part of his ongoing Meritocracy Quartet (following The Conference of the Birds), concerns a writer, Louie, working on the third novel of a series called the Meritocracy Quartet. Lewis coproduced and wrote for the 1980s cop show Hill Street Blues; his first-person protagonist similarly contributes to a cop show called Northie. Told in retrospect, the novel takes Louie through the 1980s (the first two books cover the '60s and '70s), when he moves to L.A.: his father, Bill, who abandoned the family, lives there with his current wife. After meeting a woman named Melissa (who has recently overdosed), Louie breaks into Hollywood by joining Northie. He has a strange relationship with Northie producer Kurtz, Melissa's ex- and one of Louie's several father substitutes (a pattern Louie acknowledges). Melissa gets pregnant, and she and Louie marry; later, despite trepidation all around, they have a second child. Despite unnecessary metafictional trappings and a forgivingly loose format, Louie's story is consistently entertaining. (Apr.)
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Review

Bangor Daily News, Margery Y. Irvine

"Theme Song for an Old Show is a theme song for the oldest show of all — discovering what, besides mortality, we share with all humans, and also what makes us individual. Jeffrey Lewis has written a novel the very form and structure of which helps us to see life’s journey."


Publishers Weekly

...consistently entertaining.


Kikus Reviews

[T]he TV-biz ruminations make up the best passages here, as when Louie deconstructs the idea that procedurals like Northie relied for their force and novelty upon superior "realism." His dealings with fellow producer Zacky Kurtz, a man obsessed with getting "bare ass" on American television, is consistently entertaining, too.


Library Journal

This is the third book in Lewis's "Meritocracy Quartet," which looks at the generation that came of age in the Sixties; the first two titles covered the 1960s and 1970s. A lawyer-turned-television writer (he worked on the 1980s police drama Hill Street Blues), Lewis is really tracing his own life through a barely visible scrim of fiction. And yet the author is up to more than fictionalized memoir. His opening chapter, in which his marvelous ear for idiomatic speech is revealed as much through narration as in dialog, hints at the concepts he will explore: the vagaries of love, the odd consorting of dignity and temptation, and, yes, the fragility of creation and existence. Narrator Louie moves to Los Angeles in 1980, where his father had gone years before upon deserting the family for another woman and for TV production. Louie has success writing for a cop show called Northie, meets the woman who becomes his wife, and reckons with a TV producer with very particular ambitions. That fine ear of Lewis's (with the occasional mawkish exception) makes his prose style the book's strength. This volume, as well as the earlier ones, deserves general readership. Ultimately, public libraries should have the entire quartet in their collections.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Other Press; First Edition edition (April 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590512332
• ISBN-13: 978-1590512333
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 0.7 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,693,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars An easy-going but very moving book, June 7, 2007

By 

Leora Skolkin-Smith "LSS" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Theme Song for an Old Show (Hardcover)

Wandering around this year's BEA I came upon the author of this lovely book, Jeffrey Lewis. After I read his work I realized that the writer and the book were very similiar in character and style--both generous to the reader, unpretentious, open-hearted in the best ways. Theme Song for an Old Show is an entertaining narrative, full of unique moments and honest longings. It tells a story about family and a history so near to us we have forgotten we needed some perspective on it--that of New York in the 1980's and before.

I was glad to meet both author and novel.