Peter Biskind’s new Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile and Greed Upended TV, is a fascinating attempt to chart the transition from cable television’s first efforts at creating what we now look back on as “the second golden era of TV” to the industry’s latest incarnation in the form of multiple, and often very confusing streaming platforms. Biskind is the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the classic 1998 history of how Tinseltown’s Young Turks grabbed the reins in the early 1970s from the old men who built the industry, only to watch helplessly a few years later as their dark, nihilistic, European-influenced films quickly lost favor with suburban American audiences, who preferred the growing amount of popcorn faire spearheaded by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in the later portion the ‘70s. This change in viewing habits allowed studio executives to wrest control of their product back from the would-be auteurs now too coke-addled to bring their films in on time and on budget.
As a result of changing viewing tastes at the box office, the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” generation lost significant ground on the big screen, but their mindset would gain a new foothold in Hollywood beginning in the late 1990s, thanks to cable TV services such as HBO and AMC, who saw the creation of dark dramatic series as a way to capture significant real estate on cable and satellite onscreen programming guides.
As Biskind writes in Pandora’s Box, HBO was the first cable network to see something different than simply rebroadcasting Hollywood movies and running videotaped specials by standup comedians too raunchy for terrestrial TV networks.
Not surprisingly for an industry as self-obsessed as Hollywood, Biskind’s new book is far from the first snapshot of the television industry at a particular point in time. In 1983, Todd Gitlin wrote Inside Prime Time, which quickly became a popular college textbook to teach students how American network TV worked. Only a few years earlier, Alvin Toffler’s 1980 futurist classic The Third Wave predicted then-recent technology such as the VCR, home video games, online computing services and cable TV would “de-massify” the forms of mass media that had existed for most of the 20th century, not least of which, commercial television:
[S]lice the mass television public into segments, and each slice not only increases our cultural diversity, it cuts deeply into the power of the networks that have until now so completely dominated our imagery. John O’Connor, the perceptive critic of The New York Times, sums it up simply. “One thing is certain,” he writes. “Commercial television will no longer be able to dictate either what is watched or when it is watched.”
However, in the early 1980s, all this “de-massification” was still of little concern to the men running the original big three commercial networks. With offices in Manhattan and studios in Hollywood, and reliant upon the commercials of massive corporations for their funding, networks had an accompanying massive fear of alienating the sensibilities of most centrist liberals and conservatives in flyover country. This meant endless hours of the blandest prime time programs possible, which meant evening schedules full of cop shows, medical dramas, and beginning in the mid-1970s on ABC, shows with plenty of “jiggle,” such as Charlie’s Angels and Three’s Company.
The word that Gitlin repeated frequently in Inside Prime Time was “Recombinant.” Network TV in the 1960s through the 1990s was all about small modifications of existing formulas. A hit theatrical movie like M*A*S*H or The Odd Couple could be reworked into what would hopefully be a long-running hit TV series. An existing TV series on one network — say NBC’s Adam-12 police procedural about two young L.A. police officers patrolling the streets in a squad car becomes ABC’s The Rookies, a police procedural about three young Southern California police officers patrolling the streets in a pair of squad cars. As Gitlin wrote:
Hits are so rare that executives think a blatant imitation stands a good chance of getting bigger numbers than a show that stands on its own…If M*A*S*H and Holiday on Ice are both winners, why not army surgeons on skates? In this world without deep tradition, “why not?” is the recurrent question. The result is the absurd industrialization of mannerism, which is the industry’s characteristic style.
Another element of the industry’s characteristic style back in the day, Gitlin added, quoting CBS’s William S. Parley, were “‘likable, intriguing characters who capture the imagination, interest, or concern of the audience.’ Again and again, when I asked executives why a show had failed, I was told, ‘People didn’t like the characters.’ Then came little theories about what exactly they didn’t like. NBC’s Gerald Jaffe said about the failed working-class series Skag, for example, ‘Anyone with a family all of whom are ugly people inside will do badly. Good people should be overcoming adversity.’”
Flashforward to late 2023. In Pandora’s Box, Biskind covers the big three network executives’ obsession with likeable characters right at the start of his book:
“You couldn’t kill a dog,” recalls Sopranos writer Robin Green, reflecting on her years laboring in the vineyards of network television. “The character loses the sympathy of the audience.” Remember the outcry that greeted the scene in The Godfather where the horse’s head ends up in the bed of Jack Woltz, never mind the scores of humans garroted, shot, stabbed, or otherwise consigned to sleep with the fishes.
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Copying the sponsor-based business model used by radio in the 1920s and ’30s, their shows, analogous to the four quadrant blockbusters produced by the movie studios, were meant for everyone. The programming may have been free, but the not-so-hidden cost was high: terminal blandness. Fiercely protective of their brands, jittery advertisers whose primary goal was to sell Camels, Cheerios, and Chevrolets wanted TV’s doctors and lawyers happily married, not fighting in divorce court. They wanted their cops and cowboys delivering the bad guys to justice, not beating, framing, or otherwise abusing them.
Why were there so many cops and doctors and lawyers on the air back then? Why do those professions still dominate terrestrial network TV to this day? For Inside Prime Time, Gitlin wrote, using an assist from David Gerber, the creator of NBC’s long-running Police Story and Police Woman TV series:
Exit Joe Friday, Enter Tony Soprano
In the industry jargon, [policemen] afforded a franchise—a hero’s right to interfere every week in the lives of others. “In television there are a certain amount of franchises,” Gerber points out. “What do you got? You got doctor, lawyer, and chief. Throw in some Indians, for westerns. So doctor, lawyer, and police; the westerns are gone. You try to do something offbeat—White Shadow, Paper Chase, American Dream—and you get shot down. So you stay with the franchise or you take a chance.
Flash-forward to late in the 1990s. In Pandora’s Box, Biskind writes that this formula would be little changed until HBO, which had replaced meddlesome sponsors with a subscriber base. Because it was on cable TV, the FCC had much less control over what it could show. The management of HBO had slowly come to the conclusion that their network could do more than run recent movies and comedy specials. While history judges 1999’s The Sopranos as the first popular cable TV series filled with charismatic anti-heroes, Biskind writes that it was really HBO’s 1997 prison-based series Oz that first broke the mold for what cable could offer.
Oz premiered in 1997 and ran for six seasons, until 2003. There had been nothing even remotely like it on American television, and nothing ever since. [Showrunner Tom] Fontana once said, “The things I’m getting away with, I should be arrested for.” It wasn’t only the buttons he pushed or the boundaries he broke that made the series so unique. It was that he somehow managed to humanize the parade of freaks that comprised the prison’s flora and fauna, so that viewers came to empathize with the characters, even the worst Aryan Nation thugs, one of whom burns a swastika into the butt of another with the red-hot tip of a lit cigarette. Oz demonstrated that viewers would stick around and watch characters no matter how distasteful they were, so long as they were compelling.
It’s difficult to overstate the lasting impact of the show. Says [Chris Albrecht of HBO], “Oz showed what was possible to do on television. It blew the doors off.” He continues, “Tom and Barry Levinson were a little like Lewis and Clark, looking down at the Pacific going ‘Holy crap, we made it.’”
This mode of television was explored in 2013 by Brett Martin in his book, Difficult Men, an early look at what drove the first cable TV series with antiheroes as leads such as The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Wire. These shows were sold to satellites and local cable providers under a very different formula than the heyday of The Big Three:
John Landgraf, who became president of FX Entertainment in 2004, explained the value of having original shows like The Shield and Rescue Me: “There is a group of consumers out there, in the tens of millions”—way more than watch any individual FX show—“that would really be bothered if they couldn’t get FX. They would either change cable providers or bitch to their cable provider. I’m not sure that would happen if all we had was Two and a Half Men repeats and a really good lineup of Hollywood movies.”
With success also comes leverage, in particular for the ability to “bundle” a media company’s other stations alongside a popular one. So, for instance, AMC Networks…could insist that a carrier take on IFC, Sundance Channel, and WE tv if it wanted also to show Mad Men and Breaking Bad. And when the satellite provider Dish Network refused, it could wage a public relations war, appealing directly to subscribers…the era in which Stephen J. Cannell could have a show canceled while pulling a 32 share—that is, over a third of the entire viewing audience (Black Sheep Squadron, in 1978)—was obviously long gone.
Using a very different sales formula than TV of the 1950s-through 1990s, these shows featured very different casts and stories than formulaic cops, detectives, and war hero stories that earlier TV producers such Cannell specialized in:
America, as The Sopranos debuted, was well on its way to becoming a bitterly divided country. Just how divided would become vividly clear in the 2000 presidential election. After it, Americans on the losing side were left groping to come to terms with the Beast lurking in their own body politic and—as the decade rolled on with two wars, secret prisons, torture scandals, and more—with what things it might be doing in their name.
That side happened to track very closely with the viewership of networks like AMC, FX, and HBO: coastal, liberal, educated, “blue state.” And what the Third Golden Age brought them was a humanized red state: cops, firemen, Mormons, even Nixon-supporting Don Draper and, crime of all crimes, nonvoting Jimmy McNulty [of The Wire]. This was different from previous “working-class” shows, such as Roseanne, pitched at attracting a large audience who related to its financially struggling characters, or even All in the Family, which invited each side to laugh equally at the other. This was the ascendant Right being presented to the disempowered Left—as if to reassure it that those in charge were still recognizably human.
Matthew Weiner, the creator and showrunner of AMC’s Mad Men, which ran from 2007-2015, got his big break as a writer on The Sopranos. Mad Men and Breaking Bad put AMC, the previously de classe basic cable movie rerun platform on the critics’ map as a player in the series game. Biskind notes that Weiner incorporated many of the quotes of AMC management into the dialog of Mad Men. In a fourth season episode, ad agency co-owner Roger Sterling, played by John Slattery, likely echoed the sentiments of Weiner straining against the demands of AMC when he said, “My father used to say this is the greatest job in the world except for one thing: the clients.”
Postmodern Television: The Audience Becomes an Afterthought
While Weiner couldn’t divest himself of a network, (though in the #MeToo era, networks seemed to work hard at divesting themselves of him) Mad Men was symptomatic of the new round of cable TV shows, that somehow got sold, despite not having much of an audience. Because Mad Men appealed to journalists and others plugged into the hyper-online crowd, it developed a hype in massively inverse proportion to its actual number of first-run viewers.
In 2011 at Ricochet, TV critic Richard Rushfield explored “The Cultural Imperialism of Mad Men:”
Next March, AMC’s Mad Men will return to the airwaves after a year and a half absence. It’s return will be treated as the most significant cultural event of the year. Its stars will blanket the covers of our glossy magazines. Articles will be written in the New York Times and our most elite literary journals dissecting the show’s meaning. Banana Republic will promote its high end Mad Men line.
Mad Men at its height was watched by 2.9 million viewers. In contrast, CBS’ military police procedural drama NCIS last week was seen by 19.7 million viewers. As far as I can tell, NCIS has never been featured on the cover of any major American magazine apart from TV Guide and one issue of Inland Empire, the magazine of California’s suburban Riverside and San Bernadino counties.
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The New York Times and GQ Magazine have the right to cover whatever shows they wish and are free to bury themselves in any obscure niche they like. Our great journals still behave and write however, as though their coverage is guided not by personal preference but totally and completely by that good old objective journalistic judgement of what is important. It would be one thing if the papers (and the New York Times certainly is not alone in this) were to say, here’s our picks for the new season or what we think is the most interesting show on TV, or perhaps more to the point, here’s what we believe that the rarefied niche of upscale, urban readers that we target will be interested in reading about.
But they don’t; they still operate under the frayed pretense that they are covering the “news” of culture, giving their readers a report on what the most important developments of the day in the entertainment world. By that standard, the “flood the zone” coverage of Mad Men is completely unjustified in comparison to the information blackout on NCIS.
Netflix took this mindset even further in their attempt to get Oscar nominations for the movies they bankrolled, Biskind writes:
Struggling to open new product post-pandemic, three theater chains granted Netflix a six-day theatrical window for Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the first of two sequels to Knives Out, the rights for which Netflix bought for an astounding $450 million, give or take a few zeroes. Sources say that they were given the impression that this was a test to see whether exhibitors and Netflix could cooperate in the future. The former, however, were furious when Sarandos, on the red carpet of the 2022 Venice Film Festival, announced, “Streaming first.”
An angry theater executive groused, Netflix “couldn’t care less about exhibition.” Instead of the two thousand screens exhibitors anticipated, it played in 638. Given that it grossed $15 million in just one week, and could have made an estimated $50 million in wide release, “This is probably one of the biggest gaffes in modern film release history in terms of bungling what could have been made at the box office with Glass Onion,” said Jeff Bock, a senior media analyst at Exhibitor Relations. “In my mind, they left hundreds of millions of dollars at the table.”
The following year, Netflix’s recent German remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, Apple+’s Killers of the Flower Moon directed by Martin Scorsese and Napoleon, directed by Ridley Scott, all played in brief theatrical runs to often nearly empty theaters to qualify for their Oscar nominations.
As Richard Rushfield wrote above, during the days of the Sopranos and Mad Men, the viewer became almost an afterthought for cable TV’s production companies. During the streaming wars, as a multitude of apps began to proliferate on iPhones, iPads, and Roku boxes, it became increasingly difficult, bordering on impossible, for the viewer to find what he wants to watch. Which is why veteran TV producer Rob Long titles his review of Pandora’s Box in the Washington Free Beacon, “How Watching Television Became a Chore:”
Watching TV has never been so baffling. You don’t just walk in the house and flop down in front of the TV and start flipping around anymore. Watching television in 2024 requires what psychologists and self-help gurus call intentionality. You have to know what you’re looking for and exactly where to find it, which means the entire process usually starts with a Google search. We’re all familiar with today’s Television Catechism. It goes: What was that show we wanted to see, again? Followed by: Which one of the thingy’s is it on? And ends in an exasperated: Do we even get that one?
If you’re at my house, the Anglo-Saxon vulgarism for sexual intercourse is inserted before the words “show,” “see,” “on,” “get,” and “one” in the above.
It’s also possible you will find yourself re-inputting a forgotten password, which will inspire more profanity.
Because Biskind is writing about the changes in viewing from a left-leaning perspective, there’s a fair amount of bashing of Trump and his supporters as the book enters 2016 and beyond. And he misses much of the material that conservative and conservative-adjacent pundits such as the Critical Drinker have been covering that have turned viewers off of streaming platforms such as Disney+ (especially Disney+), the replacement of male heroes with the omnipresent girlboss, and declaring a portion of the viewers as racist and/or sexist if they complain about the retconning of a favorite show:
All This and World War II
Perhaps the series that ties together the last half century of the changes to the big screen, and the cable and streaming wars is Apple+’s Masters of the Air. Early in Pandora’s Box, Biskind notes how Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s WWII miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific ended up on HBO:
[HBO’s Michael] Fuchs likes to point to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, both produced by Tom Hanks’s company after he left HBO, as examples. “HBO spent hundreds of millions of dollars [on those shows], because Chris [Albrecht] was taking Pilates lessons at Tom Hanks’s house. A two-hundred-million-dollar Pilates class!” (According to Albrecht, Hanks took Pilates lessons at his house.)
Because of recent business acquisitions such as AT&T buying HBO, and Apple TV looking for quality programming, Masters of the Air finally ended up at the nascent streaming platform. The new series takes the WWII themes of Band of Brothers and The Pacific and focuses on the air war over Nazi-controlled Europe. It plays a bit like the old 1960s ABC TV series 12 O’Clock High, but whereas the former utilized miles of grainy combat black and white footage originally shot during WWII, the new Apple+ series is entirely built around state-of-the-art digital effects originally developed for Disney+’s Star Wars spinoff series, The Mandalorian. In that sense, the streaming series has gone full circle.
When George Lucas was writing the original Star Wars, he used scenes from WWII dogfighting movies like 633 Squadron and The Dam Busters to envision his space battles. This footage also came in handy as temporary inserts while Star Wars was being edited, as the then-revolutionary special effects being completed by the newly-formed Industrial Light and Magic had not yet been completed.
Flash-forward nearly 50 years, and Masters of the Air reverses that equation, utilizing cutting edge digital special effects techniques created for the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian to reproduce the bomber missions of WWII. While it has moments of graphic violence that would have been unthinkable on network TV in the 1960s, its patriotic themes would have been right at home on the big three networks back then.
But Masters of the Air already risks becoming yet another series that risks never finding its intended audience. All of the content created first by the cable networks, and then the streaming platforms ever since the Sopranos is a glut of product so large, even Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote would blanche at taking it all in. As Sonny Bunch, then of the Weekly Standard (before their own digital demise) asked in 2018, in an article headlined, “Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?”
The flood of television programming from Netflix et al. since 2013, and the shotgun-blast manner in which new seasons are released, have combined to make it virtually impossible to keep up with everything worth watching. As recently as 15 years ago, a discerning TV watcher only needed to keep tabs on a handful of shows—a Sunday-night drama from HBO or AMC or Showtime; a Tuesday-night drama and a Thursday-night comedy from FX or maybe a broadcast network. But now it feels like there are nigh on infinite offerings from a nearly limitless number of channels. With thousands of hours of new TV coming out every year and an increasingly fractured marketplace demanding customers keep track of several different streaming services, how do we keep the truly excellent programming from being lost in the flood of mediocrity?
And if those shows do survive in some form, where will we be viewing them? The recent publication date of Biskind’s book, Rob Long writes, means that it doesn’t include what is very likely to follow in the relatively near future — the money running out, thanks to a contracting Wall Street, and consumers who have seen their streaming fees steadily increasing, even as their cost of living is contracting thanks to inflation, and faced with a dearth of interesting original product to view:
[A]s I enjoyed Biskind’s fast-paced chronicle of the entertainment business during the recent go-go, flush-with-money decades, it all feels like a lengthy overture to the real story, which is what happens now that money is tight and the entire business is contracting. If you think “guts, guile, and greed” upended TV during the fat years, just wait until the sequel, Pandora’s Box II: Revenge of the Shareholders. It’ll be even gutsier, greedier, and with more guile—in other words, it might end up being a pretty good television series. If, that is, you can find it.
The late screenwriter William Goldman once noted that, “Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood.” And yet somehow, the industry keeps surviving. But Goldman was quoted as saying that nearly 20 years ago; a decade and a half prior to the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and the industry’s dalliances with the woke revolution of the last decade. Movies and television will both survive in some form, but as we’ve seen in the 1980s, the 2000s, and prior to 2019, likely not in its current incarnation. Like its predecessor books from previous decades, Peter Biskind’s Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile and Greed Upended TV will be seen by future readers as both an invaluable snapshot of TV’s then current era, and a cautionary tale of mistakes made inside both the boardroom and the writers’ room.