Story: From variety show joke writers to radio scribes who graduated to the screen to a generation of writers who grew up with television, the history of writing for TV in the United States is traced, with focus on particular program types, genres, and where merited, individual productions and writers. A consistent cast of characters in the writing trade begins to become apparent, shaping the medium in their own idiosyncratic ways. The book’s coverage ends in 1991.
Review: Once upon a time, back in the days of reading Cinefantastique articles about Ronald D. Moore managing to get an unsolicited spec script in the door at Star Trek: The Next Generation, I was dead set on becoming a television writer. Looking back now, it’s more like something I was really interested in doing for a hot second. Those of us who fixated on that same success story and that same goal at that same time – and we were legion – probably didn’t realize that it was more fun being Ronald D. Moore than it was being the average overworked, underpaid TV writer. This book is full of stories that are fun to read from a distance… and convince me that maybe, just maybe, I dodged a bullet. Just working in television production at a local level proved to be precarious enough.
Storytellers To The Nation tells a chronological story of the development of the medium, but only for a few chapters. At the point at which the appetite for TV has forced the networks to program more and more of the day, and those offerings have spread out into more genres, and for the remainder of the book, things are divided up by genre, and even later, whole chapters focus on specific shows where it’s merited (Police Story, M*A*S**H, and Hill Street Blues are the shows that get their own chapters), but what ties the whole thing together is a cast of characters consisting of the writers getting the most consistent work. You get to know their likes, dislikes, biases, and their opinions of their cast, producers, studio suits, and fellow writers fairly quickly.
Some of the author’s biases are on display as well; one chapter deals with three genres of 1960s TV: realistic comedies, unrealistic comedies, and unrealistic dramas. In a decade that saw the runs of Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Lost In Space, and most of The Twilight Zone’s original broadcast run, all of science fiction is folded into a few pages on “unrealistic dramas”. In a book about the history of American television writing, Rod Serling merits…four paragraphs and a handful of other mentions? Are you kidding me? It’s obvious that the writer has much more of a thing for cop shows, because they get a lot of space here. They too are a worthy topic, though in hindsight, the book seems to take a less critical eye to police/crime dramas than one might hope.
But the wealth of other valuable information about the development of the medium outweighs that one sore point. The birth of the made-for-TV movie and the British-TV-inspired format of multi-night miniseries makes for fascinating reading. Particularly interesting is the section dealing with the development and the post-broadcast influence of Alex Haley’s Roots; I would’ve been happy to read a lot more about Roots and a lot less about the adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun. Another fascinating chapter, “Unsold Pilots and Flops”, is hilarious, illuminating, and teeth-grindingly frustrating in its anecdotes. As some of the most high-powered creatives in the business feel their showbiz cachet slipping away because they’ve wound up working on a show whose star has undergone a recent religious conversion and is followed around by their agent/spritiual advisor who dictates what they can and cannot be seen doing, it’s easy to feel that frustration right along with them. Honestly, some of the book’s best anecdotes and stories would make – wait for it – a great TV script.
On the downside, the perspectives of women trying to work in the business are compressed into a single chapter instead of woven into the narrative throughout the rest of the book; it almost feels like an editor somewhere said “uh…you’re leaving out something really important” at a very late stage, and this was the last-minute fix.
Storytellers ends with the author discussing what he regards as the pinnacles of early ’90s TV drama – China Beach and thirtysomething – and while those shows are definitely worthy of extended discussion, there seems to be something critical missing – maybe Michael Piller’s writers’ room confabs on Star Trek: The Next Generation, a style of hashing out stories that has cast an oversized shadow on how TV is written today. But the author seems to have some serious genre blindness in play here, so that goes undiscussed. The book’s cutoff point also happens just before the beginning of the monumental mostly-from-one-writer effort that was Babylon 5, but given that we’re squishing the accomplishments of Rod Serling into a handful of paragraphs, something tells me Straczynski wouldn’t get a fair shake.
I’d love to see a version of this book that covers more recent material, and without the frustrating genre blind spots. But if that can be overlooked, the stories related by the book’s interview subjects are what make this a must-read for anyone fascinated by this particular craft. But as you feel the interviewees’ blood pressure collectively rising as they remember their more frustrating episodes – both literal and figurative – I’m not sure this book will sell anyone on trying to break into that field.
Year: January 1, 1992
Author: Tom Stempel
Publisher: Continuum
Pages: 324