Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook

Yale University Press 216pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £11.99

Clive James “might as well have invented” the TV critic’s job, said A.A. Gill in The Sunday Times. Before him, it was a “grudging, unconsidered cul-de-sac”, usually given to washed-up hacks “too long-serving to fire” or celebrity writers who “despised the box”. But James, the Observer’s TV columnist from 1972 to 1982, treated TV “seriously” while also being “very funny about it”. Now, after a “generational interregnum”, he has returned to writing about TV with Play All, a book about box sets. Since being diagnosed with terminal leukaemia several years ago, James has enthusiastically watched shows such as The Wire, The Sopranos and Mad Men, often accompanied by members of his family. Such shows, he acknowledges, have replaced books and even films as the “cultural reference points of our time”. Here, he analyses them with a characteristic mix of “thigh-slapping wit and forehead-slapping insight”.

James has still “got it”, said James Medd in the New Statesman. He writes as well as ever about character, and identifies new tropes, such as the “irritating daughter” (as seen in Homeland and The Americans). And he gets stuck into the “big question”: what exactly is it that we find so fascinating about these shows? Yet his glibness can irritate (“Don Draper is Don Giovanni in a Brooks Brothers shirt”) and his “love” for The Good Wife, which isn’t in the same class as other series he discusses, is perplexing. Play All isn’t quite the book about “long-form TV drama” that we needed. I disagree, said Andrew Anthony in The Observer: these essays are “brilliantly illuminating”. On every page, there’s a sentence which you can only stop and admire. James’s own show may be “drawing to a close”, but he remains as “interested, amused and engaged” as ever.