Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV
by Peter Biskind
(William Morrow, $33)
“Peter Biskind is a seasoned observer of how the showbiz sausage gets made,” said Chris Vognar in the Los Angeles Times. Twenty-five years after writing Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a best-seller that chronicled the New Hollywood revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, Biskind has taken on the so-called golden era of television that since 1997 has produced a “staggering” number of excellent series. The author, who has always been a bit sloppy in his reporting, is “at his sloppiest” in Pandora’s Box. Still, as he recounts the backstories of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and dozens of other celebrated shows, he “warms to the task of wrapping his arms around the trends and dead ends, the beefs and collaborations that have given this TV era its frisson.” And because he loves gossiping about Hollywood’s players, “Biskind is just about incapable of being boring.”
This book is “larded with stories of triumphs, creative crises, and appalling behavior,” said Christopher Grimes in the Financial Times. It opens in 1997, when HBO’s Oz, a prison drama series, shocked audiences by killing its apparent main character in Episode 1. As an instant hit, Oz “proved that viewers would watch compelling characters, even if they were unpleasant or did awful things,” and at HBO, that paved the way for Sex and the City and The Sopranos. “Soon, other cable networks were taking a leaf from the HBO script,” betting on edgy but ambitious projects.
AMC, once a cable home for movie reruns, launched Mad Men and Breaking Bad, while fellow cable network FX scored with critical hits The Americans and Atlanta. In 2013, Netflix opened a second, streamingdriven phase of the golden age when it outbid HBO to make the political thriller House of Cards.
“Golden eras never last,” of course, and Biskind describes this one as over, said Michael Schulman in The New Yorker. The streaming services that were taking risks in 2019 are now playing it safe with spin-offs and brand extensions. Biskind argues that this is natural—that Hollywood’s default mode is producing commercial junk, and that occasional flowerings of innovation result from brief shifts in market incentives. But it’s possible he has overlooked a “transformative” change in TV storytelling. While he’s focusing on Hollywood’s backstabbing boys club and lamenting the disappearance of peak TV’s great male antiheroes, evidence keeps creeping in that content providers have realized that it’s good business to diversify the screen, and that female, queer, and Black creators are responding with riveting content of their own.