Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV

by Peter Biskind

Overview

Bestselling author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, cultural critic Peter Biskind turns his eye toward the new golden age of television, sparked by the fall of play-it-safe network TV and the rise of boundary-busting cable, followed by streaming, which overturned both—based on exclusive, candid, and colorful interviews with executives, writers, showrunners, directors, and actors

We are now lucky enough to be living through the era of so-called Peak TV, in which television, in its various guises and formats, has seized the entertainment mantle from movies and dominates our leisure time. How and why this happened is the subject of this book.

Instead of focusing on one service, like HBO, Pandora’s Box asks, “What did HBO do, besides give us The Sopranos?” The answer: It gave us a revolution. Biskind bites off a big chunk of entertainment history, following HBO from its birth into maturity, moving on to the basic cablers like FX and AMC, and ending up with the streamers and their wars, pitting Netflix against Amazon Prime Video, Max, and the killer pluses—Disney, Apple TV, and Paramount.

Since the creative and business sides of TV are thoroughly entwined, Biskind examines both, and the interplay between them. Through frank and shockingly intimate interviews with creators and executives, Pandora’s Box investigates the dynamic interplay of commerce and art through the lens the game-changing shows they aired—not only old warhorses like The Sopranos, but recent shows like The White Lotus, Succession, and Yellow- (both -stone and -jackets)—as windows into the byzantine practices of the players as they use money and guile to destroy their competitors.

In the end, this book crystal-balls the future in light of the success and failures of the streamers that, after apparently clearing the board, now face life-threatening problems, some self-created, some not. With its long view and short takes—riveting snapshots of behind-the-scenes mischief—Pandora’s Box is the only book you’ll need to read to understand what’s on your small screen and how it got there.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062991676
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	11/05/2024
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	254,217
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

PETER BISKIND is a cultural critic and film historian. He was editor in chief of American Film magazine from 1981 to 1986, and executive editor of Premiere magazine from 1986 to 1996. His writing has appeared in scores of national publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Newsweek, and The Washington Post, as well as film periodicals such as Sight and Sound and Film Quarterly. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has published eight books, including the bestsellers Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, that have been translated into several languages. He is executive director of the annual Film-Columbia Festival held in the Hudson Valley.

Editorial Reviews

10/02/2023

In this no-holds-barred account, cultural critic Biskind (Star) charts how the rise of cable television ushered in an era of “Peak TV” before streaming reinstated a business model focused on “reaching as big an audience as cheaply as possible.” HBO’s ascent in the 1980s and ’90s, Biskind explains, replaced “sponsors with subscribers,” whom the company attracted with edgy programming, including profanity-laced comedy specials and original shows featuring nudity. Netflix’s foray into streaming challenged cable networks’ dominance in the 2010s, but the company’s early strategy of attracting talent by offering broad creative freedom became subsumed by an obsession with adding subscribers, leading the streamer to focus on the “lowest-common-denominator” programs that HBO made outdated, such as Fuller House. The author revels in the behind-the-scenes pettiness and ego clashes that went into making landmark shows, delving into HBO’s punitive cancellation of Deadwood after creator David Milch balked at the network CEO’s request to truncate the show’s fourth season so Milch could work on another HBO project, and the humor amuses, as when Biskind suggests that Terence Winter, showrunner of the Martin Scorsese–produced Boardwalk Empire, “would have pulled a gangster series out of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” to work with the director. This gossip-filled overview of the past 40 years of television will keep readers glued to their seats. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

One of Hollywood’s shrewdest chroniclers . . . explains in punchy, propulsive prose, how we went from Tony Soprano to Ted Lasso. . . . Pandora’s Box is as unsparing as Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and the thesis of the two books is the same: Hollywood’s golden ages don’t arise from the miraculous congregation of geniuses. The industry’s default setting is for crap. . . . [Biskind] focuses . . . on the machinations of high-powered monsters . . . and lays out a sprawling, amoral ecosystem with the dispassion of an omniscient narrator.” — New Yorker

"Peter Biskind has a knack for finding fertile zones in the entertainment landscape, harvesting a rich crop of anecdotes and insights and serving them up with enticing dollops of dirt. . . . Mr. Biskind has a keen eye for all things snarky, cynical and mean. . . . You won’t be able to put his book down.”
— Wall Street Journal

"Biskind sees clear signs that the risk-taking attitude that led to two decades of edgy, adventurous programming—what he labels 'discomfort shows'—is ending." — Financial Times

“Tackling the fall of network TV, rise of cable, and middling new era of streaming, this interview-packed volume might just have the answers to a question that keeps me up at night: How come TV sucks now?” — The Millions

“In his new book, author Peter Biskind catalogs real-life misbehavior by the principals responsible for an array of lauded series with the same unsparing eye that he detailed the excesses of New Hollywood in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.” — Entertainment Weekly Online

"How Ted Lasso killed Tony Soprano . . . A binge-worthy book about TV's recent history." — The Economist

 "This brisk, blistering account of how streaming has changed where we put our eyeballs is classic binge-worthy reading. I had no idea the people involved in creating culture-altering shows are as entertaining as the shows themselves, but Peter Biskind did, and you’ll never look at them same way again.” — Steven Soderbergh

“Peter Biskind’s Pandora’s Box is not only a richly detailed and colorful account, but also an important and historic document on how television has well and defiantly superseded the cinema in the last thirty years. Biskind brilliantly maneuvers his way through a historic panoply of cinematic and television endeavor with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. A gripping and compulsive read.” — Brian Cox

“Peter Biskind has always been the most rigorous and amusing Hollywood historian we have, taking on the great men of the past—and now with his trademark cheeky intelligence he takes on the giants of the present age of television-as-cinema. Despite my having lived much of the book’s arc, Biskind offers a fresh perspective on the new Wild West of home entertainment.” — Lena Dunham

“Peter Biskind takes on a wild, whirlwind tour of the birth, life, death, and rebirth of cable and streaming services, introducing us to the people behind them who turn out to be as ferociously nutty as the characters they put on the screen.” — David Nasaw, Arthur M. Schlesinger professor of history emeritus, City University of New York Graduate Center

"A lively writer who includes a lot of vastly entertaining gossip about the increasingly corporate drivers of the changes [in the TV and film industry]. A fascinating topic." — Library Journal (starred review)

“This gossip-filled overview of the past 40 years of television will keep readers glued to their seats.” — Publishers Weekly

“Biskind is known as much for his outspoken opinions as his insightful commentary, and Pandora’s Box is Biskind at his most candid. For readers interested in what goes on behind the scenes in the world of television, a must-read.” — Booklist

From the Publisher

Your book was…like a bag of pot, with me saying, ‘I’m not gonna smoke.’ But I was insatiable.”

Raging Bulls Quentin Tarantino on Easy Riders

★ 11/01/2023

TV filmmaking and distribution changed dramatically 25 years ago on January 10, 1999, when The Sopranos debuted on HBO. Network television had grown ossified, with too many restrictions, boxed in by the demands of its shows' sponsors. HBO replaced sponsors with subscribers: fewer restrictions on content and language, and a show's story arc could stretch across an entire season. Netflix jumped in when producing its own series became less costly than leasing them from outside. Then came FX, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and others. Streaming replaced cable, and Netflix went wild, premiering new movies and series weekly and building a gigantic video library to attract and keep customers. The new freedom attracted star writers, directors, and actors to the small screen—including Martin Scorsese's Boardwalk Empire, Kevin Costner in Yellowstone, and Glenn Close in Damages. Film historian/cultural critic Biskind (The Sky Is Falling) has covered the film and TV industry in eight previous best-selling books. He's a lively writer who includes a lot of vastly entertaining gossip about the increasingly corporate drivers of these changes. VERDICT A fascinating topic that the author handles well. The depiction of cable executives is blistering.—David Keymer

Library Journal

2023-08-24
A film critic’s detailed history of the writers and executives driving the era of “Peak TV.”

In his latest examination of the entertainment industry, Biskind begins with the creation of HBO in the early 1970s and its gradual journey from showing premier sports events, comedy specials, and racy documentaries to the world of scripted original programming. HBO’s shift was neither obvious nor guaranteed, but the company’s ability to construct a daring and creative home for writers and showrunners fleeing the constraints of network TV changed the course of broadcast cable, set the bar for the emerging streaming business, and even blinded HBO to its own vulnerabilities. Biskind follows this impact with an audit of inflection points like the rise of sleeper cable networks like AMC and the creation of Netflix and Disney+, and he explores many of the most significant shows of the last two decades, including The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, House of Cards,Oz, and Justified. As the story moves on from HBO’s early days, the narrative devolves, as the author sacrifices linear organization and meaningful commentary in favor of gossip about corporate acquisitions, executive egos, and creative cross-pollination. As in his 1998 bestseller, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Biskind builds his text from first-person quotes gleaned from countless conversations he has had over decades with key players in the field, and his amusing barbs pepper the text. Rather than a synthesized assessment of the “upending” of TV, this is primarily the story of the obsessions and idiosyncrasies of the industry’s higher-ups and their relationships and tensions with each other. While these personalities have had an outsized and still-relevant influence on changes to both the small screen and the entertainment industry as a whole, their professional sagas are neither compelling nor surprising. The book becomes repetitive, confusing, and tiresome, a missed opportunity to combine Biskind’s obviously thorough knowledge, distinct vantage point, and droll wit with coherent analysis and insight.

An intermittently interesting look behind the scenes of prestige TV that falls short.

Kirkus Reviews