Wesley Britton's Blog - Posts Tagged "situation-comedies"

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific
David Bianculli
Publisher: Doubleday (November 15, 2016)
ISBN-10: 0385540272
ISBN-13: 978-0385540278
https://www.amazon.com/Platinum-Age-T...

Reviewer: Dr. Wesley Britton

For forty years, David Bianculli has been a noted TV critic, perhaps best known for his audio commentaries and interviews on PBS’s radio show, Fresh Air. As he demonstrates on every page of The Platinum Age of Television, Bianculli’s personal wealth of TV knowledge is very deep indeed, going back to the 1950s when the author’s childhood love affair with the small screen began.

One stated purpose for the book is the tracing of the evolution of quality television starting long before TV’s “Platinum Age.” Bianculli claims the age began in 1999 when two important series premiered, The West Wing and The Sopranos. Just what qualifies as quality TV might surprise some readers as the first two chapters deal with children’s shows and animation. Then there’s the chapter on soaps, not the daytime series but the influential ongoing storylines in programs like Peyton Place and Dallas.

Bianculli looks at the full history of television in such chapters devoted to different genres and categories, usually opening with overviews that briefly touch on series he doesn’t spotlight followed by focused discussions of shows he believes are landmarks in TV’s evolution. Despite the book’s title, I Love Lucy isn’t covered until Chapter 8. In many discussions, as with Legal shows, he also mentions radio programs that set the stage for their television descendants. For example, he gives us a detailed history of crime shows before the first series he highlights in that genre, 1981’s Hill St. Blues. Before that groundbreaking show, Bianculli points to the differences between quality and popularity, in this case all the TV detectives who had only one characteristic or another to distinguish themselves from each other in very interchangeable storylines. Then came Hill St. Blues and NYPD Blue and crime shows dramatically evolved into a new era of maturity and creativity all the way up to Breaking Bad.

For each genre, Bianculli offers up these detailed history lessons with no shortage of analytical observations along with often hit-and-run explorations of the shows he spotlights. At the end of most chapters are interviews with and retrospectives of key figures like Mel Brooks, Carol Burnett, Stephen Bochco, Norman Lear, James L. Brooks and many others. Not only is Bianculli a devoted watcher of hundreds of hours of TV—claiming to have seen every broadcast of Saturday Night Live—his interviews add an insider’s point-of-view that shares what performers and creators think about their work, how their shows came to be, their motivations and influences, and often judgements of their respective legacies.

The Platinum Age is a book for anyone who loves television, and who doesn’t that include? As it reaches back to the beginning and includes series up to the present, it should interest all generations of TV watchers. I suppose there are those who would be most curious about specific chapters that deal with the genres they prefer. All readers will learn things they likely haven’t discovered before and should measure their own judgements against Bianculli’s. Fawlty Towers as the first workplace sitcom worthy of a spotlight? Did you know about the 1963 Arrest and Trial, a 90 minute mix of police work and courtroom drama decades before the Law and Order franchise did the same thing? Do you remember The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd and the fact it featured a single mother who had a child on her own a year before Murphy Brown launched an unintentional controversy with the same event? In short, this is a book for pretty much everyone willing to put down the remote and read an engaging book about what they’re watching.

This review first appeared Jan. 21, 2016 at BookPleasures.com:
goo.gl/j6TiwJ

MARY: THE MARY TYLER MOORE STORY
Herbie J Pilato
Paperback: 458 pages
Publisher: Jacobs Brown Press (January 25, 2019)
ISBN-10: 0999507850
ISBN-13: 978-0999507858
https://www.amazon.com/MARY-TYLER-MOO...


Reviewed by Dr. Wesley Britton

Mary isn't the first show biz bio I've read from Herbie J Pilato, a founder of the Classic TV Preservation Society. I first learned about the depth of Herbie's TV expertise when I read his 2007 The Bionic Book: The Six Million Dollar man and the Bionic Woman Reconstructed. After that, he produced several adoring books about Bewitched star, Elizabeth Montgomery.

Now, Pilato has presented us with a in-depth, exhaustive bio of a star he clearly also adores, a star most of us out here in TV-Watcher land love as well. Mary Tyler Moore, and her more iconic roles like Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, certainly did turn the world on with her smile. If that number includes you, then this is a book for you.

To greater and lesser degrees, most of us know quite a bit about the biography of Mary Tyler Moore, her career, her private life, her struggles, her successes and failures. There's so much in the public record, including the autobiographies Moore wrote.

What Herbie J. Palato has given us is a one-stop tome that covers everything one could ask for about Moore herself, her colleagues, her relationships, her misfires and triumphs, her self-consciousness and lack of self-esteem in terms of her looks, not to mention her causes like diabetes research and animal rights.

When an author devotes this much attention to a beloved subject, there can be some excesses in the text. In this case, there's a lot of repetition, notably the countless references to the importance of Ordinary People in Moore's career. There are numerous paragraphs summarizing the careers and roles of those Moore worked with at one time or another. Of course, this makes Mary an easy book to skim. But keep your eyes open to catch the streams of nuggets Pilato gives us. We get a portrait of a woman in 3-D, including her shortcomings, talents, work ethic, parental skills (or lack of them) and her insights an perspectives regarding her important and influential career. And surprises--I didn't know her animal rights activism extended to protecting lobsters. Books like these are also good for reviewing lesser known projects like talk show appearances, guest-starring and cameos on TV series, and public speaking. For the first time, I got the story to what happened to the short-lived1985 Mary series co-starring John Astin from Addams Family fame. I got the insider stories behind the sad attempts to reunite the Dick Van Dyke cast and especially the dreary Mary and Rhoda TV movie.

Naturally, you got to have some real interest in the biography of Mary Tyler Moore to want to dive into this very detailed and balanced tribute. Someone needed to write this book, and who better than Herbie J. Pilato. He knows how to do it.

This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Feb. 5, 2019:
https://waa.ai/oCZ1