Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 384.5540973 EAN: 9780520217850 ISBN: 0520217853 Label: University of California Press Manufacturer: University of California Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 383 Publication Date: January 02, 2000 Publisher: University of California Press Sales Rank: 728355 Studio: University of California Press
Product DescriptionWith a New Introduction Unsurpassed since its first publication, Inside Prime Time is the only book to take us behind the scenes to reveal how prime-time shows get on the air, stay on the air, and are shaped by the political and cultural climate of their times. Using more than 200 interviews with network executives, producers, writers, agents, and actors, as well as months of on-set investigation during the networks' more prosperous years, sociologist and critic Todd Gitlin takes us into a frantic world searching for hit shows. The result is both a lucid picture of the mechanics of prime time and a series of vivid stories of what succeeded or failed, and why. His analysis includes a blow-by-blow account of how the exceptional police series Hill Street Blues succeeded against all odds before eventually succumbing to formula itself.
No one else has analyzed, as Gitlin has, the inside track that links executives and producers, or the efforts of worried advertisers, hopeful writers, and the lobbyists of the fundamentalist right to shape America's waking hours. In a new introduction, Gitlin describes the elements of the new television order, and argues that the proliferation of cable channels and the decline of the old networks have not fundamentally changed the business mentality that guides decisions about the entertainment that will fill Americans' leisure time.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Dated but still interesting
Written in the early '80s, Inside Prime Time was long considered to be one of the quissential books to be written about the business about how a small group of insiders shaped American culture through television. The book has since become quite dated. Author Gitlin, best known as a former '60s radical and a co-founded of the SDS, is highly complimentary of what -- at that time -- was then the dominating creative forces on television, the socially relavent comedies of Norman Lear and the humanistic ... Read More
