A story of “greed, lust and lies”, Peter Biskind’s new study of the past two tumultuous decades in the world of television promises much. Sadly though, it’s not exactly binge reading, says Peter Fincham

How interesting are the ins-and-outs of the television commissioning process and the internecine office politics of powerful TV executives?

When I was director of television at ITV my scheduler was a delightful man called David Berg, whose job involved studying the ratings and analysing audience trends. David would say things like, “When the history books are written, they will show that we over-indexed for ABC1s in the 9pm slot during the crucial autumn season.”

To which I would say, “David, who’s going to write these history books? And more to the point, who on earth’s going to read them?”

Well, the answer is here with Peter Biskind’s weighty tome Pandora’s Box: the Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television. Biskind, who previously wrote the best-seller Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ’N’ Drugs ’N’ Rock ’N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, has now turned his attention to the momentous changes that have taken place in the TV business over the past couple of decades.

The narrative itself is straightforward. The original networks – CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox – had become increasingly moribund by playing it safe, avoiding difficult subjects such as sex and violence, and targeting the easy-to-offend audiences of middle America.

Then along came the disrupters. First the cable networks like HBO, Showtime and AMC, who ignored all the so-called rules with shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.

And then, more recently, the streamers – Netflix, Amazon, Apple +, Disney +. At which point budgets took off like a Star Wars Imperial Shuttle, and the new golden age of television was born.

So far, so familiar. On one level this is a tale of capitalism in its purest form – innovation, market dominance, complacency, disruption – with the whole cycle being replayed over and again.

You could say that TV networks are like the airlines we remember from our youth, with the big four – NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox – playing the role of TWA and Pan Am. Although the difference is that the original TV networks are still around, as well as the cable networks, and the streamers. The skies are pretty crowded out there, and it’s estimated that around 500 English-language drama series are made every year. They call it “peak TV”.

This gives the narrative arc of Biskind’s book a problem, or maybe the problem just lies with the sub-title – the Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television. As the author freely admits in the first few pages, television isn’t broken. Its golden age just seems to go on and on, and as we acquire more and more devices that allow us to watch the stuff at pretty much every stage of our waking lives, we happily do so.

The other challenge for Pandora’s Box is that in order to tell this tale you have to turn TV execs into a bunch of characters we actually give a damn about. It turns out that the highly paid people who wield the power in American television don’t mind stabbing their rivals in the back on a regular basis. No shit, Sherlock. It may have all seemed like high drama to those involved, but does it really matter to us? Take this paragraph, about some management changes at HBO –

“Fuchs in particular was unhappy. To him it was like Chutes and Ladders, and he felt he was going down the chute. ‘They were pissing all over us,’ he recalls. ‘Nick had really lost his way.’ … ‘Nick spoke to senior management, and I blew a fucking gasket. I heard that Bridget Potter called Nick to tell him, ‘You were right, I thought that Michael was [way out of line].’”

If that sort of thing gets your blood up, this is the book for you. Biskind is billed as a “cultural critic”, and has the cultural critic’s tendency to make sweeping statements safe in the knowledge that nobody will challenge them. Take this for instance –

“When premium cable came along in the 1980s, thanks to HBO, it replaced sponsors with subscribers… By subscribing, viewers voluntarily invited cable programmes into their homes. Moreover, the emergence of cable coincided with the breakdown of consensus culture that occurred in the Vietnam/Watergate era.”

Wait, what?

But don’t let me put you off. This is a very readable book and, if you’re on a long flight, it might distract you for a few hours from the obvious temptation, which is to watch more telly.

I remember reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls when it first came out and feeling that I’d been given a ringside seat at the boardrooms tables of the movie industry. It was thrilling. Maybe my problem with Pandora’s Box is that I’ve sat round those same boardroom tables in TV, and occasionally I nodded off.

Our July/August issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.