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

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, that 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, HBO Max, and the killer pluses—Disney, Apple, Paramount, et al.      

Since the creative and business sides of TV are thoroughly entwined, Biskind examines both, and the interplay between them. Through frank, and occasionally shockingly intimate interviews with creators and executives, Pandora’s Box investigates the dynamic interplay of commerce and art through the lens of the relationships among the networks, cablers, and streamers—sometimes allies, sometimes enemies—and uses the shows they air, in particular the game changers, as windows into the byzantine practices of the players as they use money and guile to destroy their competitors. 

At the end, this book crystal balls the future in light of the success and/or failure of the streamers that, after apparently clearing the board, now face life threatening problems, some self-created, some not. Pandora’s Box may be right or wrong, or most likely both, but regardless, it is a provocative read.