Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers

good

The book looks good ,this is a gift and I’m sure they will like it .

If wanting to read the gpingd on invabel tv this is your book

Oral histories are a very particular kind of non-fiction. Not everyone likes them, but I find them fascinating. In Tinderbox you get a very Rashamon kind of experience, with the same experience being narrated by a variety of people, which means you're left not knowing what is truth, what is fiction, and what lies somewhere in between. What makes that worthwhile is the way very strong personalities leap off the page, and the cut throat business of tv production is laid bare in all its glory and ghastliness. For me, this is a riveting read. Just one complaint, and one observation -- one of my all time favourite HBO shows gets almost no love -- Deadwood. And truly, with all the patting on backs of how diverse they are in their approach to hiring/casting, not a single one of them seems to notice that there is absolutely zero political diversity. Which means, in a very real way, there is no diversity at all. If everyone at an organisation thinks the same way, in lock step, then other differences are irrelevant. The closest they get to a dissenting voice is Bill Maher, who at least is not afraid to call out the crap everywhere he sees it.

I really enjoyed the author’s books on Saturday Night Live and ESPN so when I found out they were doing one on HBO I pre-ordered it right away. Of the 3 books I ended up liking this one the least. That is not to say that it is not good. The book is exceptionally long in the tooth. Unlike the other two books I found myself skipping over sections of this one especially when they got into politics and financial aspects of the networks workings in the boardroom. I felt that some of these sections, although important to the history of the franchise, could have been trimmed a bit. I never had this feeling with ESPN or SNL books. Some of the insights behind my favorite HBO programming were fascinating. I had never watched “Band Of Brothers” or some of the other classics that the book prompted me to go back and discover. I found it amazing to discover that the network spent over $30 million on a Game Of Thrones prequel pilot and then scrapped it. Overall this is a good book that sometimes gets bogged down in the weeds a bit. You may find yourself skipping over parts, but it is still a worthy read.