Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind review – essential viewing

A sweeping but gossipy behind-the-scenes look at the off-screen dramas that made prestige TV

Rebeca Nicholson

Friday 24 November 2023

Peter Biskind is a cinema man. Best known for 1998’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and other books about the meaty, macho movie business, he has turned his attentions to the growth of streaming services and what might be the end of the current golden age of TV. The swaggering Pandora’s Box attempts to wrangle a complex tale into some sort of order, from the early days of prestige TV, to the high-stakes and seemingly bottomless business of “content creation”. But in the acknowledgments that conclude the book, Biskind still offers a secular prayer for the return of his preferred medium. “Movies, I hope, will one day make a comeback,” he writes. For now, television will have to do.

Biskind begins with, and frequently returns to, HBO, which began in 1972 as a cable channel showing films and sporting events for a fee, before growing into a home for series so reputable that it could get away with the slogan “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” Though he documents early successes such as The Larry Sanders Show and Oz, it is, inevitably, The Sopranos that kicks off this new golden age in earnest. “The Sopranos goes places where no other show had gone,” he writes.

The story of the series’ creation is fascinating, as is the book’s portrait of its creator, David Chase. Curiously, network television had declined to make The Sopranos, and Pandora’s Box is full of tangled tales of executives turning down shows that would go on to become canonical. Everyone passed on Mad Men, until the then-mediocre AMC took a punt; similarly, there were near-universal rejections for Breaking Bad, leaving AMC, newly flush with the success of Mad Men, to pick it up and run with it.

Pandora’s Box is at its most enjoyable when it digs into the biggest TV dramas of the last three decades. There are great stories about the making of the shows, and insights into fallings-out and rash hirings and firings on the corporate side. Some anecdotes are gossipy, such as the one about how Steven Spielberg had his name taken off The Americans because he objected to the casting of Welsh actor Matthew Rhys. Others are just plain juicy. HBO apparently pushed back only twice on the content of the original Sex and the City series: once for a joke involving a dog and fellatio, and once for a shot that featured both condoms and a statue of the Virgin Mary.

The point of the book, though, is that it builds towards a rupture, which arrives in the form of Netflix. Once a DVD rental service, Netflix changed everything when it gambled the house on streaming. Biskind writes of a 2006 plan, put together by several HBO executives, to buy Netflix, which was shot down by HBO’s top brass. He takes great pleasure in quoting Jeff Bewkes, formerly CEO of HBO’s parent company Time Warner. “It’s a little bit like, ‘Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?’” Bewkes said, in 2010, when asked about the threat posed by this relative newcomer. “I don’t think so.”

The Albanian army did take over the world. Netflix established a ruthless new business model, which the TV networks followed, for fear of dying out if they didn’t. Did it work? Biskind suggests that we reached “peak TV” in 2022, and that the decline is already well under way. Budgets are bloated beyond reason and sense. Corporations with deep pockets, such as Apple and Amazon, have moved into the market, funding mega-budget follies such as the middling Lord of the Rings adaptation, The Rings of Power. There is a relatively up-to-date analysis of the unfairness of the system, particularly for those who are actually being creative, rather than those selling the end product. Biskind quotes one former network exec as saying, “We are in a golden age of content production and the dark age of creative profit sharing”, which is part of the reason for the recent industrial action in the US.

Biskind rarely holds back on offering his own reviews. He loves Deadwood and Justified, but thinks Mad Men “was wildly uneven, with beautifully realised episodes cheek by jowl with clunky ones”. He loathes the US remake of Shameless, calling it “poverty as entertainment”. For him, the masterful I May Destroy You “drags in places”. Ever the movie guy, there is an occasional sense that he is holding his nose. But when it comes to business, and the lurid details of what the rich and powerful get up to, Pandora’s Box is beefy, garrulous and substantial. If it is a death knell for TV, it’s a thoroughly entertaining one.