‘The Sopranos goes places where no other show had gone…’
Peter Biskind is a cultural critic and film historian who is perhaps best known for Easy Riders, Raging Bulls – his wild romp through the heady days of ’70s cinema. What makes that book so special is the freewheeling and fancy-free descriptions of a unique time in American cinema history. A time when the filmmakers briefly wrestled the power back from the studios and were able to create some of the most enduring art that the medium had ever seen. If I were to sum up Pandora’s Box in a pithy one-liner (and I am going to), I would describe it as Easy Riders, Raging Bulls but for the golden age of television…
In Pandora’s Box (subtitled: The Greed, Lust, and Lies that Broke Television), Biskind examines the conditions that allowed the age of the show-runner to emerge from the bland police procedurals and quiz shows that made up television in the ’70s and ’80s. He does this through the lens of a number of high-profile TV auteurs such as David Chase, David Mulch and Matthew Weiner. As with Easy Riders, many of the people featured here are not presented in a particularly flattering light but Biskind’s writing is always insightful and compelling. You come away from a Biskind novel really feeling like you’ve learnt something. He has an unrivalled understanding of the inner machinations of pop culture and it is a pleasure to spend some time walking around the mind of someone with such a comprehensive knowledge of film and television.
The slight issue here is that these men (they are nearly all men) are not quite as interesting as their cinematic counterparts. They also didn’t have as much of a cultural impact as the auteurs of the ’70s, no matter how much Biskind tries to squint to make it so. That said, it is fascinating to chart the journey from shows like Oz, Deadwood and The Sopranos to the current second golden age of TV represented by Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and Stranger Things.
Pandora’s Box provides the definitive chronicle of an utterly unique era of American television that still resonates today. This is not just a time capsule but also a road map. We currently live in a time where television is just as prestigious as cinema (if not more so) and this book explains why.