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The sound of that bumper - the static, the choir - remains Pavlovian in its promise. on the third night of one of those endurance contests and I had to keep my hand on the pickup truck. There are a lot of winning moments in “Tinderbox.” But wading through its nearly thousand pages I often felt spacey and exhausted, as if it were 4 a.m. But this book is so vast that, by the weary end, these pats of cold margarine slapping me in the face were the only things keeping me awake. His interstitial material is mugged by phrases like “oodles of ambition” and words like “ginormous.” These really bugged me at the start. Miller is a good interviewer, but a corny writer. I have a special fondness for Lizzy Goodman’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011,” and I await the oral histories of Chez Panisse, Balthazar, Death and Company (the bar), n+1, Anna Wintour’s tenure at Vogue, Monster Energy drinks, the making of “Dusty in Memphis” and this newspaper’s Styles section. The result, she wrote, was that “you are what people have to say about you.”

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She thought oral histories were full of irresponsible drive-by shootings. He liked it that “the reader, rather than editor, is jury.”Įlizabeth Hardwick loathed the form. George Plimpton, who helped edit the best-selling oral biography “Edie,” was a fan.

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It gives you a staccato series of micro-impressions, as if you were looking through a fly’s compound eyes. But the souk that is the modern television world was growing crowded. Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and “Game of Thrones” were in the wings. HBO’s luck held for a while after “The Sopranos” signed off. A planned Howie Mandel special was killed. Staffers at HBO sometimes found it hard to define what HBO was, but they knew what it wasn’t. Before HBO, elite actors wouldn’t go near a television show. Winning awards was more important than ratings. Often the only direction given to directors and producers was: Don’t make anything you’d see anywhere else. These were the kind of guys who knew what a debenture was yet had a feel for programming and knew enough to hire good people and leave them alone. HBO had good luck with its early executives. “We were putting a husky guy with a hairy back wearing a wife-beater in the lead role,” says Jeff Bewkes, a former Time Warner C.E.O. “The Sopranos” was not an immediate hit, but it was beloved internally. With shows like “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and especially “The Sopranos,” HBO changed notions of what television could be, and pickpocketed the cultural conversation from film. “Tinderbox” slows down and lingers purposefully on the turn of the century, when the so-called golden age of television began to come into view.

Miller, who has previously compiled oral histories of “Saturday Night Live,” ESPN and Creative Artists Agency, digs into the machinations and bruised egos behind these deals. for it, after Time had outflanked Sterling Communications long ago.” Discovery rescued it from AT&T, which had gobbled it up from Time Warner, which had saved it from Time Warner AOL, which had somehow abducted it from Time Warner, which had shrewdly outplayed Time Inc.

In reverse order, Miller describes how HBO - the fly, more or less, in this scenario - has been sequentially consumed from 1972 through today: “Warner Bros. Following these deals is complicated, like following the lyrics to “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” Students of power will find much to interest them. If you’re going to read “Tinderbox,” prepare for a landslide of corporate history. In the ruinous wake, Levin resembled the proverbial hedgehog, the one who climbs off the hairbrush while sheepishly muttering, “We all make mistakes.” At the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, he tried to combine Time Warner, of which HBO was a subsidiary, with Steve Case’s already sinking AOL. Levin, of course, would become the architect of the most ill-judged merger in media history.