Pandora’s Box
  • Published: 11 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9780141992754
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

Pandora’s Box

The Greed, Lust, and Lies That Broke Television

Formats & editions
Paperback
11 Feb 2025
EBook
7 Nov 2023
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From the author of the 'stone-cold classic' Easy Riders, Raging Bulls comes a blockbuster follow-up: the inside story of television's epic transformation

The revolution has been televized. From The Sopranos to Stranger Things, the shows we watch - and the ways we watch them - have been transformed over the past fifty years. Out of the bland wasteland of 'play-it-safe' broadcasting came astonishing stories of sex , violence, and corruption shown first on cable, and then by way of streaming. Today, the power of viewers to select what they want and when they want it is greater than ever before. In short, we are living in a new golden age of television, but golden ages don't last forever, and this one may turn out to be too much of a good thing. Revolutions have a habit of eating their own, and the era of 'peak TV' may have an unhappy ending.

Pandora's Box is a major new account of the small screen from incisive cultural critic Peter Biskind. Through exclusive, candid and colourful interviews with writers, showrunners, directors and actors, Biskind brings us face to face with the people whose creations we encounter every day on our sofas, revealing the dynamic interplay of art, commerce and technology. We follow executives down the corridors of power and see how their money and guile cultivate, then crush creativity; we witness the making - and unmaking - of TVs biggest hits. There has never been a more exciting time in entertainment history, and in Peter Biskind, the ideal insider guide, captures all of it.
  • Published: 11 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9780141992754
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

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Praise for Pandora’s Box

Peter Biskind's Pandora's Box is not only a richly detailed and colorful account of how TV has defiantly superseded the cinema in the last thirty years, but also an important historic document. Biskind brilliantly maneuvers his way through a panoply of cinematic and television endeavor with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. A gripping and compulsive read

Brian Cox

Peter Biskind has always been the most rigorous and amusing Hollywood historian we have, taking on the great men of the past--and now with his trademark cheeky intelligence he takes on the giants of the present age of television-as-cinema. Despite my having lived much of the book's arc, Biskind offers a fresh perspective on the new Wild West of home entertainment

Lena Dunham

This brisk, blistering overview of how streaming has changed where we put our eyeballs is classic binge-worthy reading. I had no idea the people who created culture-altering shows are as entertaining as the shows themselves, but Peter Biskind did, and you'll never look at them same way again

Steven Soderbergh

Peter Biskind takes on a wild, whirlwind tour of the birth, life, death, and rebirth of cable and streaming services, introducing us to the people behind them who turn out to be as ferociously nutty as the characters they put on the screen

David Nasaw, author of The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War

Peter Biskind catalogs real-life misbehavior by the principals responsible for an array of lauded series with the same unsparing eye that he detailed the excesses of New Hollywood in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Fall 2023 Must-Reads, Entertainment Weekly

This gossip-filled overview of the past 40 years of television will keep readers glued to their seats

Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

Biskind is known as much for his outspoken opinions as his insightful commentary, and Pandora’s Box is Biskind at his most candid. For readers interested in what goes on behind the scenes in the world of television, a must-read

Booklist

Pandora’s Box explains, in punchy, propulsive prose, how we went from Tony Soprano to Ted Lasso … Biskind is skilled at the quick character sketch … [and] lays out a sprawling, amoral ecosystem with the dispassion of an omniscient narrator

New Yorker

Biskind is the perfect person to chronicle how we got here … The writers and showrunners are compelling figures, and Biskind’s story is larded with stories of their triumphs, creative crises, neuroses and episodes of appalling behaviour

Financial Times

A binge-worthy book

Economist

Thoroughly entertaining… Pandora’s Box is essential viewing

Rebecca Nicholson, Guardian