Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind — is the golden age of TV at an end?

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In the mid-1990s, an executive at the HBO cable network gave the scriptwriter Tom Fontana $1mn to develop a pilot episode for a series about life inside a tough American prison. The exec then asked Fontana an unusual question: “What’s the one thing you’re never allowed to do on broadcast television?”

“Kill the lead [character] in the pilot,” Fontana replied. Albrecht’s response was swift: “Do it.”

In the opening episode of Oz in 1997, Fontana set his protagonist on fire, kicking off a six-year run for the influential show. It marked a turning point in American TV, writes the veteran entertainment writer Peter Biskind in his new book Pandora’s Box. Oz proved that viewers would watch compelling characters, even if they were unpleasant or did awful things. “It’s difficult to overstate the lasting impact of the show,” Biskind writes. “In short, no Oz, no Sopranos.” 

A year later, HBO launched Sex and the City, a raunchy, wildly popular celebration of Manolos and the female libido. The Sopranos, the story of a ruthless New Jersey mob boss who seeks psychiatric help, began the following season. The Time Warner-owned network was on a roll, and its success would transform the industry — as well as audiences’ expectations. It became a new golden age of TV.

Biskind unpicks the predicament major media groups are experiencing now that the explosive growth of their streaming services has slowed

Biskind is the perfect person to chronicle how we got here. His best-known book, 1998’s Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, tells the inside story of the rise and fall of independent cinema in the 1970s — a grand narrative whose main characters include Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The story is packed with stories of sex, drugs, breakdowns, box-office triumphs and epic cinematic failures.  

The characters who animate Pandora’s Box are less well known. Yet many of the writers and showrunners who have power in the TV business are compelling figures, and Biskind’s story is larded with stories of their triumphs, creative crises, neuroses and episodes of appalling behaviour. The book also celebrates the role of women and people of colour in the golden age, including Jenji Kohan (Weeds, Orange is the New Black) and Issa Rae (Insecure).

Biskind has a perfect subject in David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos. Chase spent 20 years working in advertising-funded network television — a medium for which he felt “nothing but contempt,” Biskind says — before HBO gave him a shot. The Sopranos mined themes from his unhappy upbringing in Clifton, New Jersey, with an angry father and a mother “always on the verge of hysteria”, as he described it to Biskind.

The show’s brutal violence, sex and profanity could never have appeared on US broadcast television, highly regulated and dependent on advertising. But, not bound by those restrictions, HBO had more liberty to experiment, and soon other cable networks were taking a leaf from the HBO script.

AMC, then considered an also-ran network, produced Mad Men and Breaking Bad. FX, owned at the time by 20th Century Fox, countered with their own cutting-edge series: Atlanta and The Americans. (Non-US readers may be bewildered by the alphabet soup, but many of the shows will be familiar.)

Seeking to build their subscription base, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu gave these bingeable shows new life on their streaming services. Yet with Netflix’s big-budget reimagining of the BBC’s 1980s political thriller series House of Cards in 2013, quickly followed by the women’s prison drama Orange is the New Black, the streamers also became producers of programming, not just distributors. By 2015, US studios were turning out 349 original scripted series in a single year, up from 182 in 2002 — prompting annual predictions ever since that we had reached “Peak TV”. (In 2022, there were 599 new scripted shows; this might actually be the peak.)

Biskind does a good job of explaining the economics that Netflix introduced to the industry, including its overhaul of the old compensation models for writers and producers that became an issue in this year’s strikes. He also unpicks the predicament major media groups are experiencing now that the explosive growth of their streaming services has slowed.  

Pandora’s Box arrives at an uneasy moment: many expect some sort of industry shake-out in the coming years, and even Netflix has started selling advertising to boost its earnings. Biskind sees clear signs that the risk-taking attitude that led to two decades of edgy, adventurous programming — what he labels “discomfort shows” — is ending.

For an author whose work celebrates renegade spirit, this cannot be a good thing. “What will happen when the moral ambiguity of the streamers collides with the ad-supported moralism?” he asks. We may soon find out. 

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies That Broke Television by Peter Biskin Allen Lane £25/William Morrow $32.50, 368 pages

Christopher Grimes is the FT’s Los Angeles bureau chief

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