cover image TV

TV

Brian Brown, . . Crown, $24 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-609-60615-5

Television industry veteran Brown takes the reader behind the cameras and into the booth at major televised sporting events over several decades—from the Olympics to the Super Bowl—depicting a hostile, high-pressure environment where egos and tempers clash perhaps even more fiercely than out on the field. At the center is acclaimed director Caesar Fortunato, who got into television when the medium was young. Caesar, an innovator credited with changing TV forever by inventing the instant replay, is finding it increasingly tough to fit in with the representatives of the corporate-driven media behemoths of the '90s, who seem not to understand or appreciate his craft. And Caesar's own dissolute lifestyle has brought chaos to his personal life, and finally to his work. Gambling becomes perhaps his most dangerous compulsion and threatens to wipe him out financially. A fateful battle of wills results as Caesar strives to get fired and force the network to buy out his contract, and the network attempts to make his job so unpleasant that he will quit on his own and let them off the hook. Brown's episodic narrative jumps back and forth in time, tracing Caesar's progress from his boyhood in Philadelphia and early local TV jobs in the late '50s, on through four more decades of a bumpy ride to wealth and fame. There is, at times, a Hunter Thompson quality to Brown's rendering of Caesar's wild living and conflicts with authority. And while the desultory timeline is occasionally awkward, the insider's view of TV is captivating, as is the portrait of Fortunato, a colorfully flawed, larger-than-life protagonist. (Aug.)

Forecast:Blurbs by Brown's colleagues Tom Brokaw and Bob Costas will make media mavens sit up and take notice. This isn't the definitive industry satire, but it's a good one, and sales should reflect that.