cover image Not So Prime Time: Chasing the Trivial on American Television

Not So Prime Time: Chasing the Trivial on American Television

Howard Rosenberg. Ivan R. Dee Publisher, $26 (288pp) ISBN 978-1-56663-577-6

Television's class acts and shameful excesses are explored in this delectable book of crisp, witty and caustic criticism, compiled from longtime Los Angeles Times television critic and Pulitzer-winner Rosenberg's columns. Dating from 1986 to 2003, these provocative essays focus primarily on news coverage of big stories, from the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and the downfall of the Berlin Wall to the war in Iraq and that enduring example of journalists gone wild, the O.J. Simpson trial. Rosenberg's keen observations and vibrant writing bring fresh insight to the familiar, whether he's trashing a trashy daytime talk show or vigorously demanding that TV news adhere to the high journalistic standards that it rarely achieves today. Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly is a""self-inflating gasbag."" A reporter sucking up ad nauseam to Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1993""at times looked poised to climb up on his subject's lap and purr."" In a piece that veers away from news, a particularly inane NBC movie about Noah is""a Bible story as Henny Youngman might have written it. Take Lot's wife. Please."" And he offers touching tributes to titans like Jackie Gleason, Nancy Marchand and Charles Kuralt. Because the columns are arranged by theme rather than by chronology, they can feel repetitious when read consecutively--three pieces in favor of televising executions and four about the TV image projected by various presidents, for example. Although Rosenberg spends twice as much time critiquing TV as he does praising it, he conveys such admiration and respect for this much-maligned medium that he can only occasionally be accused of kvetching.