Three Blind Mice

"This is another book where you can recognise that intersection between creativity and industry. It’s about a system that starts off with the amazing golden days of the big three TV networks, emphasising particularly Brandon Tartikoff’s time at NBC, which involved in the creation of Miami Vice , LA Law , The Golden Girls , Hill Street Blues – an incredible range of amazing projects. But it’s a story of decline. The Three Blind Mice are the three main networks who lose this incredible position that they have at the centre of American and global entertainment. They don’t notice all the changes that are going on around them – from the growth of VHS, to the beginnings of the cable networks, to the things that will lead them to the incredibly diminished position that they have now. He details the corporate battles that go on when outside industrialists come in and attempt to change the system. It ends up, eventually, with nobody really focusing on what is going on outside the firm, no one really understanding how much the world is changing. It’s a brilliantly written book, which is also a great cautionary tale. Even Tartikoff gets it completely wrong with some series. It’s that sense of error, of people who are geniuses committing themselves passionately to things that are just wrong, that people hate. And then picking themselves up and carrying on. He sees it as inevitable, because there is so much money locked up inside these organisations. Some are good and some are bad. He talks about Jack Welch, when GE buys NBC, standing back and letting them get on with it in lots of ways. Other people are much more destructive: take, for example, the Larry Tisch era at CBS, when the organisation really lost its way. They all become conservative and defensive. That’s the other big thing. Arguably they should have embraced the changes that were going on all around them, but instead they hid from them, and decided not to invest. A lot of the energy in production has moved, first of all, to the cable networks, and, even beyond that, to things like YouTube. There used to be these three ivory towers that were almost impossible to get into. At the heart of them sometimes people did amazing work, but they weren’t porous to the world outside. Now we live in a world of amazing porous-ness. Even over the period that I’ve worked in television, it’s gone from being a very narrow world to being a world that people move in and out of all the time. The major networks will never regain the power and influence they once had in the world, when they were the only three places where people could watch anything. No. I think they go through phases of great creativity. Look at American Idol and Lost . Some of these projects that were definitely different and surprising happened. Or even now, with shows like Glee . But the bar for the networks to invest in dangerous projects is very high. It’s much easier for smaller entities like HBO or AMC or even the History Channel to invest in surprising projects, and find that little trigger that somehow connects up with what everybody needs. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The Simpsons . It’s interesting to look at the individual stories of how things are created. This article goes through some of the story behind the creation of The Simpsons . They don’t end up interviewing the two fundamental creators of The Simpsons , Matt Groening and James Brooks, but they do have Rupert Murdoch and Fox CEO Barry Diller telling their part of the story. No one quite knows the truth, but something that might just have been pitched in a meeting without Matt Groening having really thought about it before, because of the way things were at Fox, just becomes huge and connects with audiences in a way that people never expected it to…"