The title of Bill Carter’s new book, “Desperate Networks,” vamps on the hit ABC-TV show “Desperate Housewives” to prove how current it is, and this is current indeed, with up-to-date insights on Katie Couric’s evolution into the first network TV anchorwoman. Carter’s breathless account of the latest jockeying in network TV is an instant, rapidly assembled history of the more traditional parts of a medium undergoing massive change. It is a good book about a subject that may be of interest primarily to media junkies.
Its most compelling aspect is the insider quality, not surprising considering Carter has covered television for The New York Times for years. His descriptions of powerful executives like Viacom/CBS’s Leslie Moonves, Jeff Zucker and Bob Wright at GE/NBC, and Robert Iger and Steve McPherson at Disney/ABC are rich; “Desperate Networks” often feels like a serial, or one of the sitcoms Carter so expertly dissects.
The top executives get their due, as do lesser lights like Mike Darnell, the excitable boy who tunes into kitsch and titillation so effectively for Fox, that scrappy fourth network; Lloyd Braun, the former chairman of ABC Entertainment who finally found vindication in the success of “Lost”; and Marc Cherry, the writer who scored so strongly – after years of wandering the entertainment desert – with “Desperate Housewives.”
The book tracks mainstream TV from 2004-2005, when Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel left the scene. The big hits on the three legacy networks were losing their luster as Fox began to snare the coveted 18-to-49-year-old viewer, and all were looking for the next smash. Besides “Desperate Housewives,” the killers were “American Idol” and “Lost,” shows that, in Carter’s telling description, began their careers as orphans.
“Desperate Networks” is a traditional rags-to-riches story, but here, the protagonists are the shows. The most successful seem to involve people who reflect the career trajectory of the show itself, like Teri Hatcher, the star of “Housewives.” Too bad Carter shows attitude in an otherwise knowing sketch:
“Teri Hatcher’s tale was so familiar, it was all too easy to write her off as another burned-out case,” he writes. “The scenario had played out so many times before in Hollywood: Sexy young thing of limited range ages past her sell-by date and can’t get arrested.
“The big heat in Hatcher’s career had come a full decade earlier when she signed on to star as Lois Lane in the ABC semihit Lois & Clark. But the show had burned out quickly and left the air back in 1997.
“That was the year Hatcher’s daughter was born and she was willing to shelve acting in favor of her personal life anyway. A woman of unusual intelligence (especially for an actress), Hatcher had never intended to enslave herself to show business.”
That bothersome parenthetical phrase makes you wonder what Carter thinks of actors. The people he focuses on are men’s men in a macho medium, like the combative “American Idol” star Simon Cowell (who reportedly earns $36 million a year) and NBC alpha male Zucker.
At the very end, Carter says Moonves is positioning CBS to be more content company than network and is considering forcing cable companies to pay a subscription fee for network programs. That’s the sort of provocative thought that could make Carter’s next book as rich in analysis as this one is in movers and shakers.
Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer from Cleveland.
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Desperate Networks
By Bill Carter
Doubleday, 416 pages, $26.95
