Last week, I told you all about my new book, “The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever,” and said that it would go on sale around the week of Thanksgiving. As it turns out, the Kindle and Nook editions of the book were released much earlier than expected, while the paperback has come out slightly ahead of schedule today. (Other digital editions, for the iBookstore, Sony Reader, Kobo, etc., should be coming at some point in the next few weeks. The distributor I use for those sites works on a different schedule from everyone else. But if you want to read it on an iPad or iPhone, the Kindle app is really good, and is what I use for eBooks.)
For those who missed that earlier post, or the separate book website I set up, or the Frequently Asked Questions list on said site, “The Revolution Was Televised” is my look back at the way the groundbreaking dramas of the last 15 years – roughly from “The Sopranos,” “Oz” and “Buffy” through to “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” – transformed the TV business and how seriously we take it. It’s almost entirely new material (a couple of chapters lean a bit more on archival interviews in cases where the creator wasn’t available to do a new one), featuring new conversations with all three of the HBO Davids (Chase, Simon, Milch), Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Shawn Ryan, Vince Gilligan, Tom Fontana, Howard Gordon, Jason Katims, Ron Moore and David Eick, Jane Espenson, and a whole lot more.
It’s a tribute to this great era I’ve been lucky enough to cover, and the early reaction from people who downloaded digital versions of the book has been very positive.
Since versions of the book have been available for a couple of weeks now, I also thought I’d use this post as an excuse to take additional questions about it beyond the ones in the FAQ, both from people who’ve read it and those who are considering it. So have at it, and I hope everybody likes the book.
I ask it about other people’s work, so may as well about my own: what did everybody else think?