GLUED TO THE SET

Rating:
Summary: Doh!
Review: Anybody who thinks they're writing a book about the sixty best television shows ever made yet somehow doesn't include The Simpsons is obviously so stupid and ignorant that no further comment need be made. Time for this windy old hack to be sent to the glue factory.

Rating:
Summary: Doh!
Review: Anybody who thinks they're writing a book about the sixty best television shows ever made yet somehow doesn't include The Simpsons is obviously so stupid and ignorant that no further comment need be made. Time for this windy old hack to be sent to the glue factory.

Rating:
Summary: A Disappointing and Annoying View of the Tube
Review: For the title and publisher's description of the book, I thought GLUED TO THE SET would be a reasonably enjoyable look at television programs and the culture which surrounded them. What I found was an annoying, over-blown polemic that tried desparately to locate deep sociological, demographic,and cultural trends in EVERY television show selected. The author's quest for meaning frequently stretches both the reader's credulity and patience. Just as a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, sometimes TV programs are just diversion or entertainment, and nothing more. Bob Newhart and Mr. Ed are entertainments, not cultural icons or symptons of a mass media-driven societal decline.

Rating:
Summary: Politics and Culture ... and TV
Review: I really enjoyed reading a book that seriously examined the effects TV had and has on our lives, and reading in depth analysis of why certain shows hit it big, and why some shows are still loved today while other shows that were extremely popular in their time are now forgotten. However, I couldn't help but feeling now and then that the author sometimes just took the opposite viewpoint from everyone else in order to seem like he was not in any way a follower, or to prove how different and more insightful his viewpoints were than other TV reviewers! For example, he seems like have a much higher opinion of Home Improvement than of Seinfeld, he discounts Saturday Night Live as having had little influence on popular culture and so forth. This didn't really distract from my enjoyment of this book, however! I like to read opinions other than the mainstream ones! I also really enjoyed reading about how he picked which 60 TV events or shows to profile.

Rating:
Summary: An ideal essayist
Review: Mr. Stark has managed to capture what the whole spirit of essay-writing is about: to spark debate and seamlessly incorporate the various (and often needlessly divorced) disciplines, be it sociology, psychology, design, media, education, etc.

Many other reviewers on this democratic yet altogether newfangled 'Amazon' service have expressed displeasure at Stark's omissions and/or the marketing of the book. For those who expected a simple list of the Best Shows of All Time, you should not bother with books to begin with; yet if you persist in reading, I suggest you start with Ziauddin Sardir's essay about list and rank obsession in 'The A to Z of Postmodern Life'.

Mr. Stark's cause, I believe (and teach my students) is to provoke the very debate and discussion that has prompted both 1 and 5 star rankings. He is perhaps one of the most effective essayists of our time, for he manages to incorporate opinion, research, and a broader historical view by referencing the very (and only) things that give our American culture its ballast. Most importantly, he manages to do this without falling into the academic sophism that describes much of the current film/video literature.

Rating:
Summary: good information but often ended negative
Review: Steven Stark has an uncanny ability to bring cultural, social and political significance to the ubiquitous mundane world of television. I took no small delight in his insights and tracings of the effects of television as an event itself, rather than merely the presentation of events.

In my own life, however, television events I felt were important were not even alluded to by Stark. To fill out that part of the picture, I write this review.

To wit:

In his discussion of Walt Disney's influence, he failed to mention all the nuclear power stuff. One significant episode involved Walt dropping a ping pong ball onto a ping-pong table covered with mousetraps and ping-pong balls, resulting in a flurry of popping traps and flying balls. This was to illustrate a nuclear reaction. For many of us impressionable youngsters, this was our first take on quantum theory and the "friendliness" of nuclear power. Stark just plain and simple missed this far-reaching segment of the television mind warp.

In his discussion of Walter Cronkite and his reputation as the "most believed man in America" he failed to note this Walt's role in putting to rest, at least in the visible media, the nagging questions surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1967 (I believe), Mark Lane's book, Rush to Judgement, and several others had rightfully pointed to the impossibility of the Warren Commission's findings. There was nightly discussion on the veracity of the report throughout the television bands and in the press. Then along came Mr. Credibility, who looked at America over the tops of his grandfatherly wire-rimmed glasses and he explained the controversy, pointing to all the anomalies. It was a hell of an expose. But in the final moments of the show--the last one of any note to address the Kennedy assassination for two decades--he simply said words to the effect, "but in the final analysis, the Warren Commission stands tall, etc., etc." This particular television event was a w! atershed event in the use of the media by renegade segments of the government to steer the public discussion away from what they were doing and had done. Mr. Credibility was in the midst of it, and Stark missed it.

A final weakness in the book is his failure to mention the program I Led Three Lives. Today I don't recall if the star was named Herbert Philbrick or if that was the main character's name. But the story line was always that dirty communists were being infiltrated by the righteous secret government agent who was working both sides and who was always in danger of being found out by the nasty commies. This show had a tremendous effect of us youngsters and set the tenor of much of the early part of our political and civic lives. When the sixties came along and higher education and notable research by scholars into the dynamics behind the Viet Nam War and the military industrial complex, the revolt was just as much against the world as presented by I Led Three Lives as it was against "people over thirty." How easy it would be, if that's all it was. But it was deeper and television was in the middle of it, setting the tone for people's lives as it is today. And alas, Stark missed it.

In conclusion, Stark can't get it all, can he? What he has done, however, is open wide the door to the critical thinking that is so necessary to detach ourselves from the intrigue and grasp of television. I just wish he had stopped to the shine his powerful light on those three of my own pet peeves.

Rating:
Summary: Not Supposed to be about the 60 GREATEST shows
Review: This book is not meant to be about the 60 greatest shows ever to appear on television. It is not, in reality, a book about television at all, but rather about sociology. It analyzes the impact of television on American life, and, conversely, the impact of American life on television.

Bravo to Mr. Stark for writing a book which gives us much more than so many other books do in discussing television. Mr. Stark actually makes us think about its impact.