Peter Biskind is a cinema man. Best known for 1998’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and other books about the meaty, macho movie business, he has turned his attentions to the growth of streaming services and what might be the end of the current golden age of TV. The swaggering Pandora’s Box attempts to wrangle a complex tale into some sort of order, from the early days of prestige TV, to the high-stakes and seemingly bottomless business of “content creation”. But in the acknowledgments that conclude the book, Biskind still offers a secular prayer for the return of his preferred medium. “Movies, I hope, will one day make a comeback,” he writes. For now, television will have to do.
Biskind begins with, and frequently returns to, HBO, which began in 1972 as a cable channel showing films and sporting events for a fee, before growing into a home for series so reputable that it could get away with the slogan “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” Though he documents early successes such as The Larry Sanders Show and Oz, it is, inevitably, The Sopranos that kicks off this new golden age in earnest. “The Sopranos goes places where no other show had gone,” he writes.
