“Three Blind Mice” may be the most thorough probe ever into how the TV industry works. An indefatigable reporter, Auletta enjoyed unprecedented access to everyone from top brass to affiliate-station managers, His book is a sprawling tale of infighting and desperation, set during the mid- to late 1980s, when new corporate parents took charge of NBC, CBS and ABC. While the book lacks the focus of Auletta’s “Greed and Glory on Wall Street,” it is a smart portrait of once-coddled institutions retrenching in the face of competition from cable, VCRs and the Fox Broadcasting Co.
Auletta is best when portraying the conflict of corporate cultures. After General Electric bought NBC in 1985, top GE executives Robert Wright and Jack Welch insisted that running a network was no different from manufacturing aircraft engines. In one memorable scene, the brusque Wright introduces himself to top NBC executives-and lectures them for 90 minutes about how they had bungled their jobs. Morale at the network sagged. By contrast, Capital Cities’ Thomas Murphy and Dan Burke, writes Auletta, deftly slashed costs at ABC while introducing such innovative shows as “thirtysomething” and “The Wonder Years.”
Meanwhile, over at CBS, Tisch’s 1986 takeover plunged the network, especially the news division, into a psychological abyss. Auletta, who interviewed Tisch extensively, portrays the chairman as an isolated, unimaginative martinet obsessed with the bottom line. In one anecdote, Tisch invites flamboyant CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff to breakfast in his Beverly Hills Hotel suite. “You can have a half a grapefruit or orange juice,” Tisch tells him. “I’m hungry. I want a bagel,” answers Yetnikoff. Replies Tisch, outraged: “You know how much a bagel costs in this hotel?” One of Tisch’s underlings bragged about hiking the price of tampons in CBS ladies’ rooms from a nickel to 25 cents.
Will anyone besides media junkies care about this? The cast of characters and deluge of dollar signs become dizzying, but Auletta mixes enough gossip with the business talk to keep the yarn moving. We get an inside account of CBS founder William Paley and Tisch’s botched attempt to woo Steven Bochco to CBS. (Bochco rejected Tisch’s stingy production offer, further alienating Paley from the new chairman.) We follow NBC Entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff through a marathon scheduling session and go behind the scenes in the touchy affiliate-network relationship. Yet Auletta’s analysis gets lost amid all the anecdotes, and his verdict is debatable: are the network owners really “blind mice” or are their properties doomed by increasing diversity and technological advances?
Frank’s “Out of Thin Air” complements Auletta’s saga of decline. An ex-newspaperman, Frank joined NBC in 1950 and rose to president of the news division. He created the “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” produced memorable documentaries and programs (including the acclaimed series “First Tuesday”) and guided coverage of key events of the 1950s and 1960s, such as the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Frank’s witty, engrossing memoir makes one realize how powerfully our historical memories were shaped by television. The book is also a nostalgia trip to the bygone days when the networks produced incisive documentaries such as Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame,” about hunger in America, rather than specials such as “Bad Girls” starring Deborah Norville. Frank’s fate brings home the new cost consciousness: shortly after GE took over NBC in 1985, he was fired. His memoirs are a sentimental epitaph for a past era; Auletta’s “Three Blind Mice” is an unvarnished portrait of what television has become.
