The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever by Alan Sepinwall

The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever by Alan Sepinwall, 388 pages.

Alan Sepinwall, who started as a television critic as an intern at The Star-Ledger, in New Jersey, in 1996, describes the shows that changed the way television was written, produced, and watched starting in the late 1990s. Shows like Hill Street Blues, and St. Elsewhere made big changes in the way television was written and staged, but in the years that followed Homicide, Life on the Streets, and NYPD Blue shook things up even more. This book focuses more on the shows that followed: Oz, The Sopranos, Wired, Battlestar Galactica, and anything created by Joss Wheedon all get their due.
For a book about TV shows, it was pretty good. For shows I liked, such as Deadwood, The Shield, and some named above, I found the book very compelling. The chapters about shows I could never quite get into, like Oz, and Friday Night Lights, didn't quite hold my attention. Go figure. I was surprised to find that this book, which is well-edited, and cleanly written, which had received solid reviews in several media outlets, had been self-published. Good job.

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Tapping into The Wire

Tapping into The Wire: the real urban crisis by Peter L. Beilenson & Patrick McGuire 214 pgs.

Need a quick overview of domestic issues in America? Read this book that relates real urban issues with the episodes of the HBO television show "The Wire."  Beilenson was the city Health Commissioner of Baltimore and uses the show to illustrate the real life situations he dealt with every day on his job.  Even though this book is subtitled 'the real urban crisis" there area  lot of chapters that deal with issues that are found in suburban and rural areas as well.

As we sit around and watch the federal government mess around with "the sequester" and the "fiscal cliff" and the "debt crisis", it is easy to forget that municipal governments are dealing with real issues and, at times, making a real difference.

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