Biskind

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…

On 10 January 1999, the first episode of a drama about a New Jersey gangster with panic attacks debuted on the US cable channel HBO. The Sopranos ran for six seasons, the final episode being broadcast on 10 June 2007. Across eight years and 86 episodes it came to represent a golden age of TV, when moral complexity, deep characterisation and unprecedented authenticity were common features of a bold new form of televisual storytelling.It’s this “peak era” that Peter Biskind, the cultural critic and film historian, both…