[In the following review of Inside Prime Time, Crook asserts that Gitlin's book contains powerful insights regarding the corporate culture of the major television networks.]

Like the Kremlin, the Big Three commercial television networks are closed, secretive, often paranoid fortresses. They are places where truth shifts cynically, where power, prestige and ideology filter through descending layers of evermore insecure bureaucracies.

They are places consumed by internal politics—who's in and who's out, who's standing next to the chairman and who isn't—where curious outsiders, especially journalists and writers, are subversives.

This is a book by one of them. Todd Gitlin's Inside Prime Time is perhaps the best book ever written about the thinking of the insulated men and women in the executive suites of Century City, Burbank and Television City.

Gitlin has listened to them. He has used their words to describe the fear, uncertainty, doubt and bravado of the men and women who make prime-time TV.

My reporting colleagues and I have heard many of the same people speak the same words. But we, too, have been absorbed by TV, co-opted to think the way its executives do, react as they do and report what is important to them.

Gitlin, a true outsider, a UC Berkeley sociologist, penetrates this haze of the present. After interviews with 200 executives, producers and writers, he has discovered the sociopolitical context of TV, its ideology. Because TV truly does reflect, if slowly, mass cultural and political aspirations, Gitlin cuts close to the ideology of America itself:

What comes across the small screen amounts to an entertaining version of the world—to ideology, in a word—but whatever conspiracy theorists may think, this is not because the networks are trying to indoctrinate the helpless masses. No, the networks generate ideology mostly indirectly and unintentionally, by trying to read popular sentiment and tailoring their schedules toward what they think the cardboard people they've conjured up want to see and hear.

If this is cultural tyranny, it is a soft tyranny, operating through stripped-down formulas that the networks selectively abstract, via other media, from mass sentiments.

Gitlin's is a subtle, profound observation. TV executives do not believe they are cultural arbiters, and certainly not political ones. Continually so accused, executives answer (honestly, given the rules where they work) that they only anticipate and reflect the social and political currents of the day. They select programs that instinct, research and ratings say people want.

Gitlin doesn't deny them that. He argues only that selection—how some shows make prime-time schedules and how others don't—is a political process that springs from the social axioms of TV's internal, unexamined culture.

“Ideology,” Gitlin writes, “means nothing more or less than a set of assumptions that becomes second nature. … Television can no more speak without ideology than we can speak without prose. We swim in its world even if we don't believe in it.”

Gitlin is not talking about simple, electoral politics. This is in-vitro politics, how elites respond to the masses. Broad issues of the day intrude—it matters to networks whether the public is shifting to the right or left—and, like politicians, network executives must tune to the vast public yammer, and the vaster public silence. They respond by creating the icons of mass culture.

How else, outside Hollywood's own context, do you explain the patterns of network TV? Why do program trends develop? Why, for instance, in the same season, did all three networks order situation comedy scripts based on Vietnam? Why did all three networks' scripts revolve around the reporters who covered the war? Why did the shows have to be comedies?

Why did none make the prime-time schedules?

The easy answer, given to Gitlin by an NBC executive commenting on his network's failed pilot, was, “I don't think people want to hear about Vietnam. I think it was destined for failure simply because I don't think it's a funny war.”

A CBS executive said that his network's Vietnam show “was so anti-Establishment as to be, I would imagine, offensive to the average American. There were no heroes; the army was the villain. The good guys were the villains and the bad guys were the heroes.”

Gitlin's more truthful answer emerges from the insulation in which TV's men and women operate. “The creative community reads the same cultural newsletter,” Gitlin says. They are forever guessing about an audience they have never met and know only through newspapers and other media.

Executives tend to transfer to the unknown public the doubts, questions or insecurities of their own lives. Controversy has no place in the political environment of a corporation, and the executives who must pick and choose the cultural symbols of millions invariably look to corporate ideals as their guide. TV's lowest common denominator is not in the viewing public, but network bureaucracy.

“An industry devoted to satisfying abstract audiences does not usually attract individuals with strong moral positions in the first place,” Gitlin writes. “This industry that thrives on getting its products liked is inhabited by managers who advance by being liked. … What results is a culture of ingratiation, in which sweeping assumptions about entertainment easily become inflexible and executives drift equally easily into market miscalculation.”

TV executives of Los Angeles, for the most part, are not going to like the picture Gitlin presents of them. They won't understand it, and they will accuse Gitlin of slandering their integrity, of misunderstanding them, of making them look like buffoons. Or worse, like nasty cultural commissars.

They will see buzz words, like political or ideology, and react as if they have been accused of perpetrating some sinister plot on the public.

That's a format Hollywood can understand. That's the way it thinks.