The New Entrepreneurs: An Institutional History of Television Anthology Writers (review)

Conventional wisdom describes theater as a writer's medium, film as a director's medium, and television as a producer's medium. Countless works of film scholarship have contested and complicated this adage as it relates to historic and current practices in film production. However, television scholarship, less directly shaped by questions of individual authorship in a media industry, has productively retained producers and network executives as the medium's preeminent content creators. Historic and current developments in network television encourage further reconsideration of the creative and institutional impact of other television personnel. In The New Entrepreneurs, Jon Kraszewski examines an important group of multimedia authors, television anthology writers, with a greater level of detail and a broader scope than previous histories of early television.

Kraszewski provides a compelling history of major television writers whose professional roles changed rapidly between the 1950s and early 1960s. In the early 1950s, the premier television anthology writers rose from part-time freelancers to celebrated broadcast playwrights, commanding prestige, profit, and influence in New York and Hollywood. By the end of the decade, most worked as anonymous series writers or left the industry altogether. Early television flourished as a writer's medium before the three networks solidified the industry based on a schedule of familiar genre series with predictable scripts. The most accomplished writers navigated this tumultuous era of television to become multimedia writers and producers, leveraging their success in television into opportunities in publishing, on Broadway, and in film. As their influence waned in the later 1950s, they fought to retain the critical role of the writer in the changing structure of the television industry.

Kraszewski draws upon extensive archival research into the papers of three of the most successful anthology writers: Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, and Rod Serling. Despite similar beginnings in television, each writer took a remarkably different path following his acclaimed anthology work. Chayefsky adapted his Marty teleplay into the Hollywood Oscar-winning film while retaining creative choices and profit participation. This lucrative window for television writers closed soon after it opened, and Chayefsky left television with a lifelong cynicism toward the medium. Reginald Rose remained in the business, adapting his 1957 anthology teleplay, The Defender, into The Defenders, a semianthology series. Rose retained power over scripts but had to adhere to the more restrictive series structure. Serling, the iconic host of The Twilight Zone, had perhaps the most varied career, parlaying his television writing into published anthologies, Broadway productions, Hollywood films, and finally work as an onscreen talent and executive producer. However, Serling's attempt to control The Twilight Zone through writing proved that keeping pace with the demands of series television remained all but impossible for a single author.

By focusing exclusively on writers, Kraszewski makes an important addition to earlier scholarship on this television era that largely focuses on corporate and regulatory history. Like their contemporary independent producers in Hollywood (such as Burt Lancaster and Harold Hecht, who produced Marty on film), anthology writers provide a key example of creative personnel using successful productions to gain control of future productions. Yet unlike film independents, television writers more insistently relied on multimedia engagement to offset the volatile changes in early television. Their history also adds to our understanding of changes in television program formats. While the telefilm westerns came to dominate late 1950s television as anthology dramas faded from the air, writers readapted serious dramas dealing with social issues into a series structure. The "vast wasteland" polemics of regulators, critics, and former anthology writers helped mask the important narrative transitions exemplified by these hybrid shows.

Kraszewski divides his book into five case studies, arranged chronologically and supported by historical research on the changing context of the television industry. Each case study emphasizes a particular television writer adapting his work to gain a foothold in other media industries or greater creative and economic power in the television industry. The guiding metaphor of "the new entrepreneur" helps structure these chapters...