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“It’s Not TV” by Felix Gillette and John Koblin

Despite the title, “It’s Not TV” by Felix Gillette and John Koblin chronicles one of television’s great success stories.

It’s been 50 years since what started as a small cable channel blossomed into what has become a quality showcase for a medium that’s not always been about quality.

In this interview with Steve Tarter, Gillette talks about the “HBO Shrug,” an expression for how the network put distinctive programming before the bottom line, allowing creative folks to do their thing without interference such as allowing David Chase to make his mafia series in New Jersey with all the costs that come with location shooting instead of on a Hollywood soundstage. 

Everyone has their favorites but HBO put its mark on the TV landscape with shows like “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” “The Wire,” "Game of Thrones" and many others.

Gillette talks about how, early in the 21st century, HBO considered buying a little DVD service called Netflix and why HBO’s east coast executives nixed the deal. 

He also talks about an original movie that HBO was developing in the early 2000s that was going to focus on the battle between Donald Trump and Steve Wynn over an undeveloped property in Atlantic City. Missed that, you say? That’s because the movie never got made. Trump got wind of the plan, said Gillette, and had dinner with director Danny DeVito, convincing him to back out.

Now in the age of streaming, HBO faces competition on all fronts from companies with big budgets for projects. Gillette talks about how the network is at yet another crossroads and what might lie ahead.

Joel Richard Paul’s latest book explores the impact of Daniel Webster, a man often considered one of the greatest orators of the 19th century, but also sheds light on American history along the way.

For example, 45 years before the South seceded from the union, the New England states contemplated such a move. Outraged over the loss of critical trade with England due to President James Madison's initiation of the War of 1812, New England representatives met in Hartford in 1815 to debate the measure. As it turned out, cooler heads prevailed, trade finally returned and order in the union was restored.

That’s just one of the insights Paul shares in “Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism,” a book about the New Hampshire lawyer who turned politician when he moved to Boston.

“Daniel Webster was willing ultimately to sacrifice his own political ambitions (he was a four-time candidate for president) in order to save the union,” Paul told Steve Tarter.

Webster’s support of the Compromise of 1850—where the west was declared slave-free in return for the northern states agreeing to enforce fugitive slave laws—cost him the backing of members of his own party in Massachusetts, a state that vehemently opposed slavery, said Paul. 

Even though Webster opposed slavery, himself, he made the point that the only way to eliminate it was as a union, a stance that Abraham Lincoln also took. “Lincoln and Webster were political allies. Webster shaped Lincoln’s thinking,” the author said.

Webster saw his speeches and writings published widely. For years after his death in 1852, schoolchildren were taught to recite excerpts from his speeches, said Paul, pointing out that Webster's stirring rhetoric convinced Americans to see themselves as a nation bound together by a government of laws, not parochial interests.

World War II is often recalled as that one great war, an engagement between the forces of good and evil that called upon this country to unleash the arsenal of democracy to thwart fascism and annihilate the concept of Nazism.

But what we don’t often recall is that while every able-bodied individual was called on to serve his country in this time of need, some of the most able-bodied Americans stepped up to help the cause and were turned down—because of the color of their skin.

That’s just one of the stories that Matthew Delmont relates in “Half American,” a book that documents the battles that black Americans fought before they could be sent overseas—to enlist, to survive basic training and then to accept secondary roles when the military, bowing to pressure, finally put black soldiers into service.

Delmont said it took seven years of research to construct “Half American.” He reported that black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender were great resources on black America’s involvement in WWII.

“The black press has always understood itself to be a fighting press,” he told Steve Tarter. “They’ve always said they’re fighting on behalf of black Americans. During WWII they were fighting against racial discrimination in the military and defense industries,” he said.

“They were front and center calling on FDR, the military and politicians to be accountable, to recognize that black soldiers were catching hell in these Army bases in the South,” said Delmont, who spelled out the large—and largely ignored—role that black Americans wound up playing in the war.

“Black Americans, by and large, were not in combat but placed in supply and logistical roles,” he said. Delmont points out that supply lines like the Red Ball Express that served Allied troops in Europe made the difference when it came to keeping troops engaged. “WWII wasn’t just a battle of strategy but a battle of supply,” he said.

While the black press promoted a Double Victory campaign, calling for wins over America’s enemies and racism at home, it was all but ignored by the white press, said Delmont. “When it was reported on, it was critically as some viewed black Americans fully behind the war effort, that blacks were asking too much by asking for equality.”

Delmont also cited the role black Americans played in two of the biggest road projects during the war, the Alaskan Highway and the Ledo Road in Asia. Under some of the most difficult conditions on Earth, black Americans made up an estimated 60 percent of the work force in both projects.

Talk of democracy being endangered is fashionable these days. It’s easy to be alarmed but Yascha Mounk says there are reasons to be optimistic. In “The Great Experiment,” Mounk spells out his reasons: “Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly,” he said. 

Achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world and is the greatest experiment of our time, said Mounk.
  
 Mounk said societies have long suffered from domination, fragmentation, or structured anarchy. So it is hardly surprising that most people are pessimistic of a harmonious outcome but Mounk said the past can offer crucial insights for how to do better in the future. There is real reason for hope.

“It could go wrong in all kinds of ways but in the United States, we’ve made some real progress,” he told Steve Tarter.
  
 It is up to us and the institutions we build whether different groups will come to see each other as enemies or friends, as strangers or compatriots. To make diverse democracies endure, and even thrive, we need to create a world in which our identities come to matter less—not because we ignore the injustices that still exist but because we have succeeded in addressing them said Mounk..
  
 Scanning the globe, Mounk said there are no perfect democracies to emulate and that nobody is doing any better at it than the United States.

We need to reject politicians who are unwilling to compromise and try to pit groups against one another, he said.

You know about Sears, America’s favorite store until it wasn’t. So how is Sears an example of quitting as cited in Annie Duke’s book, “Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away”?

People know about Sears, the pioneering catalog store that rose to become the nation’s powerhouse retail establishment, accounting for 1 percent of the country’s Gross National Product in 1950, said Duke.

They also know what happened in later years when the store faced competition from the likes of Walmart, Target and others. What folks don’t always recognize is that Sears also spawned Allstate Insurance, the Dean Witter stockbrokerage (later bought up by Morgan Stanley), the Discover card and the Coldwell Banker real estate firm, she said.

Where does quitting come in? Sears quit the wrong thing, said Duke. They chose to tough it out with retail in the 90s when they should have stayed with the financial services side of the business.

Quitting has a negative connotation, Duke told Steve Tarter. “If I call you a quitter, it’s like calling you a loser,” she said. 

But quitting at the right time is not only appropriate, it gets you to your goals, said Duke. “They say, ‘Winners never quit and quitters never win,’ but winners quit a lot. They quit all the stuff that’s not working so they can stick to the things that are,” she said.

Duke, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, also serves as co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit that seeks to held kids K-12 make better decisions in life, she said.

Looking back now, the story of what took place in Donald Trump’s White House during 2020 seems like a dream--or nightmare. The events passed by us on television while we were all hunkered down during the pandemic. Two Washington Post reporters looked into that year a little further with interviews of 140 people. 

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker wrote “I Alone Can Fix It,” a book published in 2021. Old news? With hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection still going on, the book serves as a reminder of the amazing and upsetting events that took place that year.

What was really going on around the president as a government failed to contain the coronavirus and over half a million Americans perished? The authors also focus on who was influencing Trump after he refused to concede an election he had clearly lost and spread lies about election fraud. 
 
Leonnig told Steve Tarter in the 2021 interview that she never covered anything like the Trump presidency in 20 years of reporting at the Post. “There’s nothing that came across my plate like this. It was like a firehose times ten,” she said.

Along with relating the many difficulties that occurred in the 2020 White House, Leonnig made a point of recognizing what made Trump a winner in the first place when he upset Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

While acknowledging that no one was more surprised than Trump, himself, to have attained the presidency, Leonnig outlined what she felt carried the Republican standard bearer to victory: convincing rural America and those who felt they were being ignored in Washington that he would be their defender, she said.

Marshall Allen has a message for you: get ready to fight.

His book, "Never Pay the First Bill," urges consumers to know their rights and understand what you’re up against—namely the nation’s healthcare system.

“Our healthcare system is exploiting our sickness for profit,” Allen told Steve Tarter in this 2021 interview.

“It’s okay to make a profit and we want to reward excellence but what we have too often in the American healthcare system is profiteering,” he said.

“You have businesses creating schemes to take more of our money than they should and a lot of schemes are very deceptive,” said Allen, who’s been covering the healthcare scene for 16 years as a reporter.

“I’m trying to help people understand how these schemes have been working against them,” he said.

Allen said the consumer must be constantly vigilant. “No one else is coming to our rescue,” he noted.

Allen’s guerrilla guide includes the following:

--Analyze and contest your medical bills, so you don't pay more than you should;
 --Obtain the billing codes for a procedure in advance;
 --Write in an appropriate treatment clause before signing financial documents.

If you want to know more about crime fiction, Martin Edwards is your man. His latest book, “The Life of Crime” is an extensive  (over 700 pages) history of the subject, sectioned off by books, radio, stage, movies and TV.

When he’s not recording history, he’s madly writing—mystery novels, short stories and articles. He’s also president and archivist for the prestigious Detection Club, a British group of writers founded in 1930 by folks like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

Speaking from his native England, Edwards took time away from his writing to talk about, what else, crime novels with Steve Tarter.

How did he get started with a life of crime, Tarter asked? Edwards, now 67, said when he was eight he saw a movie, not a terribly good one, but one that was based on an Agatha Christie story. From that point on he was hooked. 

“From that moment on, the two things I wanted to do were to read lots and lots of crime fiction and also to write it. I had a very specific ambition to be a crime novelist. I’m very lucky that I’ve been able to achieve that,” said Edwards.

You might be interested to know that one of the founding members of the Detection Club was A.A. Milne, the author of “Winnie-the-Pooh.” Milne joined the illustrious group even though he only wrote one crime story, “The Red House Mystery,” a book that sold well in England, Edwards said.

Whether the writers are new or old, Edwards believes there’s crime novel to fit all tastes. 

One of his next projects is a Liverpool mystery set in the 60s that may involve a certain musical group, Edwards suggested. He can’t say any more. It is a mystery, after all.

Linda Flanagan paints a vivid picture of the “Little League parent” in her book, “Take Back the Game.” It was herself. She writes about being so proud of her son’s basketball skills before realizing that she’d gotten too caught up in being a super-fan. 

Parents need to back off from their kids’ games, said Flanagan, a former track coach, herself. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with sports, she said. Athletics are training grounds for character, friendship, and connection; at their best, sports insulate kids from hardship and prepare them for adult life. 

But youth sports have changed over the last 25 years, said Flanagan. They no longer deliver the healthy outcomes everyone wants. Instead, unbeknownst to most parents, kids who play competitive organized sports are more likely to burn out or suffer from overuse injuries than develop their characters or build healthy habits. 

In “Take Back the Game,” Flanagan writes about the youth sports industry that’s grown up, capitalizing on parents’ worry about their kids’ futures while selling the idea that more competitive play is essential in the feeding frenzy over access to colleges and universities. Flanagan delves into a national obsession that has compelled kids to specialize year-round in one sport, increased the risk of both physical injury and mental health problems, encouraged egregious behavior by coaches and parents while reducing access to sports for low-income families. 

If you want a good example of how to handle sports, check out Norway, Flanagan told Steve Tarter. It's a country with "a culture geared toward children, their development and  enjoyment of sports versus our system which is based around adults, adult supervision, seriousness, and competition," she said.

Starting  about 15 years ago, television had to adjust to a new world. No longer did the medium have the audience to itself.
Cory Barker, a communications professor at Bradley University, explores what happened when TV collided with social media and the internet in his book, "Social Media: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture."
Barker outlines how campaigns were set up for people to chat online while watching specific programs, where exchanges among viewers took place on Twitter as a show unfolded.
There's less of that now, Barker noted, now that so many streaming networks have developed. The internet came and conquered.
But the streamers can't afford to celebrate, said Barker. "This has been a bad year for every streaming network," he told Steve Tarter, referring to reduced subscriber lists at almost every level.
Barker also weighs in on the future of newspapers, noting that the college students he interacts with on a daily basis generally treat news as a commodity they're able to get free online.
He also points to the stratification occurring across the nation where big operations like the New York Times continue to expand offerings and influence while local media outlets have to make do with less and less.