Tinderbox, James Andrew Miller
Tinderbox, James Andrew Miller
List: $49.99 | Sale: $35.00
Club: $24.99

Tinderbox
HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers

Author: James Andrew Miller

Narrator: Amy McFadden, James Andrew Miller, Robert Petkoff

Unabridged: 43 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/23/2021


Synopsis

Tinderbox tells the exclusive, explosive, uninhibited true story of HBO and how it burst onto the American scene and screen to detonate a revolution and transform our relationship with television forever.

The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, The Wire, Succession…HBO has long been the home of epic shows, as well as the source for brilliant new movies, news-making documentaries, and controversial sports journalism. By thinking big, trashing tired formulas, and killing off cliches long past their primes, HBO shook off the shackles of convention and led the way to a bolder world of content, opening the door to all that was new, original, and worthy of our attention.

In Tinderbox, award-winning journalist James Andrew Miller uncovers a bottomless trove of secrets and surprises, revealing new conflicts, insights, and analysis. As he did to great acclaim with SNL in Live from New York; with ESPN in Those Guys Have All the Fun; and with talent agency CAA in Powerhouse, Miller continues his record of extraordinary access to the most important voices, this time speaking with talents ranging from Abrams (J. J.) to Zendaya, as well as every single living president of HBO—and hundreds of other major players.

Over the course of more than 750 interviews with key sources, Miller reveals how fraught HBO’s journey has been, capturing the drama and the comedy off-camera and inside boardrooms as HBO created and mobilized a daring new content universe, and, in doing so, reshaped storytelling and upended our entertainment lives forever.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company

About James Andrew Miller

James Andrew Miller is an award-winning journalist and the bestselling author of Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN; Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live; Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency; and Running in Place: Inside the Senate. He received his BA from Occidental College, his MLitt from Oxford University, and an MBA from Harvard University.

About Robert Petkoff

Robert Petkoff has won multiple AudioFile Earphones awards for his acclaimed narrations. He was named Best Voice of Fiction & Classics for his reading of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale. His other narration credits include Oath of Office by Michael Palmer, Gangster Squad by Paul Lieberman, and books by David Foster Wallace.Petkoff has appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in theaters across America and Europe.  He has worked in television and film. His theater credits include Lord Evelyn Oakleigh in the Broadway production of Anything Goes, Perchik as part of the Tony-nomianted cast of Fiddler on the Roof, and Hubert Humphrey in the Tony award-winning play All the Way. He has also had numerous roles in television on shows such as Law and Order and Married with Children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Richard on December 08, 2021

This is a long, long oral history of the cable channel HBO (and now a streaming service, HBO Max). It is an exhaustive look at all aspects, from a small beginning in the 1970s, trying to cable up a few apartment buildings, to being able to broadcast via satellite to cable operators all over the worl......more

Goodreads review by Paul on February 05, 2022

I love HBO. So I was fascinated to get a look behind the so-called curtain of entertainment history and get a better understanding of just how HBO came to be. It's an enthralling history of one of today's biggest entertainment brands that started with just 300 people hooked up to a cable in the grou......more

Goodreads review by Justin on March 31, 2023

The oral history from the creatives captivates, but HBO’s corporate goons are not nearly as compelling as those in Miller’s “Powerhouse”.......more

Goodreads review by Todd on December 02, 2021

I thoroughly enjoyed Miller's books on SNL and ESPN. This, however, was a long slog to get through. 70% of the book deals with corporate mergers and the power struggles of executives no one has ever heard of or care about. If Miller would have kept the business content to 30% of the book and devoted......more

Goodreads review by David on March 10, 2022

It took me nearly two months to read TINDERBOX, James Andrew Miller's exhaustively researched oral history of HBO. Not because the book was slow or tedious, but because I happened to pick it up during what was the busiest time in my life, a period of productivity that has since been surpassed. Taking......more