How FOX Broke the Rules...

Read Powells.com review of Kimmel's book on FOX Television and decided to chime in with the review I wrote last year:
"Kimmel, a Boston correspondent for the entertainment industry newspaper Variety, chronicles the turbulent growing pains of FOX television in this new history of FOX’s struggle to become the fourth television network. Although unauthorized by the network, this narrative of the birth of FOX Television is laden with first person accounts and Kimmel relies on several former Fox executives and staff members for behind-the-scenes information. The book is full of quotes and anecdotes from key meetings and events at FOX since 1985, and is best read as an updated companion piece to Alex Ben Bock’s 1990 history of the network, Outfoxed. From Married…with Children to Malcolm in the Middle, FOX has radically changed the face of broadcast television and Kimmel emphasizes this point throughout his book. However, it works more as a social history than a critique of FOX, and Kimmel ably details the history of a broadcaster once called “the coat-hanger network”."
I still think the book works as a social and cultural analyis of how FOX re-energized television in the early nineties. It didn't necessarily make television better, but the book does make a good point of showing FOX's development into an American pop culture powerhouse, for good or bad.