I wanted to do a book which would give you a sense that the totality of the medium had been addressed. A VIEWER’S BOOK: “You may have watched a lot of TV but never thought systematically about it.I’m much more interested now in thinking about and writing about TV than the movies.” So I began to develop an historical perspective on TV that I had had on the movies for a long time. ‘The Wire,’ ‘The Sopranos,’ ‘Breaking Bad’ - they were so much more ambitious than anything made for theaters. “I was at a point where I felt that the movies were not really going anywhere very exciting, and that if you were looking for the best American movies, you probably needed to look at television. At 400 pages, the book is a bit weighty, but not the prose.īut what made Thomson, who had never before put his take on TV between covers, decide to change channels? During a recent interview, he explained. As ever, his writing is bright, puckish and reader-friendly. In “Television: A Biography” (Thames & Hudson, $34.95), he focuses on TV from its individual genres to its broad social impact during the past 70 years. Now Thomson has switched his gaze, and his analysis, to the TV medium. British-born but long based in America, he is the author of nearly two dozen film-related books including “Moments that Made the Movies,” “‘Have You Seen … ?’: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films” and “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.” NEW YORK - At 75, David Thomson is the sultan of cinema criticism.
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