3.11/The Lived Worlds/The Magazine

Television and the Magazine World

The Clearance Clause

A year later, the same industry produced a subtler crossing between television and print. On November 28, 1994, the New York Observer, a weekly broadsheet printed on salmon-colored newsprint and read closely inside Manhattan’s media world, ran the first installment of a column called “Sex and the City.”² Its author, Candace Bushnell, was a freelancer with bylines scattered across the city’s fashion and general-interest titles, writing under her own byline about a Manhattan she and her friends were living through in real time. The column ran for two years. One of its recurring men she called Mr. Big, and the name attached itself, in time, to Ron Galotti, a corporate vice president at Condé Nast who had spent the first half of the decade helping shape Vogue and Vanity Fair from inside the company’s Madison Avenue offices.³ Bushnell’s columns were collected into a book in 1996;⁴ two years after that, an HBO series adapted from them began production for a network whose signature shows, until then, had been a prison drama and a mob family.

The trajectory ran from a weekly the size of a tabloid, through a paperback, into a cable schedule occupying an hour every Sunday night — and it did so without the participants treating any leg of the journey as a demotion. A magazine columnist’s ex-boyfriend, a man whose career had unfolded entirely inside print publishing, became, under a different name, one of American television’s most recognized romantic leads. Neither industry had planned the crossing. Both benefited from it once it happened.

The Trade on the Desk

A magazine’s senior editors read two trade papers to keep track of an industry that was not, on paper, theirs: Variety, the daily record of the entertainment business since before either of them was born, and its rival the Hollywood Reporter, the more Los Angeles–inflected of the two. Neither was edited for a magazine audience, but both landed on senior desks anyway, because by the middle of the period a magazine that ignored television risked missing a story its own readers were already discussing.

Entertainment Weekly, launched by Time Inc. on February 16, 1990, with Jeff Jarvis as creator and managing editor,⁵ as an answer to a decade in which no serious magazine treated television criticism as anything but a hobby, staffed itself with writers who covered the medium the way Meridian’s own critics covered film and books — seriously, skeptically, at length. TV Guide, still a mass-market fixture in 1989, drifted toward irrelevance for exactly the readership a prestige monthly cared about. Inside the daily papers, the beat had its own hierarchy: John J. O’Connor covered television for the New York Times through most of the decade; Bill Carter covered its business, and his account of the Carson-to-Leno succession fight became, on publication, the standard reference for how the industry actually worked.⁶ Tom Shales, at the Washington Post, could move a show’s ratings with a single review. At Vanity Fair, James Wolcott — who had been writing seriously about television since his years as the Village Voice’s critic in the 1970s — joined the magazine’s contributing-editor roster in 1997, arriving at Condé Nast’s Madison Avenue offices at almost the exact moment cable was becoming the more interesting story than network.⁷ A senior editor’s desk, by 1996, was not complete without at least one of these publications on it, however much she might have told a dinner-party guest that she didn’t really follow television.

The Corridor

The route between a magazine masthead and a television writers’ room ran mostly one way, and it ran through a specific building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. George Meyer, a Harvard Lampoon alumnus of the class of 1978, photocopied a fanzine called Army Man — eight pages, an initial run of two hundred copies handed to friends — before he joined the original Simpsons writing staff; the zine’s sensibility, dry and referential in the National Lampoon register, traveled with him into the room.⁸ Al Jean and Mike Reiss, both Lampoon class of 1981, joined for the show’s first season. Conan O’Brien, a recent Lampoon president with no on-camera experience, wrote for The Simpsons between 1991 and 1993 before NBC gave him Late Night, which premiered September 13, 1993; Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein took over as the show’s showrunners for its seventh and eighth seasons.⁸ Bruce Eric Kaplan, whose single-panel cartoons had run in the New Yorker for most of the decade, joined Seinfeld’s writing staff for its ninth and final season.⁹ A cartoonist had crossed into the highest-rated sitcom on American television without changing how he wrote a joke.

Greg Daniels wrote for the Lampoon alongside O’Brien at Harvard, joined The Simpsons’s writing staff in its fifth season in 1993, and left it to co-create King of the Hill with Mike Judge, a self-taught animator who had reached television from outside the comedy-writing trade entirely.⁸ The migration was not exclusively literary-comic: Lawrence O’Donnell spent 1989 to 1995 as a Senate aide to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, staff-directing two committees, before The West Wing hired him as a writer in 1999;¹⁰ he won the show’s first Outstanding Drama Series Emmy in 2001, a policy career converted into a production credit with no comedy pedigree at all.¹¹ Meyer and O’Brien’s shared instinct for satire had a print precedent in Spy, the monthly Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter founded in 1986 to mock the same media and entertainment figures a television writers’ room mocked for a living by the decade’s second half; Andersen sold his stake in 1991 and left the magazine in 1993, by which point its house voice was already legible in the sitcoms it had spent five years needling.¹²

Not everyone crossed. Anthony Lane stayed at the New Yorker as its film critic from 1993 onward and never wrote for a screen he didn’t also review. The corridor ran in one direction more than the other: a magazine writer, a zine editor, or a Senate staffer could become a television writer without penalty; a television writer moving the other way, into magazine bylines, was rarer and mostly went unremarked when it happened.

Shows About Us

Television had its own way of returning the attention: a run of shows set inside magazines, newsrooms, and newsmagazines that a real editorial floor watched with the specific alertness of an industry checking its own reflection. Murphy Brown, Diane English’s sitcom about a fictional CBS newsmagazine, gave the format its most explicit culture-war moment in 1992, when Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the title character’s decision to become a single mother and the show wrote his speech into its own season premiere that fall. The Larry Sanders Show, premiering on HBO in 1992, turned the satire inward on the entertainment business itself — a behind-the-scenes talk show shot without a studio audience or a laugh track, conventions the medium had not yet abandoned anywhere else.

Closer to a magazine floor’s own furniture: Just Shoot Me!, which NBC set inside a fictional fashion title called Blush starting in 1997, and Suddenly Susan, in which Brooke Shields played a magazine writer at a fictional San Francisco alternative weekly. Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night, premiering on ABC on September 22, 1998, moved the same overlapping, fast-talking newsroom dialogue onto network prime time as a sports-highlights show, its arguments over a line of copy and a deadline closer to a magazine floor’s own daily friction than anything else on the schedule that season. Suddenly Susan’s cast absorbed a real loss mid-run: David Strickland, who played a co-worker, was found dead in a Las Vegas motel room on March 22, 1999.¹³ The show’s writers chose to close its third season with an episode built around his character’s death rather than recast the part or explain the absence away.¹⁴ A magazine floor recognized its own workplace comedy in these shows with something close to proprietary fury — amused at the imprecision, unable to look away from the resemblance.

Who Explained It

Pauline Kael retired from regular film criticism at the New Yorker in March 1991, after nearly a quarter-century as the magazine’s most consequential arts writer, and left behind a cohort of critics her admirers had already started calling, half-affectionately, the Paulettes — a name coined by Time’s own film critic, Richard Corliss.¹⁵ David Edelstein, David Denby, and Owen Gleiberman were among them; James Wolcott, whom a mentor of the group had once recommended for a job at the Voice, became, at Vanity Fair, the most consistent chronicler of a fragmenting medium the Paulettes’ own training had prepared them to take seriously as an art form rather than dismiss as noise.

The critical apparatus around television thickened through the decade in other registers too: Tom Carson wrote essayistic appreciations of mass culture for the Voice and later Esquire; Caryn James covered the overlap of television, film, and literature for the Times; John Leonard did the same for New York magazine and Harper’s; Ken Tucker did the same, in a more consensus-building key, for Entertainment Weekly. By the last years of the period a new venue for the same instinct had opened online — Salon ran television criticism from Joyce Millman and Heather Havrilesky that looked nothing like a newspaper column and read nothing like a press release. Alan Sepinwall, a University of Pennsylvania sophomore in 1993, began posting recaps of NYPD Blue to a Usenet newsgroup for an audience of strangers; by 1996 he had turned the habit into a paying job as the Star-Ledger’s television columnist, a route into criticism that did not exist for O’Connor’s or Shales’s generation.¹⁶

Kael died on September 3, 2001, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at eighty-two.¹⁷ The attacks on the World Trade Center followed eight days later. The critical apparatus she had trained — the Paulettes, and the Paulettes’ own students in turn — kept writing about television for another two decades, in a country that had, by the time she died, mostly stopped needing anyone’s permission to take the medium seriously.