Vol. 5, No. 7, July 2008
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BOOK REVIEW: New Bedlam
Bill Flanagan • Penguin Press
When a mid-level TV executive with a high-maintenance fiancée and a taste for the high life fudges some facts on his reality show, the network honchos want a sacrificial lamb. And so it happens that Bobby Kahn—who had turned firing people into an art—finds himself out of work, dumped by his petulant girlfriend, and desperate to keep his newly dire straits a secret until he lands another job. If the industry learns he was axed, he’s as good as blacklisted. Such is the set-up of this hilariously cynical second novel by MTV senior VP Flanagan. His first book, A&R, lambasted the music industry. New Bedlam does the same to television, which its young protagonist sees as a vast but very lucrative wasteland. When he lands at a low-level Rhode Island cable network, Bobby knows he’s gone from the big leagues to the farm team. He cares nothing about excellence in programming. All he wants is to reconstitute his own fallen star and prove his value in the business. He decides to do so through a series of outrageous promotional stunts. Funniest of these is an attention-getting series that makes good use of the network’s backlog of old Bonanza episodes. Bobby develops a series called The Kennedys, the Cartwrights and the Corleones, examining the surprising similarities among these famous American families (there are three brothers, two die, the youngest inherits the family crown). That stunt and others like it garner instant national press for lowly King Cable and industry buzz for Bobby. Soon he’s hot again. But just because he’s gone from New York to New Bedlam doesn’t mean Bobby is spared from dealing with super-egos. Everyone who works in TV is afflicted with vanity, self-importance and inflexible demands. Bobby realizes he is in much the same sort of culture he occupied in New York, and soon it’s time to move on. He does not learn any life lessons, and when he meets his old boss, who is now on the skids himself, Bobby does not feel a groundswell of pity. Nope. This just isn’t that kind of book. But it’s sure funny.
