Reality TV

SHOUTS of “Fumo! Fumo!” erupted when white puffs of smoke floated from the roof of CBS headquarters recently, while below, on the pavement, the media were a seething mass of excitement. At last, Dan Rather’s permanent successor had been named. And coverage of Katie Couric’s ascension to the Holy See of CBS News, as vicar of Leslie Moonves, was typically bombastic, with Newsweek magazine, for one, asking on its “Katie’s News” cover: “Will She Shine at Night ... And Who Will Watch?”

The Los Angeles Times, too, attached cosmic relevance to Couric’s coming move, with Calendar lavishing more than 40 inches (plus nine grinning photos) on painstaking, in-depth coverage of her “perkiness.” As if the multitudes shared this media fixation on Couric being named “CBS Evening News” anchor -- and its designated ratings rejuvenator -- after a long, glittery run fronting NBC’s durable “Today” program.

Segments of U.S. media have long operated within a ring of insularity, guided by the unsound premise that what infatuates them necessarily arouses the public with similar intensity. A reason for this twisted perspective is that reporters spend a lot of time schmoozing with other reporters, building a consensus of the few. One wonders, therefore, whether ordinary Americans care much, or should care, about the tangle of industry subtexts that beguile many who work in or report on television.

Bill Carter’s reply in “Desperate Networks” is yes. A presumption of wide public interest underlies his spirited account of the bitter executive rivalries and elaborate program strategies at the networks that Carter covers so astutely for the New York Times. He visited this neighborhood in long form earlier. His last book, “The Late Shift,” crept backstage to eyeball the power struggle behind Jay Leno besting David Letterman in the quest to succeed Johnny Carson as host of NBC’s “Tonight” show in 1992. And now, heeere’s “Desperate Networks,” in which Carter again pulls apart and scrutinizes the tinker toy that is commercial television, this time spending 400 pages inside a closet racked to the max with network suits and small-screen dandies.

His book’s title, a play on ABC’s hit series “Desperate Housewives,” refers to ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox jockeying for audience earlier this millennium while nervously watching advertising dollars stream to cable and the Internet. Carter writes of shrewd moves by industry opportunists, along with opportunities missed. He frames his story in large part around dueling moguls, most notably CBS Corp. Chief Executive Moonves versus Jeff Zucker, now CEO of NBC Universal Television Group. What he describes is not quite the life-and-death bada bing of Tony Soprano versus Johnny Sack on HBO or even Patton racing Montgomery to Messina in World War II. But Carter does ratchet up his narrative by evoking the tone and idiom of military combat, as when Moonves at one point is urged by an underling to redeploy “Survivor” and boldly strike at NBC’s greatest strength in prime time: “Boss, if we don’t attack Thursday now, we never will.”

In fact, most of the players in “Desperate Networks” are on the attack. This is, after all, a business that rarely rewards the unassertive. Take Stephen McPherson, head of ABC’s entertainment division; his hot temper earned him the nickname “purple Steve,” Carter learns from an unnamed executive. Equally conspicuous here is Mike Darnell, the diminutive Fox impresario whose lust for predatory, anything-goes trash (think “When Animals Attack” and “World’s Deadliest Swarms”) makes him the bloodthirsty Chucky doll of programmers, affirming Paddy Chayefsky’s dark prophecy in “Network.”

At its best, “Desperate Networks” delivers fascinating, snappily decoded insights into TV blockbusters. A must-read is Carter’s entertaining reprise of CBS giving birth to an 800-ton Godzilla -- “Survivor” -- after ABC had twice rejected producer Mark Burnett’s creation. “This was either going to be a brave new world for network television,” Carter writes of “Survivor” emerging, “or the dark night of its soul; but whatever it was going to be, Leslie Moonves had opened the door to it.”

Nearly as intriguing is Carter’s story behind ABC moving to ratings-rich Wisteria Lane on Sunday nights with “Desperate Housewives” -- which he says NBC had summarily turned down with “a fleeting look and good-bye” -- and the riches-to-rags-to-riches odyssey of the show’s witty and resilient creator, Marc Cherry.

On a more somber note deep in his book, Carter eulogizes Peter Jennings with a moving account of his cancer-ridden last days at ABC News.

“Desperate Networks” is least readable when slogging through thick marshes of the arcane, as when Phil Rosenthal, executive producer of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” is revealed as ghost gag writer for Moonves speeches. Carter discloses, also, that Moonves refers to Zucker as “Zippy.” And about McPherson, Carter reports in prose not zippy: “He had managed to fight off the reality gambit on Wednesday and now his bosses wanted the drama ‘Doing It,’ now renamed ‘Life as We Know It,’ the saga of teenage boys and their preoccupation with sex, to get the Wednesday-at-8 position.”

More problematic are opportunities for perspective that Carter misses by failing to read between his own lines, perhaps loath to drop his straight reporter’s mantle. Writing almost as an extension of his subjects, Carter never pauses to reflect on the larger matters their actions and comments touch upon. He does occasionally pick off easy targets: Selected series are “pedestrian” or “cheesy” or “hopelessly lame.” He finds “ludicrous” that Zucker at one point would executive-produce both “Today” and “NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw.” He comments (oddly) that “Desperate” housewife Teri Hatcher is really smart, “especially for an actress.”

Yet the author is a no-show on more consequential issues that define TV, one being age. His book affirms that 18 to 49 is king to this network crowd, with 18 to 35 the advertisers’ dream demographic -- and the 50-plus, graying side of the color chart is too antique to merit attention. As one CBS executive huffs anonymously about his network’s pre-Moonves atrophy, “We had shows with viewers over seventy.” Imagine! The idea that passing 70 makes one decrepit and infirm is a gnarled perspective that cries out for challenge at a time when Americans are living longer and ever more productively as they age. Instead, Carter turns the other cheek.

Carter reconstructs the debacle of CBS having to retract a “60 Minutes Wednesday” story charging that President Bush received preferential treatment during his National Guard days. Yet he never ponders possible systemic reasons for CBS News acting with such haste in airing a story so scandalously flawed that it toppled Rather from his anchor perch. Could one be that the 24-hour news cycle -- along with hair-trigger talk radio and the Internet -- have the nation and its media careening on such a perilous fast track that time to think and carefully evaluate is no longer available?

Carter salts his chapter on network news with insider tidbits while noting in considerable detail the high-profile departures of icons Brokaw, Jennings and Rather from anchor thrones and the likelihood of Couric’s coronation at CBS, which later happened. But never does he question this ongoing cult of personality -- a signature of TV news -- or the practice of throwing ticker-tape parades for these zeppelins as they sail higher and higher above the stories they report. Carter’s book is a perky journal of how networks do business. As for something a bit more thoughtful, smoke gets in his eyes. *