James Andrew Miller's HBO oral history book Tinderbox doesn't offer much more than 1,024 pages of amusing anecdotes

The A.V. Club

"The massive, 1,024-page book is built on interviews of dozens and dozens of key players in HBO’s past," Bradley Babendir says of Miller's Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit Of New Frontiers. "There’s Edie Falco and Laura Dern. Davids Chase, Simon, and Larry. There’s executive after executive after executive. Miller did an exceptional job getting important people on the record and at length. That, unfortunately, is only half the job, and often the better you are at it, the harder the other half of the job—putting the book together in a cohesive way—gets. There is so much ground to cover, from 1971 to the present day. Organizing it all so that it flows well and gives readers the context they need is a gargantuan task, and Tinderbox doesn’t come close to fulfilling it. There are a number of amusing stories for fans of HBO’s biggest hits. A standout is J.B. Smoove’s account of his Curb Your Enthusiasm audition. He recalls walking in and saying, 'Okay, Larry, let’s do this baby, and since this is improv, I might f*ck around and slap you in the face.' But that story is quickly followed by a section that exemplifies the book’s flaws. Less than a page later, there’s a quote from John McEnroe about his appearance on the show. 'When I saw the outline, I thought, "How the hell can somebody even come up with this? This guy’s out of his mind."' That is immediately followed by bolded, italicized transitional text about a former executive returning to the HBO building because they were naming a theater after him. If you’ve never seen Curb or perhaps don’t remember the plot of a television episode that came out 14 years ago, Miller won’t help you. He never explains it. This quick gloss is not in exchange for depth in other areas. Little in this book rises above the level of trivia."

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• If you’re going to read Tinderbox, prepare for a landslide of corporate history: "Students of power will find much to interest them," says Dwight Garner. "HBO had many stepparents over the years. Following these deals is complicated, like following the lyrics to 'There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.' In reverse order, Miller describes how HBO — the fly, more or less, in this scenario — has been sequentially consumed from 1972 through today: 'Warner Bros. Discovery rescued it from AT&T, which had gobbled it up from Time Warner, which had saved it from Time Warner AOL, which had somehow abducted it from Time Warner, which had shrewdly outplayed Time Inc. for it, after Time had outflanked Sterling Communications long ago.'" Garner adds: "Oral history is a strange form. It gives you a staccato series of micro-impressions, as if you were looking through a fly’s compound eyes...Miller is a good interviewer, but a corny writer. His interstitial material is mugged by phrases like 'oodles of ambition' and words like 'ginormous.' These really bugged me at the start. But this book is so vast that, by the weary end, these pats of cold margarine slapping me in the face were the only things keeping me awake. There are a lot of winning moments in Tinderbox. But wading through its nearly thousand pages I often felt spacey and exhausted, as if it were 4 a.m. on the third night of one of those endurance contests and I had to keep my hand on the pickup truck."
• Tinderbox delves into Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall's "ugly" Sex and the City feud
• Tinderbox also examines how sports played a crucial role in HBO's early years
• James Andrew Miller calls Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Crown "the big three" of hit shows HBO rejected: "The Crown was an obvious one, but Mad Men kept coming up," says Miller. "They had the opportunity to read Matthew Weiner’s pilot, and I get into the whole story of what happened. Nobody can be in a position where they buy every hit, of course. But I think all three of those could have been on HBO. It’s very frustrating for a network when they turn down a show and it becomes a huge hit. There’s a lot of finger-pointing." What was it like for Miller to report on HBO vs. his previous oral histories of SNL, CAA and ESPN?: "There were some similarities — particularly with ESPN in the sense that there were a significant number of people who have been there for 20, 25, 30 years, so long that when you’re trying to do a book of record, they warmed up and were incredibly helpful across the administrations," he says. "The second thing is that, much like ESPN and all of these places, HBO started from humble roots where they were the underdog. Now in this post-Netflix era, they’ve gone back to feeling like they are the underdog and some of them relish that. As a result, there’s a real fighting spirit."