What to Read During the Holidays

Welcome back to Buffering, where yes, we’re coming to you a couple days early because of the holiday. This week’s edition features what may or may not become a new annual tradition: The Buffering Bookshelf. Some great TV and movie industry-related books are being released this fall, and I wanted to spotlight some of the most interesting ones. Think of these as suggestions for what to read during any time off you might have this holiday or inspiration for potential gifts. I limited my choices to titles that seemed interesting to me, touch on bigger themes in the TV industry, and have an October or November release date.

Those boundaries meant I didn’t include other notable 2023 books such as Maureen Ryan’s must-read Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood(since it was published late last spring) or Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!(in which pop culture writer Will Harris talks to the legendary trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker about their classic film). But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check them out, too. Hope your Thanksgiving is a great one, and as always, I’m thankful to you for reading (and offering feedback or news.)— Joe Adalian

Reach Joe on Twitter @tvmojoe or email buffering@vulture.com.


Enjoying Buffering? Share this email with your friends, and click here to read previous editions.

For most folks, Thanksgiving week means extra calories, more time with family and friends — and, beginning Friday, the mad dash to wrap up shopping for Christmas and Hanukkah presents. Books always make a great gift or stocking stuffer, and the good news is that if you’re into media and pop culture, a lot of great new titles are out there right now. Because Buffering always aims to serve, I’ve put together a brief (but by no means definitive) list of new TV and film-adjacent books that have caught my eye lately. I also reached out to their authors to find out what motivated them to tackle their subjects and what they discovered during the process. And remember: There’s no rule against giving yourself a few holiday gifts, too.

The authors: Rolling Stone chief TV critic Alan Sepinwall (The Revolution was Televised) with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage

The details: The title is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s worth noting the book is not some cursory attempt to cash in on the 20th anniversary of Fox’s now iconic drama. Sepinwall (who, full disclosure, has been a friend of mine since the mid-1990s) talked to basically every important actor, creative person, and executive associated with the series. He also knows his O.C., having written about it extensively when it was on the air. As someone who also covered the show from its conception to its finale — as a business reporter, not a critic — I was blown away by how many new tidbits about the production Alan uncovers.

Why they wrote it: “Back in the spring of 2004, I wrote my first book, Stop Being a Hater and Learn to Love The O.C.,” Sepinwall told me via email. “While it was exciting to be a published author, the book itself was pretty thin, literally and metaphorically, because it was produced in a rush to cash in on the overnight success of the show. Then last year, Josh and Stephanie reached out to me, because the 20th anniversary of the premiere was coming up, and they wanted to put out an oral history book. Given my history with the show, they wanted me to author it. I’d never written an oral history of any kind before, and because Josh and Stephanie were attached, I knew I’d have a relatively easy time getting people to talk to me. (This proved true, with only a few exceptions.) Most importantly, they insisted that they wanted a warts-and-all portrait of the experience, and that’s exactly what I got. Almost everyone was super candid about problems with the show, onscreen and off, even as we were all celebrating the good times. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun to report and then write.”

Most interesting discovery: Sepinwall says a chapter about “the disastrous third season is, I think, a revealing portrait of the many different forces that can lead a good show to make a series of cascading bad decisions, with elements of things I know about from many other shows. (Honestly, by the time I was done assembling all the interviews, it felt like I had inadvertently used the story of The O.C. to tell the story of making any TV show, particularly in that era, in a way that would appeal to TV obsessives even if they weren’t necessarily O.C. fans.)

But the most surprising part of the story by far was about Mischa Barton’s exit. There was a public narrative for so long about her behaving badly on the set, about her being fired as the result of that, or her angrily quitting because she was over the whole experience. And it turned out to not be that at all. Instead, Mischa was largely a victim of outside forces: the show running aground creatively, the network demanding a character death to boost viewership, the showrunners mistakenly assuming Mischa wanted to leave without actually talking to her about it, etc. Life tends to be a lot more complicated than the rumor mill would have you believe, and it was fascinating to have all my assumptions about Marissa turned on their head.”

The author: ScreenCrush editor and critic Matt Singer

The details: Finally someone has done a deep dive into the complex relationship between the two most famous movie critics of the past four decades. While there had been celebrity film reviewers before, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert used a national TV platform to bring their appreciation of cinema to the masses. Singer’s book looks at how they got together, why their relationship worked, and how they helped birth a generation of film lovers. I wouldn’t be shocked if some platform decides to turn it into a limited series or made-for-streaming movie.

Why they wrote it: “If not for Siskel and Ebert I might never have become a writer,” Singer says. “Watching the show as a kid was what first sparked my interest in film and film criticism. I became obsessed with movies and criticism, and that led pretty directly to studying film in college and grad school, and everything that’s come after. I wrote a book on Spider-Man that came out in 2019, then another book that never came out for reasons beyond my control. At that point I decided if I was going to write another book, it had to be something I had the final say on; something I originated and got to do exactly my way. My list of ideas I was going to send to my agent did not include Siskel and Ebert at first — mostly because even though I wanted to do it, I was intimidated to tackle this subject that means so much to me. It was my wife who gets credit for talking me into it, partly by insisting I would do a good job and partly by pointing out if anyone else wrote a Siskel and Ebert book, I would be pissed that I missed my chance. (She was definitely right about that.)”

Most interesting discovery: “Part of my research involved watching hundreds of episodes of the show from its 25 year history,” Singer explains. “I expected there would be reviews of movies I didn’t know, but I assumed they would mostly be junk; forgettable films that fell into obscurity because they weren’t any good. What surprised me were how many movies Siskel and Ebert loved that I had never seen or even heard of before. The sheer number of them inspired the one part of the book that wasn’t in the original proposal: the appendix, which contains capsule reviews of 25 of these “buried treasures.” (The name comes from occasional episodes of Siskel & Ebert where the hosts would recommend movies that had flopped in theaters.) Adding that appendix felt like a good way to get a little film criticism into this book about these two hugely important film critics who inspired me and many others, and who always said the best part of the job was helping turn independent and foreign movies into hits, by inspiring people to head to the theater to see something they might not have otherwise seen if it hadn’t been recommended on the show.”

The authors: The Ringer’s Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales; Gavin Edwards (The Tao of Bill Murray)

The details: Over the course of more than 500 pages, and through hundreds of interviews, the authors explore how an iconic 20th century comic book brand pretty much willed itself into becoming this century’s most potent box office force. The focus is not on a critical dissection of the individual movies; instead, the book concerns itself with the people and decisions that have shaped Marvel Studios from before Iron Man through today. With The Marvels’ box office performance (or lack thereof) prompting a wave of stories about the studio at a crossroads, this feels like a potential epitaph for the company’s first epoch.

Why they wrote it: “Our publisher Norton actually reached out to us in 2019 right when Avengers: Endgame was busy dominating the world,” Robinson recalls. “I had written a cover story for Vanity Fair in 2017 on the first decade of Marvel Studios and they asked if we’d like to write an oral history diving deeper into Marvel’s history and success. It seemed like a no-brainer. This was not only a great fandom story, it was a great Hollywood story. How did this little studio from nowhere show up and swallow an entire industry? However, having worked with Disney over the years, I was quite skeptical that the studio would be at all inclined to let us behind the curtain. After some back and forth with the publicity team over there, we were assured that they wouldn’t necessarily stand in our way.

This eventually proved not to be the case and in fact Disney urged everyone in the industry to ignore our calls and emails. This just made us even more excited to get this story that Disney was so keen to keep hidden. This did mean the idea of an oral history was out the window since we would need to include reporting that was off the record or on background. But we got the story and the finished product couldn’t have come at a more interesting time for the Marvel discussion.”

Most interesting discovery: “I think the element that surprises people the most is just how unlikely the entire operation was in the beginning,” Robinson says. “Starting with no financial backing from their parent company, Marvel Comics, the Marvel Studios founders put together Iron Man on a wing and a prayer and, crucially, very little script. Fueled by a director, Jon Favreau, who had plenty of independent cinema experience, and a leading man, Robert Downey Jr., with nothing to lose, the story of Tony Stark — a B-lister comic book character — took off like a shot and everything that fell into place in his wake felt like another miracle. There were endless behind-the-scenes squabbles, power clashes, and lucky breaks behind the first decade of Marvel but you wouldn’t know it from the outside looking in. It took hundreds of interviews with insiders to bring us the full story.”

The author: Former CNN anchor and New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter (Top of the Morning)

The details: In 2020, Stelter’s Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth examined the grossly symbiotic relationship between the now-former president and the cable network that helped elect him. Barely three years later, Stelter is back with a new tome revolving around many of the same characters, but with an even more dramatic backdrop: Trump’s attempt to nullify the results of the last presidential election. He’s also armed with even more evidence with which to prosecute the case against Fox: Thousands of texts and emails from Fox News staffers exposing how the network operates.

Why they wrote it: While there’s nothing new about Trump’s lying or Fox’s perversion of “fair and balanced” reporting, Stelter says having access to the innermost thoughts of the central players was a game-changer. “This time, the most explosive quotes are on the record,” he told Katie Couric Media last week. “Normally in my media reporting, I have to rely on anonymous sources, who are afraid to lose their jobs if they speak out. But because of Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox, so many emails and texts and memos have been exposed from the likes of Sean Hannity and Rupert Murdoch. This is the story of the ‘big lie’ in their own words.”

Most interesting discovery: While some of us would argue that Tucker Carlson has been allergic to the truth for decades, Stelter says his reporting suggests he has gone to an even darker place lately. “Tucker Carlson’s world kind of shrank during the Trump years,” Stelter told the USA Today podcast The Excerpt earlier this month. “As he became a bigger and bigger star, as he became more and more extreme in his rhetoric, more radicalized on the air, he also became unglued, and he shut himself off. He moved out of Washington, DC, for example, and retreated to his compound in Florida and his home in Maine on an island — literally on an island. He was not going into the office anymore. He was not seeing his colleagues in person very often. He was not seeing the head of the network in person. So I think it closed him off a little bit from the outside world and even from the Fox world.

And certainly I had several sources who still are close to Tucker, who said to me…the Trump era, and then Covid, really changed him. I’ve known him 20 years. Those are not the ideas of Tucker from 10 years ago. That’s a newer person that’s emerged, and he’s not hearing countervailing points of view or inconvenient facts. And by the way, this is about much more than Carlson. This is about tens of millions of people in the United States who have totally walled themselves off from hearing countervailing facts and opinions. They only want to hear what they already believe to be true.”

Peacock is settling in for an extended stay on Love Island USA: The NBCUniversal-owned streamer has green-lit two more seasons of the dating competition series, an adaptation of the long-running U.K. hit in which impossibly hot and unnaturally horny singles hang out (and hook up) while staying at a luxury villa.

The series began its run on CBS back in 2019 but moved to Peacock in 2022 after the streamer made a multimillion-dollar, two-year commitment to the series following a bidding war with other platforms. Peacock’s bet seems to have paid off: The streamer says the audience for the show’s second summer on the platform grew 20 percent over its 2022 number and that Love Island USA now ranks as its No. 1 original reality show.

While Peacock declined to offer more detailed data to define exactly how many subscribers have watched the series, the decision to renew Love Island USA for not one but two more seasons would seem to suggest the show is more than meeting the streamer’s ratings targets, or at the very least doing well relative to other titles on the platform. What’s more, Corie Henson, executive VP of unscripted content for NBCU Entertainment, says the show’s growth trajectory was a key factor in the renewal. “There were huge numbers for this summer’s season five, which was the second season on Peacock,” the exec tells Vulture. “It’s not like all the fans that were going to come came that first season; the numbers have multiplied, so there are still new people coming to the show every season. You see the potential for growth.”

And while competitive bidding back in 2019 likely played a role in Peacock’s original two-season order for Love Island USA, Henson says the decision to double down with a two-season renewal at the time was not something mandated by ITV, the U.K. media giant that controls the global franchise and produces the U.S. version via its ITV Entertainment division. “We could have picked up the show a season at a time, but we really wanted to make a statement that we believe in this show,” she says. “We also want it to signal to the unscripted community, which like everyone else is going through a bit of a challenging time right now, that we’re still very much in the market and we are still buying.”

But there are also some longer-term financial advantages to going all in on Love Island. There’s a massive, and not inexpensive, infrastructure behind the show. While the series shares some creative DNA with The Bachelor (and its many spinoffs), it also has something in common with CBS’s Big Brother: Rather than airing once or even twice a week during its six-week run, Love Island USA churns out new episodes on six out of every seven nights. That’s a lot of television, and it is all produced with almost no turnaround time for producers. In other words, making the show isn’t cheap — but committing to lots of episodes up front allows producers (and thus Peacock) the opportunity to amortize those costs over a longer period, making the whole endeavor more affordable, especially the longer the show runs.

“It’s very much like the Big Brother model,” Henson explains. “They built that house once back in season six, and they still use that same house because essentially they basically paid their mortgage off, if you will. So we hope that we’re talking to you again in season 35 of Love Island, because it’s about the economy of scale. The more episodes we commit to, the more it makes sense to us financially.” It’s also one of the reasons why Peacock earlier this month debuted Love Island Games, which brings together cast members from past U.S. seasons and various international versions of the show for what is the first-ever spinoff of the franchise.

Henson knows about the economics of CBS’s Big Brother firsthand: She and her top deputy, NBCU executive VP of alternative programming Sharon Vuong, were both producers on the iconic Eye reality show back in the aughts, while Vuong later went on to oversee production of the series as head of CBS’s unscripted division. Vuong was also involved in production ofCBS’s version of Love Island USA and then, when she jumped to NBCU, helped move the show to Peacock. Even though CBS wasn’t able to make the franchise work for its linear network, Vuong was convinced Love Island could still thrive at Peacock, in part because of how well the original British Love Island has done on its U.S. home, Hulu. “The U.K. version has a very loyal fan base, and I think whenever you’re looking at IP, that’s always a really good signal,” Vuong says. “Even though on [CBS] the show only did a certain number, it was a very strong base, and there was opportunity there. I still think there’s an opportunity for the franchise to grow.” The fact that Peacock is able to run “a less sanitized, less ‘broadcast’ version,” as Henson notes, has also helped.

But while streaming’s more relaxed content standards have allowed for a somewhat more risqué show, Henson and her Peacock colleagues have actually stolen a page from the broadcast playbook as part of their effort to bring an audience to the show. Rather than have each day’s new episodes drop just after midnight or early in the morning — the streaming standard — Love Island’s new installments premiered in prime time, streaming live at 9 p.m. ET last summer. Despite the conventional wisdom that time slots don’t matter for on-demand platforms, Henson believes the linear model has given the show a notable boost. “It’s created a sense of urgency for people to come to the platform so that they can be part of the social-media conversation in real time,” she says. “It’s appointment viewing again, like what we see on linear when a show is working and people sit down in front of their television at eight o’clock.”

Indeed, an NBCU rep tells me that on average, one-third of Love Island’s audience watches the show as it premieres in real time every night rather than bingeing episodes next-day or later in the week. And because there are six episodes premiering every week, that means those viewers are also opening the Peacock app at least six times every week — another big win, since it increases the odds those subscribers will discover other content on the app while decreasing the chance they’ll cancel the service. “It’s such a big win to find a show that has such a rabid fan base that you can get them to come back day after day,” Henson says.

The two new seasons of Love Island USA are expected to premiere in the summer of 2024 and 2025.

Sign up to receive Vulture’s 10x10 crossword every weekday.