Your Show of Shows

Rating:
Summary: fun look at a tv pioneer
Review: This is a well written and researched book on one of the great early shows that was on US television. As such, it offers a fascinating look into a medium that was evolving and how a group of great innovators molded the process.

Creating great comedy is not just about funny guys doing strange things. As with all true innovators, great comedians also tend to be members of great teams. Their goals are similar to those of visionary businessmen, scientists, and designers: they want to achieve something revolutionary and they want to advance their careers and, by extension, make money. That is why Your Show of Shows, a 1950s American television comedy series starring Sid Caesar, offers fascinating lessons on one of the most successful creative teams in TV. Not only did Caesar's writers challenge the standard practices of a new and rapidly evolving industry, but they did so consistently over a number of years with seemingly impossible deadlines every week.

How did they do it? In a nutshell, Sid Caesar put a group of phenomenally talented writers into an empty room and let them be themselves while offering subtle, if occasionally brutal, hints at how they should work together rather than directing (or "micro-managing") them. Caesar nurtured an environment to spawn creativity and he had a great producer behind him who knew how to line up corporate support. Amazingly - and typical of the audacity that went into this show - the first few shows were aired without sponsorship and yet were unprecedented in their production costs.

The group included Mel Brooks, who went on to create a number of pioneering comedies. Woody Allen also got his big break as part of Caesar's team and later came into his own as an Oscar-winning scriptwriter and filmmaker. In addition, there was the celebrated producer, director, writer, and comedian Carl Reiner (creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show) as well as Larry Gelbart, who created of the M*A*S*H television series and the Broadway play City of Angels. Finally, prior to becoming one of America's most successful Broadway playwrights, Neil Simon began his writing career on the Caesar show. In spite of their huge egos and now-famous eccentricities, this group worked as a team, sometimes offering solo performances, but always as a part of something bigger than themselves alone.

These personalities stand out in the book, in all their quirkiness and egotism and talent. The pressure on the team was enormous: not only would they have to meet the highest standards of sophistication, quality, and originality as set by Caesar and Liebman, who did not want the ordinary slapstick that was popular then, but every week Caesar and the other performers would have to entertain a live audience during a 90-minute, nationwide broadcast. Caesar describes it as putting on half of a Broadway play - new - each week, and doing it in real time. As such, it is also a facinating study of leadership, even if by a comedian.

Nonetheless, there are long sections of descriptions of the shows' content. I found that boring, but it is a matter of taste and what you are expecting. I was looking more for a histrry of TV and how an innovative team worked, and I got it in this book very satisfactorily. I did not want tv criticism or recapitulations of things that are better seen than analysed.

Recommended.