TV Bookshelf: John Leonard's 'Smoke And Mirrors'

If you want to see the stylistic differences between TV critics of the 1990s and today, you need only to look at "Smoke And Mirrors," written by critic John Leonard in 1997.

Leonard was a voracious writer and began his professional career as a book critic. He became the executive editor of the NY Times Book Review in 1971 at the age of 31 and continued to write about literature until his death in 2008.

But Leonard tackled everything from culture and politics to the media and spent a fair amount of his life writing about television. He wrote for Life and the NY Times under the pen name Cyclops and for New York Magazine from 1984 to 2008. He was a gifted writer and an often insightful critic.

But read in 2014, "Smoke And Mirrors" is a dense and often meandering look at some of television's trends and influences. The paragraphs are crammed with snark and allusions to other works and genres. Much of it comes off as writing for writing's sake and while the result is impressive, most modern readers will walk away with little but the sense that they've just been bombarded by every fanciful phrase Leonard could cram into a bit less than 300 pages.

Take, for example, this passage from the book. I randomly selected a page and passage and this is what readers are confronted with towards the bottom of Page 158:

"In 1990, Law & Order worked on NBC and Equal Justice didn't work on ABC because Law & Order belonged to the nineties and Equal Justice to the seventies. "Justice," wrote John Milton in the seventeenth century, "in her very essence is all strength and activity; and hath a sword in her hand, to use against all violence and oppression on the Earth." This fierce idea of justice as a woman warrior, a terrible angel with a swift sword, accords remarkably well with the current punitive temper."

The paragraph goes on for a couple hundred more words and indeed that is part of the problem with the book. The ideas are packed in so tightly, the references and observations intertwined so completely that some paragraphs are more than a page in length. Reading the book becomes more of a slog than a pleasure and that's a shame in a book that should be one of the touchstone books in any television fan's library.

The book reads almost as if Leonard is trying to make television seem more artistically substantial by overwriting about the subject matter. It's the journalistic equivalent of tabletop magic. By distracting the reader with a hundred words wwhen ten would do just fine, maybe they won't realize television is the lightweight medium many people believe it to be. Compare that approach to TV with the writing in last year's "The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever," written by longtime TV critic Alan Sepinwall. Sepinwall's faith in the medium and belief in its possibilities shows on every page of that book and he doesn't feel the need to show off for his readers in every paragraph. The result is a book which is both nuanced and enlightening.

"Smoke And Mirrors" is worth reading and worth owning if you get it cheaply enough. But it's unlikely you'll ever revisit it in the future. And given Leonard's reputation and talent, that's a shame.