'Complete Directory': The set-top book
It's always fun to find the new edition of Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh's Complete Directory to Prime-Time Network and Cable TV Shows
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It's even more fun to open up to the Acknowledgments and see your name there, inducted into the "Complete Directory
Hall of Fame" by virtue of having passed along some useful information to the authors.
In my case, I've been inducted twice, in the 8th and 9th editions. And
if there's a 10th edition, I've already guaranteed my entry there, too.
I should note, however, that's a big fat "if."
Tim Brooks was the head of network research for NBC and Earle Marsh was a manager of special projects at CBS research in 1979 when the first Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows came out. Even though New York Times TV writer Les Brown had his Encyclopedia of Television and Erik Barnouw had published Tube of Plenty to acclaim, Brooks and Marsh's work was immediately hailed as the best of the bunch, more comprehensive and a more enjoyable read.
Still, it almost didn't get printed, Brooks told me, because publishers were worried "that it was too big." And that was when only 3,000 shows had aired on five networks, including a defunct one (DuMont).
If you collect Complete Directorys like I do, you may have wondered about the "American Book Award Winner!" tag that has appeared on the cover of the book from the second edition on. In 1979 the National Book Awards were defunded by the consortium of big publishing houses that had sponsored the competition since 1950. Seems too many small, obscure titles were winning for their liking. So the AAP, the Association of American Publishers, started up a replacement, the American Book Awards. They were called the ABAs until 1987, when a private foundation took over and renamed it the National Book Awards. That first year, 1980, a slew of new categories were introduced by the ABAs. The Complete Directory won for paperback general reference -- the first and only time a prize would be given in that category. Other one-and-only ABA winners from the 1980 ceremony included Julia Child, Malcolm Cowley, A. Scott Berg and The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the Complete Directory bulked up rapidly. The 6th edition added the words "And Cable" to its title, and for the first time the authors had to decide what shows got into their book and what ones didn't. They decided to include only programs on networks appearing in at least half the country that aired at least four episodes. (Brooks said they had to "raise the bar" still further for the 9th edition. Short-run HGTV shows didn't qualify but VH1's "Flavor of Love" did -- indeed, he noted proudly, "we have the first AND last names of the winner!")
Brooks kept rewriting the book's introductory "History of American Television" to eventually span eight distinct eras of TV content, starting with "Vaudeo" in the 1940s, then adult westerns, the '60s "idiot sitcom" age, "The Relevance Era," the ABC fantasy era, prime time soaps, the "Era of Choice" in the 1990s and most recently, the "real" reality age.
Appendixes were appended. The new edition adds a 12th, which rates the TV information Web sites. Best in their eyes is Wikipedia, and I agree; most disappointing is IMDB, and again, I agree. About Wikipedia Brooks said, "We gave it an A-minus. It’s extremely variable. If there are a lot of fans for a new show you get practically a book. But if it’s an older show or on a network like Hallmark that’s not as Internet involved, you won’t get a lot on it. But basically the information is pretty good, and that’s contrary to the reputation Wikipedia has of being unreliable. There’s clearly editing going on with Wikipedia. You go to someplace like TV.com you can tell different pages are written by different people. But it’s very uniform on Wikipedia. It’s very dry; not a lot of color or style to it."
Other appendices, like the TV shows spun off radio programs or the guide to theme songs (remember those?), really ought to be retired. Brooks is in the process of setting up a website that will have supplementary material to the Complete Directory. But he's loathe to move anything out of the book and onto the web. For years Brooks, Marsh and Ballantine (their publisher) have economized on words and typeface in order to make the contents of the ever-expanding directory fit between two covers. I have the 6th edition in front of me, and the 9th edition has three more lines per column and a slightly smaller point size (same typeface) than the 6th. That adds up to quite a savings over the course of 1,800 pages.
"Unfortunately," said Brooks, "I think we've reached the end of the road." And as we talked, it was clear he didn't just mean the capacity of one book. He's retiring at the end of this year from Lifetime Networks, where he finished a long and distinguished career in TV research. He will now focus on his passion, American recordings. He's already written one book, Lost Sounds,
"This could be the last edition," he admitted. "Earle and I have talked about it. It’s not a factory, like Maltin’s Movies on TV, where there’s a whole cast of people assembling it. Earle and I have done it all ourselves. To hire staff and researchers, the economics aren’t there to do it."
For years I've recommended people settle bets by buying a copy of Brooks and Marsh, looking up the answer, and whoever wins gets to keep the book. TV critics rely on Wikipedia, of course, but there is always a moment in writing about a show when you reach for Brooks and Marsh. When Comedy Central suggested in its PR for "Kenny vs. Spenny," the Canadian comedy series it just picked up, that the show has only aired in Canada, I cracked open my new 9th edition and found that GSN aired the original series five years ago.
"I'm just proud we got that stuff from the beginning years of television, before it all vanished," said Brooks. Indeed, thanks to their work in the industry, he and Marsh had access to internal network memos and other pre-Internet information without which many of the mysteries of TV's first 3,000 series would be permanently lost. Networks were as forgetting as their viewers back then. NBC famously erased the first 10 years of the Johnny Carson "Tonight Show" era. Nostalgia books are often erroneous, riddled with typos and gossip. Brooks and Marsh are so authoritative, the Library of Congress depends on their book for the correct spelling of TV shows and stars' names.
Over the years, they've also relied on volunteer researchers like myself. I have no idea why I was acknowledged in the 8th and 9th editions, and neither did Brooks when we spoke on the phone. So I'm recording here for posterity what happened when he shared a story about a show he was researching for the 9th edition.
"There was a reality show called 'The Family,' I think on NBC, a summer show with George Hamilton. It got pulled pretty quickly. But they never revealed what the last name of the family was. Ever. I went searching 50 pages deep on Google."
I remembered "The Family." It aired on ABC just before the war in Iraq (making it "The Mole" of 2003), then returned in the summer. As a journalist, I have access to Nexis, which is industrial-strength search of all kinds of sources, including many that Google can't get to. A few keywords later, I had a story from my TCA colleague Virginia Rohan at the Bergen County (N.J.) Record. She'd interviewed the patriarch of the low-rated reality clan, a local named Michael Perinelli.
I emailed the story to Brooks, who wrote me back, "You're da man! This is why you are in the CD Hall of Fame. Filed for the next edition, if there is one."
