SOURCE: Tuchman, Gaye. “Making and Marketing Culture.” Commonweal 111, no. 11 (1 June 1984): 343-45.

In the following review, Tuchman praises Inside Prime Time as cultural criticism, but suggests that analogies to similar corporate practices in other fields outside the television industry would have been helpful.

Every now and again, a disgruntled Hollywood writer or producer, whose slightly unorthodox idea for a series has been “ruined” by the networks, bares his soul and tells all: TV chases after money. The television industry is an old boys' network of fellas out to earn the big buck by manufacturing kitsch. They use those shows to sell the largest possible audience to the advertisers who finance America's dominant and probably most profitable medium. “Nobody but me,” that bitter expatriate invariably complains, “cares about quality.”

Inside Prime Time presents the richest information ever collected on the inner workings of America's chief culture industry. Todd Gitlin interviewed...