If you wanted a book that epitomises unoriginal, lazy, MFA’d writing this is that book. It starts with an interesting snippet about the filming of 'The Sopranos' and you can almost hear Martin’s writing teacher saying to him. ‘brilliant Brett, now that’s what we call the hook…’ and then after two pages Martin’s dull, uninteresting prose with insights that could almost certainly be bettered by any viewer remorselessly follows. If you want his thesis, then look no further than the title. Who knew that HBO and AMC et al thought they might have found a formula? The real achievement is that he somehow manages to make a book out of it - 303 pages in fact. It may be that this book is one of the ‘smartest’ ever written about American TV as David Thomson (no less) gushes on the cover. What an indictment of that genre if so. ( )

I’ve had a hard time reading recently, but i blew through this in less than 24 hours. Gripping

It's cool to see a narrative to all these hour-long, violent, addictive tv shows and to get some back story on them. The book seems to be written for film-makers though, makes a lot of obscure references, and the author seems to love himself a little much. ( )

BREAKING BAD FANS: This 300 page book has like, only 10 pages devoted to Breaking Bad. I know! Dammit, it has Walter White on the cover, but really it is about The Sopranos.

SOPRANOS FANS: read this book! This book is for you!

The 10 pages on Vince Gillian and the Breaking Bad writing team were very good. I just wish there was more of it! Ah, my crushing disappointment. ( )

When I opened Difficult Men and found a gorgeous, graphic timeline of cable shows layered over one other and broken down by season, I gasped and nearly threw my other books across the room. Brett Martin had found his target audience. I don't watch a single show on network TV, nor do I watch comedies. Yes, I'm willing to admit that I'm a boring, typical product of my generation.

And my generation is one that grew up watching, what Martin calls, the Third Golden Age of television. Starting in the mid-1990's, with shows like Oz and The Sopranos, the TV drama began to shift in a radical way. Rather than the safe, self-contained storylines of network shows, cable writers began developing plots that spanned seasons and often left viewers with more questions than answers. Soon, those developing the shows came to be as complex and unpredictable as the characters they were creating.

Though I understand that the focus of Martin's book is, as the title states, the difficult men behind the television revolution, I think there was a bit of a missed opportunity to examine the role of female writers in Hollywood. While it could potentially fill a separate book on its own, I would have liked to see discussion of the low number of female showrunners as well as their comparatively harsh criticism from the media.

Still, Difficult Men is a fascinating peek into the evolution of television over the past 30 years, digging into backstories and histories of shows like The Wire, Six Feet Under and Breaking Bad, that will thrill even the casual fan.

Blog: www.rivercityreading.com ( )