100 Books Like TV Writing On Demand

Navigating the TV industry can be intimidating. Bob Levy does an amazing job of providing an overview of the U.S. TV development process, from a producer’s point of view.

He gives a very clear and detailed explanation of the industry, the processes, and the culture. I love how he explains the terminology, the timelines, the people involved, yet never makes it boring. Levy has worked in the TV industry for more than 30 years, and it shows.

Another insightful overview of the TV development process, this time from a writer’s point of view.

This is primarily from a U.S. perspective, but one chapter gives a view of fifteen other countries, which is rare. Pamela Douglas offers the TV equivalent of Syd Field’s Screenplay. She lays out with great clarity the way TV episode structure is taught today – although I believe that talented and successful creators often use other tools to design their series.

From a practical point of view, this book is more useful if you’re developing a network procedural than if you’re developing a serial on ad-free streaming or premium channels, but it’s one of the best books out there if you’d like to explore what I call story format (rather than structure) in TV.

This is a short but excellent volume, dedicated to the design of a TV series.

It contains a brief history of U.S. Television, which in itself is enough to justify reading the book. As the title suggests, it focuses particularly on writing a pilot, a key part of any series project. William Rabkin is a veteran showrunner with hundreds of hours of produced shows under his belt, yet I really enjoyed the conversational tone in his book.

Make sure you get the most recent version, as the first edition of this classic dates back to 2011 and Rabkin has updated his book since.

This is the companion book for Des Doyle's acclaimed documentary with the same title (also highly recommended).

Described as “the first ever feature-length documentary to explore the world of U.S. television showrunners and the creative forces they employ”, the documentary is an insightful overview of the TV creative process, featuring interviews with some of the best showrunners in the business.

There is simply nothing that beats this if you want to get a sense of how the industry works and measure the stakes, the energy, the pressure, the creativity, the professionalism, and the humor experienced or displayed by these awe-inspiring storytellers.

The book features a foreword by Hart Hanson (Showrunner of Bones, The Finder, Backstrom), an introduction by Doyle, and expands on the interviews featured in the documentary.

This is one of my favorite books about contemporary television.

It deals with the processes that changed how television was viewed following the changes in HBO-style ‘quality’ television. It also critically explores the ways legitimization and associated words like ‘quality’ work as an ultimately classist system where television works as cultural capital.

Netflix established itself on the back of this legitimization, using HBO-style ‘quality’ TV series like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. But HBO also used DVDs to ‘filter’ the individual program out from the ‘flow’ of television, which helped Netflix to establish itself as television.

This book addresses another highly charged topic, the exorbitant profits of tech and internet giants. The focus is on the consequences of the huge profits on competition, economic policy, and society at large. 1% of the world’s largest companies reap 36% of global so-called economic profit, that is the profit that exceeds the cost of capital. The book, which is punctuated with juicy examples, is very didactic as well as rigorous, and will appeal not only to those versed in economics but to the enlightened public in general. It is, however, not a book on how to manage profit, but rather how to address the problems resulting from super-profits. 

This book explores the experiences of new fathers struggling with mental health difficulties and focuses on the role of digital media as part of their approaches to coping. Hodkinson and Das show how the ways new fathers are positioned by society can make it hard for them to recognize their struggles as legitimate, or reach out for help. The book explores a range of different uses of digital communication by struggling fathers, from selective forms of disconnection, to the seeking out of online information or support.

While all the books listed earlier provide detailed, in-depth, case studies of public-private sector cooperation in developing selected new technologies, the last two chapters of this book provide necessarily brief coverages of the myriad ways in which this cooperation had been successfully manifested beyond encouraging specific technologies.

Although the book’s main purpose is to show how a series of important technologies have transformed economic, social, and political life over the millennia, the last two chapters show how knowledge of these transformations sheds light on the wider use of public policy to achieve economic goals.

While many public initiatives have succeeded, others have failed. The authors isolate the reasons for these successes and failures and offer their template for designing and administering policies that are more likely to succeed than fail.

Have you wondered why there has been such a dramatic decline in trust in public institutions in recent years?

In The Revolt of the Public, Gurri argues that the rise of digital technology has allowed people to more easily share information and bypass traditional gatekeepers. Gone are the days from my own youth when most people relied on just a few established news sources. People today are more exposed to stories—either real or imagined—of corruption, incompetence, and misinformation from established institutions.

This has contributed to the rise of populism and political extremism, facilitated by social media where people can organize and coordinate their activities. 

I love contrarian thinking. It’s by definition creative…new, novel, useful. That’s what David Burkus does with this book. There are a lot of conventional thoughts about creativity and the generation of innovative ideas that are held out as universal truths, but just aren’t. True, that is. David takes them all to task, pokes holes in them with science and logic and good old thoughtful insight, and dispels an entire family of mythology...misconceptions all relating to creative thinking: brainstorming, collaborating, incentivizing, and about a dozen more. Prepare to have much of your current understanding of creativity shaken.