I want to thank TV first, because this book isn’t always kind to it. I blame society: my subject matter requires me to focus here on some of the more corrosive aspects of a medium that I write about because I love it. I’ll get to the good stuff, I promise.
I started writing this book years before I realized it; it ties together threads in television, culture, and politics that I didn’t realize were connected when I first wrote about them. So I want to thank my earliest editors at Salon, particularly Susan Lehman, who took my first submission over the transom and shortly thereafter assigned me to review The Art of the Comeback, by one Donald Trump.
Thank you to my former editors at Time magazine, where I did sixteen years of writing on HBO dramas, reality TV, news media, politics, and sundry other topics that ended up in corners of this book: among them Walter Isaacson, Jim Kelly, Richard Stengel, Nancy Gibbs, Jan Simpson, Belinda Luscombe, Tim Morrison, Josh Tyrangiel, Radhika Jones, Jessica Winter, Isaac Guzman, and Gilbert Cruz. Thank you to my colleagues and editors at the New York Times, who encouraged me to do the work in the 2016 election and after that planted the seeds for this book, including Dean Baquet, Danielle Mattoon, Gilbert Cruz (again!), Mary Suh, Lorne Manly, Sia Michel, Patrick Healy, Jeremy Egner, and Aisha Harris—not to mention every coworker I annoyed or disappointed while working on this book, or before, or after.
Thank you to friends and colleagues who read drafts or chapters, let me bounce ideas off them, or answered my newbie questions about the publication process, among them Emily Nussbaum, Alan Sepinwall, Matt Zoller Seitz, Joy Press, Dana Stevens, Laura Miller, Liz Stein, Mark Harris, Anne Helen Petersen, Virginia Heffernan, Jennifer Senior, and Alyssa Rosenberg. Thanks as well to the readers, in the Times and on Twitter, on whom I tested/inflicted many of the ramblings that ended up in these pages.
Thank you to my agent, Chris Calhoun, who waited patiently for many years for me to finally write a damn book, then suggested after the 2016 election that this might be my subject. Thank you to my brilliant editor, Robert Weil, who believed that I could finish said book; motivated me to make it more ambitious, substantive, and rigorous; and helped me look past the firehose blast of current events toward the broad sweep of history. Few writers get to work with an editor this polymathic and attentive, but every writer should. Thanks as well to the heroic staff at Liveright, including Marie Pantojan and Gabriel Kachuck, who handled my many, many first-time-author questions with thoroughness and grace; to William Avery Hudson for a sharp-eyed copyedit; and to Pete Garceau and Brian Mulligan for the big-league cover and interior design.
I can thank, but cannot name, the anonymous archivers who have squirreled away hard-to-find videos in the corners of the Internet; you are the medieval monks of the reality-TV era. Thanks also to the Paley Center for Media, that temple of video rarities.
Thank you, finally, to my mom and dad, who let me watch more television as a child than may have been strictly advisable; to my sons, Milo and André, who watched TV with me (research!), understood when I locked myself up in my office, and entertained me when I let myself out; and above all, to my wife, Beth, my best reader, my best editor, and my best friend, without whom this book would not be possible and, honestly, neither would I.