This was essentially two books in one, and was wildly uneven. The first hundred pages or so were the grindingly slow recap of the origins of ESPN, and the detailed description of chasing down financing and pricing out satellite transponders was less than riveting. (Having said that, I am now well prepared to start a fledgling cable company, and am currently finalizing a bid to purchase the rights to broadcast old episodes of Entertainment Tonight.) I am not one to flip ahead in a book that I'm reading, but even I couldn't help nosing ahead for a few pages as my eyelids got heavier. This section should have been pared down a lot - this section gets 2 stars, and that's being charitable.
Fortunately, my patience was rewarded, as the narrative turned to the personalities behind the network. (Spoilers!) Keith Olbermann is a sociopath! Bob Ley is a blowhard! Mike Tirico is such a gentleman that he'll follow you home even after you tell him to stay the hell away from you! Michelle Beadle hates Erin Andrews! Chris Berman can't string two words together without one of them being "fuck"! Bill Simmons is surprisingly candid and insightful! Nobody, and I mean nobody comes off well from this book, and the strength of this section is not only how Shales and Miller were able to somehow get these personalities to admit so much on the record, but to contextualize the quotes in such a way that they paint a much broader picture. This section gets 4 stars, and that's being conservative.
Shales and Miller wrote one of the best oral histories I've ever read in Live From Saturday Night, and the big difference here is that book is much more personality driven, which appears to play to their strength; by choosing to spend so much time on the relatively dry background material, this book fell a bit short of that high standard.
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