Best of
Tv

1988

The Complete Fawlty Towers


John Cleese - 1988
    Published in its entirety for the first time and illustrated, The Complete Fawlty Towers will appeal to the millions of fans who have suffered through endless PBS fundraisers waiting for the next episode -- and anyone who has survived a package holiday tour. Fawlty Towers is the hotel of every traveler's nightmare. Basil Fawlty -- ill-tempered, henpecked, and conniving -- tries in vain to be master of his house under the disapproving and ever-watchful eye of his wife, Sybil. The hotel offers service by Manuel, the incompetent Spanish waiter whose feeble grasp of English makes for hilarious misunderstandings, and Polly, the unflappable chambermaid who is Fawlty Towers' only sane employee. Meals are scorched in the kitchen while adulterers consort upstairs and chaos reigns all around. For countless fans, Fawlty Towers is the best-loved bad hotel in the world, and with publication of The Complete Fawlty Towers they will all have a chance to relive its outrageous awfulness.

Meeting of Minds


Steve Allen - 1988
    These four volumes offer the original scripts from the series, including material edited from the broadcast versions that ran from 1977 to 1981 on PBS stations nationwide.Many believe that Meeting of Minds is the most brilliant series ever to be written for television. The show provides a groundbreaking opportunity to be exposed to ideas by way of a medium not normally known for its intellectual vigor.Indeed, Meeting of Minds grew out of Allen's frustration with the mediocrity of the average network program. He envisioned the show as a stimulating round-table discussion conducted like any other talk show - except that the participants would be actors portraying some of the greatest minds and most prominent figures of history. Accordingly, such characters as Aristotle, Catherine the Great, Oliver Cromwell, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger, Gandhi, Thomas Paine, Cleopatra, Theodore Roosevelt, and St. Thomas Aquinas appear in startlingly effective juxtaposition, their characters revealed through brilliantly conceived dialogue.This first volume features appearances by President Theodore Roosevelt, Queen Cleopatra, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Paine, President Ulysses S. Grant, Queen Marie Antoinette, Sir Thomas More, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Galileo Galilei, and Attila the Hun.The scripts for Meeting of Minds make for excellent reading, distilling an enormous amount of research into a lively format that has the undeniable veracity of historical fact. The result is unfailingly witty, thought-provoking, and geniunely entertaining.Steve Allen's lucidity and fertile intelligence are evident on every page. Meeting of Minds remains one of the freshest, most delightful ways of gaining historical perspective ever devised, an incomparable tour de force with the power to make history come alive.

The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows


David Schwartz - 1988
    Provides information about the packager, broadcast history, hosts, announcers, producers, and rules for over five hundred television game shows.

Boxed In: The Culture of TV


Mark Crispin Miller - 1988
    Informed, controversial, ranging from a melancholy study of rock and roll's descent into show business to a hilarious look at the spectacle that is the Jerry Lewis Telethon, these twenty essays offer an unusual and (ironically) entertaining study of American media by one of its foremost critics.

The Critics' Choice: The Best of Crime and Detective TV - Perry Mason to Hill Street blues, the Rockford files to Murder She Wrote


Max Allan Collins - 1988
    

The Wild Wild West, the Series


Susan E. Kesler - 1988
    Kesler's definitive book, The Wild Wild West, The Series (1988). Completely re-edited and redesigned, much of the previous book's overall style and content remains. Lots of color has been added, along with cleaner copy and fresh material. There are great photos of the original book's 1988 San Diego Comic-Con launch. This is an absolute MUST for any fan of the series (1965-1969).

The Life And Times Of Maxwell Smart


Donna McCrohan - 1988
    Here is the definitive guide to the program: a treasury of facts from on screen and behind the scenes, culled from over a year of research and interviews with the major stars and creators. 50 photos.

Official Prisoner Companion


Matthew White - 1988
    It is the world of tomorrow, or today. A man known only as Number 6 enters its storybook-like confines. He will learn, over and over again, that inside it there is no freedom, and from it there is no escape. He is without defenses, except for one invisible weapon: his uncrushable spirit.