Television Drama Series Programming

"...Gianakos has done for television what Roget did for the Thesaurus and Bartlett did for Familiar Quotations. He has codified the industry, brought order out of chaos, made sense of what for decades was insensible. He is a pioneer, and his works will have a significant effect for generations."-From the Introduction by Allan Kalmus

For more than a decade, Gianakos' truly comprehensive chronicles of American television have been considered classic references. Here is the long-anticipated volume six. While nominally covering the television seasons 1984-1986, in fact the volume's six much amplified appendixes-on Pulitzer Prize fiction and plays, Nobel literature laureates, classical Greek drama and Shakespeare, selected 19th and 20th-century writers and their representative teleplays, and western figures as depicted upon the small screen-embrace the period through the close of 1990.

The overview again blends a thorough discussion of individual series and specials with a political, sociological, and psychological examination of the whole range of powerful images conveyed. As in past volumes, a "Days and Times" section covers virtually all that was of dramatic import on and off the major networks and cable. Following are sections on series initiated previously; series inaugurated during the current period; series not previously chronicled; and a cumulative index of series titles.