Channeling the Eighties: Inside the Shows and Business of 1980s Television

Before Lee Goldberg became an prolific television writer-producer-showrunner himself, he was a young journalist trying to understand how television really worked.

Throughout the 1980s, Goldberg covered the industry from both sides of the screen. He interviewed the writers, producers, directors, and actors behind some of the decade's most memorable shows, while also reporting on the business forces reshaping television itself: the rise of first-run syndication, the growth of cable, the revival of old series, and the birth of Fox as America's fourth broadcast network.

Collected here are his articles & interviews, written at the time, on Cheers, Hill Street Blues, Fame, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Ray Bradbury Theater, Remington Steele, The Greatest American Hero, The Paper Chase, Airwolf, The Hitchhiker, St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law, and many more-along with reporting on Stephen J. Cannell Productions, The Arthur Company, Fox, and the changing economics of television. He talked to actors (Pierce Brosnan, Daniel J. Travanti, Jimmy Smits, Ted Danson, William Shatner, etc), writer/producers (Ray Bradbury, Gene Roddenberry, Rockne S. O'Bannon, Phil DeGuere, Harlan Ellison, Steven Bochco, etc), studio executives, and network leaders to truly go behind the scenes in this tumultuous decade for television.

What makes these pieces distinctive is that they were written as events were unfolding, before anyone knew which shows would become classics, which experiments would fail, or which changes would transform the industry.

For Goldberg, these articles were more than journalism. They were an education in the craft and business of television-an education he would soon put to use as a television writer and producer himself.

Channeling the Eighties is both a time capsule of a remarkable decade in television and an inside look at an industry in the middle of reinventing itself.