Review by Mike Gange 
Adventures in a TV Nation: The Stories Behind America’s Most Outrageous TV Show.
Michael Moore and Kathleen Glynn
Harper Perennial $19.95 (PB), 241 pages.
Alas, I never saw TV Nation when it was on TV in the mid 1990’s. I don’t know where I was while those short lived, summer replacements were running on NBC. But I missed the show, and after reading Adventures in a TV Nation by the shows producers, Michael Moore and Kathleen Glynn, I sure wish I had seen it. Adventures in a TV Nation: The Stories Behind America’s Most Outrageous TV Show is an interesting look at how the show was conceived, constructed, and carried out. It is both a serious social statement about how we live and an irreverent, insubordinate, in your face kind of activism. It is the kind of book most high school kids need to read.
One of the social statements: how come taxi cabs regularly bypass Black men waiting for a lift and zoom over to the white guy a block away, even when the white guy turns out to be a felon and the Black guy an award winning actor? On the irreverent side: image getting the Serbs AND the Croatians to sing to each other the Barney theme song. As for in your face, let’s get a group of people all to swim to shore to party on a secluded, private beach in Greenwich, Conn. Encourage everyone to party within the limits of the high tide water mark and dare the cops to come and get you out.
I read Adventures in a TV Nation: The Stories Behind America’s Most Outrageous TV Show because I had just finished reading Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men. Sometimes Michael Moore and company are really funny, making the reader gleefully laugh right out loud. Sometimes they are deadly serious. Other times, motivational and inspirational. I know some of his pranks are a bit immature. Still, I wish there were more TV shows that were willing to take on the establishment, tell the sponsors to “bite me” and bring those pseudo reality shows crashing down with this kind of reality.
Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High. He regularly reviews books about media for the Saint John Telegraph Journal.
Tags: Adventures in a TV Nation, Harper-Perennial, Michael Moore, Review by Mike Gange, TV's most outrageous show
