Review of the Day: Television

Television by Lauren Rothery is a satire of Hollywood and the movie industry. The plot is a little thin and occasionally hard to follow; the highlight is the prose. Rothery’s novel alternates first person chapters between Verity, an aging actor, and Helen, his companion, editor, and sounding board. About a third of the way through the book a screenwriter named Phoebe. There is more plot, but that is all you really need to know.

In some ways the novel owes something to the work of Joan Didion; for example:

Everybody thinks they’re Joan Didion when they write about the flowers or the river (location 490).

There are quite a few references to filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Bergman, Bunuel, Satyjit Ray, Chaplin, Kurosawa, Scorsese, and others. 

And there are many passages commenting on filmmaking I thought worth remembering:

The trouble with having an idea for a screenplay is you have to write the screenplay. A real idea for anything kind of haunts you. Whether you know how to do it or not. I hate writing. But you have to. God help you if you’re one of those people who just talks about writing something (location 1379).

Kurosawa said that even a great director could not make a good movie with a bad script (location 1946).

Let me just end this review by quoting the only time I found the word television.

The two of you make a kind of movie and then it’s over. Other people, what you imagine isn’t a movie, because it keeps going. It’s television. Maybe that won’t make sense to you if you’re twenty and used to watching about three hundred things at one time, but television was when you wanted to tune in every Monday at eight o’clock, week after week, for years. Even after the whole series ended, you’d tune in for the reruns. It wasn’t about the plot, you just weren’t tired of them yet. It didn’t need to be sexy. It was romantic. If you can’t see how romantic television is, you’re blind.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a free copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

epub. 256 pgs. 30 September 2025. Scheduled for publication 2 December 2025.