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(More customer reviews)Veteran TV critic Bill Brioux has written a book that's heavily reported, immensely informative, and almost embarrassingly entertaining. The premise of Truth and Rumors is as original as it is ambitious: The idea is to collect, in one book, al the persistent rumors surrounding television shows, stars and events, and separate the facts from the fictions.
If the rumors don't make you drop you jaw, or laugh out loud, the answers will. Brioux employs a writing style that is both breezy and authoritative, as evidenced by this very quick setup to one unusual rumor.
"RUMOR: Joanie Loves Chachi was the biggest TV hit ever in South Korea because 'Chachi' is Korean for 'penis.'
"FALSE: Let's get one thing straight. Joanie Loves Chachi was never a hit, in Korea or anywhere else."
That's gold right there, but Brioux keeps going. He informs readers that yes, "jaw-jee" is a Korean slang term for the male genitalia, and no, the Scott Baio sitcom never aired on regular South Korean TV.
So much ground is covered here - and not just covered, but dug up. Did LBJ really call Walter Cronkite to complain about his CBS newscast while Cronkite was in the middle of that very show? Did a local newswoman in Florida commit suicide on live TV, after announcing to viewers she would do so? And did Michael Jackson provide the voice of a character on The Simpsons?
Through direct reporting, Brioux provides the answers: yes, yes, and yes. And answers to a lot more, in delightful chapters with such titles as "The Naked Truth" and "Ward, I'm Worried about the Beaver."
Click Here to see more reviews about: Truth and Rumors: The Reality Behind TV's Most Famous Myths (The Praeger Television Collection)
When you first heard it, you couldn't believe it: Jerry Mathers, from TV's Leave It To Beaver, had been killed in Vietnam. Then word came that Abe Vigoda, the actor who played the curmudgeonly cop Fish on Barney Miller, was dead; and that Mikey, who would eat anything as the Life Cereal tyke, had eaten too many Pop Rocks and exploded. Besides exposing us to things we couldn't otherwise believe, television can convince us of things that never actually happened. But how did these outrageous TV legends get started? How did they spread from classrooms to boardrooms across North America and beyond? And, most important, what do these rumors, so quickly transformed into facts and common knowledge, reveal about our relationship to reality through the medium of television? Put in other words, what exactly is it that were doing when were dealing in these fabulous rumors-are we chasing after surprising truths or simply more incredible entertainment?
To take one telling example: Jerry Mathers was not actually killed in Vietnam-but the basic sense of this lie wasn't far removed from the emotions factually expressed in the two-page spread of the faces of the dead in Time magazine. In the course of this compelling work-which is supplemented with interviews with many of the people implicated in these rumors-author Bill Brioux exposes the reality behind the many stories that currently circulate in our culture. Through these stories (both true and false), he sheds a revealing light on just what role these rumors play in contemporary society-and what role our society plays in regard to these rumors as well.
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