Network Apprentice: Behind the Scenes in Talk Television
by Graydon “Dee” Hubbard
Atmosphere Press


"When it comes to programming for the public stage, the national hyper-focus on politics has engulfed and infected talk television like a highly contagious and infectious disease."

Billed as a satire, this political and social drama explores the relationships between facts and data, politics, and broadcast news. Julie Anders, like her climate scientist father, is an info whiz. At the outset of the story, Julie lives with her father in Boulder while completing her master’s degree in broadcast journalism with a thesis about the 2010 Affordable Care Act at the University of Colorado in the College of Media, Communication, and Information to complement her bachelor’s degree in accounting. Her first stab at a career position comes to fruition in an apprentice position with MRABC, a newbie network and competitor with CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and others. Julie’s job is gathering pre-program background info for nightly broadcasts of the network’s star, Dan Panders, who hopes to surpass Rachel Maddow’s ratings at MSNBC, the political opinion network division of NBC News. The complexities of the job and conflicts with the “network brass” about content and guests soon make her position less palatable than Julie had anticipated. She moves on to PBS while her coworker Dan, who often disagrees with the liberal agenda of his bosses, stays with the network, even as he struggles with the intense pressure and his newly diagnosed bipolar disorder.

Set against the backdrop of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, the story also features excursions by characters into the backcountry there and in surrounding states, which make for a soothing contrast to the dramatic intensities of politics and broadcast news. At times, the story becomes a bit lost in the sea of information and ideas it provides, whether in the weight of facts and statistics or in fictive info dumps revealed in long character thoughts and dialogues. In many ways the story comes across like narrative nonfiction but will likely interest readers who take the stance that the Affordable Care Act is “a massive system of illegal contracts with insurers,” that there is excessive government regulation of businesses and corporations, that excessive force by police injures and kills more white people than black people, that fixing global warming can only happen with a big reduction in population, that the Mueller investigation is a three-year partisan hoax that only millions of citizens addicted to “rabidly partisan political pornography” are interested in, as well as other political talking points.

While Julie navigates her career in good form, those around her seem to fall in counterpoint. She loses an early love interest to an aneurysm during the night after he proposes marriage, the same condition that ended Julie’s mother’s life prematurely years before. Hubbard has endowed the book's besieged protagonist with fortitude and common sense in terms of practical life situations, and the story moves freely through dramatic personal scenarios unrelated to the broadcast journalism theme. Julie’s position as a single woman deeply involved in her career is appealing and realistic, and her successes and disappointments with her work will likely strike a familiar chord with many readers. The author’s real-world expertise as a CPA and financial expert certainly adds an air of authenticity to the themes and motifs of this novel.

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