Theme Song for an Old Show

By Jeffrey Lewis

'Pitch-perfect... quirky, rueful and wise' Kirkus

Louie is a second generation TV guy. His father left the family to go west to work in the early days of television - now it's Louie's turn. Ascending rapidly, he becomes a producer of one of the most beloved programmes in the history of television, the cop show Northie. But Northie has fallen on hard ratings times. Will it be cannibalized for one last big tune-in, or will it be allowed to conclude its run in dignity? Louie finds himself inadvertently at the centre of this most archetypal of TV plots. His on-again off-again partner Zacky Kurtz, the one-time 'King of Television' now obsessed by the possibility of being the first producer to get 'bare-ass' on network TV, drives the story towards a conclusion that is as astute and passionate an indictment of our mass culture's coarsening as American fiction has produced.

Yet Theme Song for an Old Show is about more than dirty business-as-usual on television. With the force of tragedy and the laughs of high farce reduced to an absurdly tiny pixilated screen, it tells the story of a man's last chance to find his father.

And this third novel in Jeffrey Lewis's acclaimed 'Meritocracy Quartet' is a homage as well, to the brave sort of television that the old show Northie represents.