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 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.

Jeffrey Lewis was born in New York, educated at Yale and now lives in Los Angeles and Castine, Maine. Theme Song for an Old Show is part of his Meritocracy Quartet, along with Meritocracy: A Love Story, The Conference of the Birds, and Adam the King.

A great review in the Independent:

'For some novels, the first-person form seems extraordinarily well chosen, and so it is here. Louie, the narrator, is a TV writer on a superior TV cop show, Northie (Lewis's own experience as a writer on Hill Street Blues no doubt comes in handy). The novel looks back at his whole life, from the time his father, a TV producer, left home for another woman, deftly laying bare the tensions this produced between Louie and both his parents; his uneasy relationships with friends, women and colleagues; the arc of his writing career; his failed attempt to preserve the integrity of his show; and his efforts to get closer to his father as his own star rises and his father's declines.

Highly intelligent yet never quite at ease in the world, Louie is a subtle, mordant, ironic observer of himself and others. One suspects, given the similarity in names (Lewis/Louie), a strong autobiographical element; but whether the details are true is beside the point. The novel feels true as a work of literature. It's only 150 pages and the print is large. You can read it in two hours. It will be two hours very well spent.' - Brandon Robshaw, the Independent, 31/11/2010