New Bedlam

This is my first Bill Flanagan novel. I enjoyed it. With it's interesting characters--Sammy Bignose and Moe Notty were particularly funny--and it's satiric look at the television industry, it was a welcome relief from my normal suspense novels.

Bobby Kahn, a hot, up and coming, television executive finds himself the fall guy for a scandal concerning his hit reality television show. Because news travels fast in the television executive floors, he needs to find a new job. Quick. Exhausting most of his contacts, he finds himself in the town of New Bedlam, Rhode Island, working for a small, family owned cable company, King Cable. Three stations but many customers. Those stations are quirky, which is an understatement. He has BoomerBox, a station that runs classic television series', Eureka, an arts station, and Comic Book Channel, which is self explanatory. His job is to build the stations, which will bring more cash into the already rich King family. New Bedlam, by Bill Flanagan, is to television what Carl Hiaasen is to Florida. Razor sharp satire, using an insiders view of the industry, Flanagan weaves a very good story filled with quirky characters. Yet those characters never fall into stereotypical roles; they all seem to be grounded in reality. The path that Kahn takes to move the King Cable channels into better programming, while battling the King family members, is great fun. Flanagan uses his experience in the industry to provide believable programming choices for the channels, realistic conversations concerning television and the people that run it, and enough great scenes to keep the reader interested to the final page. If this is how family run cable companies were run, especially in the small town/rural markets, they should have turned the cameras on themselves. It would have made for riveting television. Fantastic novel, it was another novel that I couldn't put down.

New Bedlam is a great satirical novel about the TV business and a dysfunctional family. While the characters are a bit zany at times, they never turn into a complete parody. Because they maintain their humanity I actually could empathize with them. This is a nice change from other humorous works of fiction that go for the big laughs without maintaining the story. Here Flanagan not only writes a decent story but a compelling one that kept me reading for hours. If you like books by authors like Carl Hiaasen you will love New Bedlam. Its full of crazy characters but also carries a positive message.