REVIEW --- Books: Rerunning the Days When NBC Ruled
Top of the Rock</br></br>By Warren Littlefield</br></br>Doubleday, 326 pages, $27.95</br></br>If history is written by the victors, then the executives presiding over NBC's dismal prime-time performance in recent years are unlikely ever to publish a chronicle of television in the era of "American Idol," "NCIS" and other hits the network doesn't air. But there was a time when NBC ruled the ratings, and Warren Littlefield -- the former president of NBC Entertainment who oversaw "Seinfeld," "Friends," "ER" and a raft of other moneymaking shows -- doesn't want anyone to forget it. He also surely knows that in the television arts and sciences, people who also write books, or at least have their name on the cover, are practically authors.</br></br>Mr. Littlefield's entry in the shelf-esteem sweepstakes, "Top of the Rock," is an oral history of mostly 1990s television, with interview snippets from on- and off-screen talent and fellow executives. Mr. Littlefield is just one among many speakers, but he gets the biggest entries and wrote the swaggering, cigar-chomping introduction. The book proceeds more or less chronologically, from "Cheers," which ended in the early 1990s, to the launch of "Will & Grace" in the late '90s. With plenty of lessons about branding and managing up (the book is about television, after all), Littlefield & Co. give their versions of events, applying the golden rule of television -- essentially, you've got to spin it to win it -- but also settling scores along the way.