James Andrew Miller

James Andrew Miller assembled Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers from more than 750 interviews, using oral history to trace the network’s development from an early cable experiment to a major producer of television drama, comedy, documentary, and sports programming. Henry Holt and Company published the book in 2021. Miller is a journalist whose earlier large-scale oral histories covered ESPN, Saturday Night Live, and Creative Artists Agency. Tinderbox extends that method by letting executives, performers, writers, and producers recount institutional decisions in contrasting voices, while Miller supplies chronology and context. The scale of the interview archive is central to both the book’s authority and its deliberately polyphonic structure.