Novel: Sellevision

Overview
"Sellevision" is a satirical novel set in and around a fictional home-shopping television network, where on-air charm and backstage chaos collide. The narrative follows a cast of hosts, producers, executives, and auxiliary staff whose professional lives are built on selling desire and convenience to a televised audience. As personal ambitions and moral compromises intensify, the sheen of the network begins to crack, exposing the absurdities and cruelties that underlie televised commerce.

Plot summary
The story weaves together multiple storylines centered on the network's most visible personalities and the people who support them. Each character navigates the pressures of maintaining a likable on-screen persona while juggling private problems: romantic entanglements, addictions, jealousies, and career anxieties. Small on-set disasters and PR missteps escalate into larger crises, and the interconnected cast finds their careers and reputations threatened by scandals that unfold both on live television and in tabloid rumor.
As tensions rise, alliances shift and secrets surface, revealing how fragile fame can be when it rests on crafted images and scripted warmth. Financial incentives, legal threats, and ratings wars push characters toward increasingly desperate solutions. The climax threads the characters' fates together, demonstrating how a single public controversy can have cascading consequences for those who profit from spectacle.

Themes and tone
The novel satirizes consumer culture, celebrity worship, and the commodification of intimacy, using the home-shopping channel as a microcosm for late-capitalist obsession with selling identity alongside products. It interrogates the gap between performance and authenticity, showing how televised friendliness can mask exploitation, loneliness, and moral compromise. Humor is sharp and often dark, skewering both the corporate machinery that engineers demand and the individuals who are complicit in their own commodification.
The tone balances biting comedy with moments of pathos; characters are frequently ridiculous yet retain traces of human vulnerability that prevent the narrative from becoming purely farcical. The book's voice shifts between caustic observation and empathetic insight, inviting readers to laugh at the ludicrous while also recognizing the real costs behind manufactured smiles.

Style and significance
The prose is brisk, energetic, and cinematic, favoring quick scenes and dialogue that mimic the rapid pace of television production and the short attention spans of viewers. Sharp, often acerbic descriptions highlight the incongruity between glamorized presentation and backstage dysfunction. Through its episodic structure, the novel replicates the fragmented, attention-grabbing rhythms of broadcast programming while developing characters who are both caricatures and rounded individuals.
As an early work by Augusten Burroughs, the novel introduces themes and a sensibility that would reappear in later writing: prominence of media-saturated landscapes, a fascination with the performative self, and a willingness to mix humor with uncomfortable truths. The book's satirical lens offers a sustained critique of how modern entertainment monetizes personality and sells intimacy as a consumable product.

Reception
Readers and critics responded to the book's wit and its unflinching look at a peculiar corner of the entertainment industry, praising its comic timing and moral clarity. Some found the portrayal gleefully mean-spirited and enjoyed its relentless exposure of vanity and hypocrisy, while others felt the satire occasionally sacrificed depth for punchlines. Over time, the novel has been recognized as a sharp, entertaining commentary on media-driven culture and the human cost of making every aspect of life marketable.