Title: Live at five
First published: 1996
Description: In Live at Five, Haynes turns our expectations of television and ourselves upside down through the story of several remarkable people on both sides of the camera.

Brandon Wilson anchors a television newscast that is regularly trounced by reruns of "The Facts of Life." When a new producer, hell-bent on raising channel 13's ratings, decides that his middle-class African-American anchor with a penthouse isn't "black" enough, he has a brainstorm: Brandon is to redefine himself by doing a series from a new home in the inner city. There Brandon meets Nita, who manages an apartment building in addition to juggling three kids, night school, and a job.

. Brandon sees his move as a Faustian bargain that allows him to tell the stories of "real folks." But when the station demands something more sensational, Brandon and Nita find their loyalties caught up in a media circus that only Nita can find a way to tame.

With hilarious takes on class, color, and our obsession with seeing ourselves on TV - even if we don't recognize what we see - Live at Five skillfully dissects our media-saturated times. Nita and Brandon wonderfully demonstrate that human lives cannot be captured in sound bites, and that the real story is what happens in our everyday lives.
Subjects: Fiction, Television news anchors, Single mothers, African Americans, Fiction, general, African americans, fiction, New York Times reviewed