MERELY WIRES AND LIGHTS IN A BOX: With the emergence of television in the late 1940s and 1950s, we have yet another game-changing development in pop-culture history -- the arrival of a new medium that, like its technological predecessors, would revolutionize the experience of entertainment. But TV went even further than its forebears, essentially combining elements of film, radio, live performance, print, and sound recordings in one simple box, thereby reshuffling the relationship among the mass media and putting television at the center of the action.
TV's rise neatly coincided with several key postwar trends, including economic expansion, the Cold War, suburbanization, and the baby boom. These developments in turn fostered some of TV's most striking features: its corporate organization, its role as "family entertainment," and its tendency toward conformity and standardization. Even more than radio before it, television was "born commercial," designed from the start not to deliver programs to viewers but to deliver viewers to advertisers. Accordingly, the major networks organized their schedules with military precision, filling time slots with programs best suited to the demographic cohort expected to be watching at that particular moment. Again, it's a familiar practice to us today, but we need to think about what that business model has meant for the content of television.
Early TV programming was not especially innovative, drawing heavily on formats already developed in other media. The Kraft Television Theater (1947) inaugurated a collection of "anthology drama" series; Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater (1948) launched a wave of variety shows; Hopalong Cassidy (1949) laid the groundwork for the mid-fifties explosion in westerns. For many viewers, though (then and now), TV's defining genre was the sitcom. David Marc's Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, excerpted in our textbook, offers a rigorous (if sometimes jargon-heavy) survey of the sitcom's rise, highlighting not just the technological developments of three-camera shooting and live studio audiences but the thematic trends that distinguished early comedies, from I Love Lucy (1951) to The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961). Time and again, Marc argues, sitcom heroes and heroines might push against the boundaries of postwar conformity, but they always wound up back home in the end, safe in the social order of Westport or New Rochelle. It was precisely this comfortable predictability, Marc claims, that made sitcoms the quintessential form of postwar popular culture.
By 1960, ninety percent of American homes had a television, and TV would reign as the dominant medium of popular culture for the rest of the twentieth century. My question to you: Is it still dominant? Is TV still at the heart of America's pop-culture life? Or has its place been usurped by PCs, the Web, and other digital media?
TV's rise neatly coincided with several key postwar trends, including economic expansion, the Cold War, suburbanization, and the baby boom. These developments in turn fostered some of TV's most striking features: its corporate organization, its role as "family entertainment," and its tendency toward conformity and standardization. Even more than radio before it, television was "born commercial," designed from the start not to deliver programs to viewers but to deliver viewers to advertisers. Accordingly, the major networks organized their schedules with military precision, filling time slots with programs best suited to the demographic cohort expected to be watching at that particular moment. Again, it's a familiar practice to us today, but we need to think about what that business model has meant for the content of television.
Early TV programming was not especially innovative, drawing heavily on formats already developed in other media. The Kraft Television Theater (1947) inaugurated a collection of "anthology drama" series; Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater (1948) launched a wave of variety shows; Hopalong Cassidy (1949) laid the groundwork for the mid-fifties explosion in westerns. For many viewers, though (then and now), TV's defining genre was the sitcom. David Marc's Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, excerpted in our textbook, offers a rigorous (if sometimes jargon-heavy) survey of the sitcom's rise, highlighting not just the technological developments of three-camera shooting and live studio audiences but the thematic trends that distinguished early comedies, from I Love Lucy (1951) to The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961). Time and again, Marc argues, sitcom heroes and heroines might push against the boundaries of postwar conformity, but they always wound up back home in the end, safe in the social order of Westport or New Rochelle. It was precisely this comfortable predictability, Marc claims, that made sitcoms the quintessential form of postwar popular culture.
By 1960, ninety percent of American homes had a television, and TV would reign as the dominant medium of popular culture for the rest of the twentieth century. My question to you: Is it still dominant? Is TV still at the heart of America's pop-culture life? Or has its place been usurped by PCs, the Web, and other digital media?
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