Our colleague Patrick McCray (of The Dark Shadows Daybook) asked us, suddenly, “If you were going to tell people briefly about the history of television, what would you emphasize?”
Well, you can’t ask Barb a question like that and not expect her to do anything with it, so she wrote the following essay. If you are someone who can’t remember a time before the internet, then you might find this educational. If you are someone who can remember a time before the internet, then you might find this nostalgic.
A Brief History of TV from the 1950s Through the 1970s (by Barb Lien-Cooper)
In the beginning, there was radio, the theatre of the imagination.
Then, during World War Two, technology changed, film cameras became lighter and easier to carry, so America saw the War through the news reels, which were shown to people before the movies they actually came to see.
Then, TV happened. The radio stars made fun of TV on their shows, but they knew the truth: TV was here to stay.
TV wiped out radio, so radio became a place where you heard music, not dramas and comedies anymore.
The movie industry almost became wiped out, too. Why spend money on a babysitter, when you could watch TV? Old movies started being shown on television, too, which coined the term “The Late Show.” If you had insomnia, you could watch a lot of classic old Hollywood films. Hollywood recovered by inventing “blockbuster” films, which were big-budget epics. Blockbusters were kind of the superhero tentpole films of the 1950s, with special effects and casts of thousands.
But, back to TV in the 1950s: TV consisted mainly of Westerns, Detective Shows, shows about Doctors, Kiddie Shows, Soap Operas, Dramas, Variety Shows, and Quiz Shows. It turned out that some of the Quiz Shows were rigged, causing a big scandal, but the scandal died out and went away, because people still liked quiz shows anyway.
Then came the Nixon-Kennedy debates, which started the decade of the 1960s, where we learned an important lesson: optics matter. Nixon won the debates, they said, but he looked like a sweaty shark with beard stubble, while Kennedy, in comparison, looked young and handsome. Kennedy became President.
Then Kennedy was assassinated, practically on television– every second of the waiting to hear if he would survive, and then later his funeral, were shown on TV.
Then Vietnam happened. The war was shown in our living room… and it was difficult to watch.
So, in response to tragedy after tragedy, TV often turned silly.
The shows were supernatural comedies (The Munsters, Bewitched, etc.), campy shows (Batman, Green Hornet), science-fiction shows (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Fantastic Voyage, The Time Tunnel), Spy Shows (Get Smart, The Avengers, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and I-Spy), or Hillbilly Shows (The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction and more)– and, still, non-silly Westerns like Bonanza and The Big Valley (and The Wild, Wild West, a campy, silly, sci-fi western).
Occasionally, a show would come about that made a difference and changed TV. Dark Shadows, a gothic soap opera, not only gave birth to nighttime soap operas, it also gave birth to every other supernatural show out there. There would be no X-Files, no Buffy, and no Supernatural without Dark Shadows. Similarly, Star Trek changed everything, spawning the science fiction shows and movies, but it also had a racially-diverse cast in a time when TV, with notable exceptions, was a sea of white faces.
Young people hated the war, and protested. The public got to see the police beating up protestors during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Instead of saying, “The police were out of line,” the American public chose to see the kids as the problem, and elected an authoritarian leader: the sweaty shark with beard stubble, who turned out to be a big crook.
We also landed on the moon, which, like everything, was shown on TV. Since TV only had three networks in those days, if you were tired of watching crappy footage of astronauts walking on a hunk of rock, too bad, as that was all you were going to see, as no TV network was going to cut away from the story of “One step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”
Towards the end of the 1960s, the silly shows were mostly cancelled, leading to shows that actually reflected the world as it was: The Mary Tyler Moore showed a career woman who just might make it after all. All In The Family showed the generation gap in all of its “fight at the dinner table” glory. “Good Times” showed a black family trying to survive in a lower-class neighborhood. The Bob Newhart Show featured a man and wife who were both career people without a cute kid to parent, and they were actually happier without a kid in their lives.
Vietnam ended, at least in part because of people getting depressed by all of the war on the news. As one story that may not be true said about a famous newsman, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
And, eventually, we lost Nixon, who was too corrupt to continue being President.
TV decided, “We’re done with actually having shows that reflect the world. Let’s be silly again.”
Hence, we got a lot of sexy comedies. We got “Three’s Company,” which had a sex joke for every punch line, practically.
We also got the Moral Majority, a religious group that made TV impose something called “The Family Hour,” which meant, no shows that actually were aimed at a mature audience until after the kiddies went to bed. Since “The Family Hour” was also the time when most people watch TV, the whole idea screwed with the ratings a lot. It also gave us “Saturday Night Live,” with the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” which meant, if you wanted mature comedy, you had to be a night owl.
Oh, there’s a lot more, but I’m bored with the subject, so…
This has been a very brief history of TV from the 1950s through the 1970s.