Television in the Antenna Age

Television in the Antenna Age is a brief, accessible, and engaging overview of the medium’s history and development in the US. Integrating three major concerns--television as an industry, a technology, and an art—the book is a basic primer on the complex, fascinating, and often overlooked story of television and its impact on American life.

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• Covers the entire history of American television, from its urban, middle-class beginnings in the late 40s, to the contemporary impact of new technologies and consolidated corporate.
  
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  Includes interview segments with industry insiders, pictures, and sidebars to illustrate important figures, trends, and events

Foreword ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiii

1 No Small Potatoes 1

Communication and Transportation: The Divorce 1

Water, Water Everywhere 6

Electrical Bananas 9

Here Comes the Judge 10

Say What? 11

2 A Downstream Medium 21

The Show Business 22

Radical Consumerism Occupies the Middle 27

Networking 31

Quality Control 34

3 A Burning Bush? 37

Broadcasting: Love It or Need It? 38

A Vertical System of Culture 44

Compatible Software 46

4 Staging and Screening 53

Sets 53

Getting with the Program 55

The Origins of ABC 58

5 Corruption and Plateau 66

Technology 66

Industry 67

Art 67

Scandals and Shake-Outs 70

6 Dull as Paint and Just as Colorful 76

TV Rules 76

Just Plain Folks 84

Television Gothic 86

7 A Myth is as Good as a Smile 89

When No News Was Good News . . . in Prime Time 91

Shows Without Trees 94

As Real As It Got 98

Regulation and Social Effects 103

Programming and the Television Industry 108

8 Oligopoly Lost and Found 111

The Train and the Station 114

The Shock of the News 121

The Third Mask of Janus 126

Index 131

“One could hardly ask for a more entertaining introduction to the history of entertainment media and its role in contemporary culture.” Stephen O’Leary, Annenberg School for Communication, USC David Marc is a writer and editor who teaches at Syracuse University and Le Moyne College. He is the author of Demographic Vistas (1984; 1996), Comic Visions (1989; Blackwell, 1997) and Bonfire of the Humanities (1995).

Robert J. Thompson is a Professor at Syracuse University, where he heads the Center for the Study of Popular Television at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. His books include Adventures on Prime Time (1990) and Television’s Second Golden Age (1996).

Television in the Antenna Age is an accessible, engaging, and straightforward overview of the medium’s history and development in the United States. Integrating three major concerns – television as technology, industry, and art – the book introduces the complex, fascinating, and often overlooked story of television and its impact on American life. It ends with a provocative meditation on the effect since the 1980s of competing technologies, the consolidation of media ownership, and the emerging aesthetics of twenty-first-century programming.

Written by the two prominent experts on American television, this book includes several illustrative features on leading figures in TV’s development. It is the most compact and authoritative history of the medium to date.