Authors: William Boddy
ISBN-13: 9780252062995, ISBN-10: 025206299X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Date Published: December 1990
Edition: 1st Edition
Just a few years in the mid-1950s separated the "golden age" of television's live anthology drama from Newton Minow's famous "vast wasteland" pronouncement. Fifties Television shows how the significant programming changes of the period cannot be attributed simply to shifting public tastes or the exhaustion of particular program genres, but underscore fundamental changes in the way prime-time entertainment programs were produced, sponsored, and scheduled. These changes helped shape television as we know it today. William Boddy provides a wide-ranging and rigorous analysis of the fledgling American television industry during the period of its greatest economic growth, programming changes, and critical controversy. He carefully traces the development of the medium from the experimental era of the 1920s and 1930s through the regulatory battles of the 1940s and the network programming wars of the 1950s.
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
Pt. 1 | Setting the Stage for Commercial Television | |
1 | Debating Television | 15 |
2 | Regulation of the Early Television Industry | 28 |
3 | UHF, the Television Freeze, and the Network Monopoly | 42 |
Pt. 2 | The Television Industry in the Early 1950s | |
4 | Early Film Programming in Television | 65 |
5 | Live Television: Program Formats and Critical Hierarchies | 80 |
6 | The False Dawn of a Golden Age | 93 |
Pt. 3 | Programs and Power: Networks, Sponsors, and the Rise of Film Programming | |
7 | The Economics of Television Networking | 113 |
8 | The Hollywood Studios Move into Prime Time | 132 |
9 | The New Structure of Television Sponsorship | 155 |
10 | Network Control of the Program Procurement Process | 168 |
Pt. 4 | Crisis and Counterattack, 1958-60 | |
11 | "The Honeymoon Is Over": The End of Live Drama | 187 |
12 | TV's Public Relations Crisis of the Late 1950s | 214 |
13 | The Critics and the Wasteland: Redefining Commercial Television | 233 |
14 | The Death of the Networks as Reformist Heroes | 244 |
Bibliography | 257 | |
Index | 287 |