Professor Answers Television History Questions

WIRED

Associate Professor of Film and Television studies Charlotte Howell joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the history of television. How did television work before digital transmission? How was TV able to grow from four channels to literally hundreds? What are the most impactful and revolutionary television shows in history? How did life change when the television was first released? When do critics say was the modern golden age of television? Answers to these questions and many more await on Television History Support.  Director: Lauren Zeitoun Director of Photography: Kevin Dynia Editor: Richard Trammell Expert: Charlotte Howell Creative Producer: Lisandro Perez-Rey Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen Associate Producer: Brandon White  Production Manager: Jonathan Rinkerman Casting Producer: Nick Sawyer Camera Operator: Jeremy Harris Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen  Production Assistant: Sonia Butt Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo Additional Editor: Sam DiVito Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds

Transcript

00:00I'm Charlotte Howell. I'm an associate professor of film and television studies at Boston University,

00:05and I'm here to answer some questions from the internet. This is TV History Support. Let's go.

00:17Wellness Hippie asks, when did TV become the devil and why? Television has a long history

00:25stretching all the way back to the 1960s of being a bad media object. One key moment in that history

00:33is in 1961 when Newton Minow, the head of the FCC at the time, said, when television is good,

00:39there's nothing better, but it's mired by homogeneity, sameness, consumerism, and violence.

00:47TV has become a vast wasteland, and the term vast wasteland has become really closely associated

00:53with television ever since. But television, its origins are in radio, not in film. Radio for a

01:01long period of time was really well regarded, but also what you listened to when you were doing

01:06other things. It was also a domestic medium. It's in your living room. You cannot guarantee

01:12the quality or truthfulness necessarily of the messages that are coming through. And so there's

01:18a lot of anxiety around television as a new medium. But interestingly, that doesn't really happen

01:25until the late 50s and early 60s. There was more and more kind of overt commercialism on TV, which

01:32many people point as like, the real reason why people talk about TV is the devil. And so that connection

01:38with commercialism, the domestic space, and also that television has sometimes kind of been seen as

01:45a feminine medium, especially, you know, because of daytime programming and soap operas. All of those

01:52things come together for this idea of television as kind of a low art form. Despite various moments

01:59of trying to offer technological regulations to help parents determine what programming their children's

02:06could watch, like the V-chip in the 90s, it is outside influences coming into the home that a lot of

02:13parents have historically had some difficulty navigating how much, what kinds of programming

02:19to let their children watch. There were in fact Senate hearings in the 1960s about violence on TV

02:25and how it affects children, in part due to the popularity of Westerns among kids. And so this is

02:30a kind of perennial question, but I think it does television dirty because television, like Newton Minow said,

02:37when it's good, there's nothing better. Art of the real asks, what was the first late night type,

02:44tonight show type show ever? You might think it was the tonight show, but in fact, if we look into the archives,

02:53we'll find one figure, Faye Emerson. Faye Emerson hosted a nighttime talk show airing at 11pm on CBS.

03:03Now it isn't exactly like a late night talk show as we would see it, but it was an episodic format,

03:08starting with Faye Emerson coming out in a key outfit, usually with outrageous hat,

03:14doing unscripted interviews with key people. I didn't do so well with the opening gag.

03:19When your hat fell off. Some of these politicians, stage and screen. There was a real political

03:25vibe to the show that would surprise a lot of people, probably. She would read fan mail and then use it to

03:31create the topic of the day. This created a real connection between the fans and the hosts.

03:37And really we can see the seeds of that growing into things like celebrities reading mean tweets

03:43on contemporary late night talk shows. But Faye Emerson is really where it starts.

03:48From Cauliflower Nice, how the hell did we go from four to 365 channels? In fact,

03:55we've always had more than four channels. In many cities, there were local independent TV stations.

04:00Many television sets could pick up about 13 channels throughout the mid-century and into the 70s and 80s.

04:08And then we have the kind of expansion of broadcast TV with the creation of PBS. In the late 60s, we have the

04:17expansion of broadcast in the 80s and 90s with new broadcast networks. But I think what this

04:23question is really getting at is how we get to cable television in particular. And cable has this

04:30really interesting history where it started off just to retransmit essentially over-the-air broadcast

04:36stations to people who are outside of the range of the over-the-air signal of local stations. But this new

04:43technology of cable laid in the ground, privately owned, offers an opportunity. And people are

04:49ready to jump on an opportunity to make some more money on television outside of networks. But the FCC

04:56has purview over cable because they retransmit the over-the-air signals and they place a couple of

05:02limitations on cable. And then HBO comes on the scene in 1975 and sues the FCC saying these limitations are

05:12really hampering our ability to compete. And they win. The limitations are lifted. The courts kind of

05:19determine that cable has greater First Amendment right protections than over-the-air broadcasts,

05:25which is why you can say various profanities on cable. And then cable really expands. Dozens of channels

05:33at first. And then in the 80s and 90s, we have fiber optic cable starting to replace the older system,

05:40expanding to hundreds of channels, which is where we are today.

05:44Executor of Judgment asks, anybody else disappointed with their families after growing

05:50up with the 90s family sitcoms and getting unrealistic expectations from those shows?

05:55The TGIF Friday Night Block on ABC from the late 80s all the way through to the early 2000s were

06:02really family-oriented shows. The TGIF block was very wholesome because ABC was owned by Disney. And so

06:12these families were meant to be idealistic. They were there to kind of sell you on this vision of the

06:19family, even if it looks different than the nuclear families of the 1950s. They fit as well the changing

06:25kind of demographics and norms of representing families on TV. So we get a lot more black cast sitcoms,

06:32like Family Matters, like Sister, Sister. We have more blended families, like Step by Step, so kind of

06:38divorced or widowed families coming together. But what we see now is that it wasn't standing out, it was more

06:44expected, as well as kind of the gender representation shifting where a lot of these moms are working moms.

06:51And so we have television in many cases reacting to changing social norms and then suddenly reflecting

06:58that because it wants to speak to people who want to see themselves on TV, even if it's through a kind

07:05of like a rose-tinted view. From the television subreddit, what's the most egregious snub in Emmy's history?

07:13A snub means that it's expected to get nominated or to win. That expectation is built through critical

07:21consensus. And then oftentimes it's more of a retrospective where some show continues to gain

07:28prominence and praise and the shows that beat it get a little bit lost in history. So people point to

07:35The Wire being only nominated for writing categories and not winning as one of the key snubs. Personally,

07:43I'm always surprised Battlestar Galactica didn't actually get much Emmy love, especially given its

07:50allegorical connection to the politics of the time. But that's the point of the snub. It is that critical

07:56consensus that really we see driven in many ways by the rise of television criticism from the 80s forward.

08:05Cam Ball 1998 asks, Was I Love Lucy the first big hit scripted TV show?

08:11I Love Lucy was innovative in a key number of ways. In particular, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz created the

08:19production company Desilu. And they conceived of I Love Lucy as a television adaptation from the radio show that

08:29Lucy was a star of. But the thing was, the network CBS wanted to shoot in New York. Desi had a job in Los

08:36Angeles. So they said, we will figure out a way to shoot it in Los Angeles. They acquired Soundstage,

08:46worked with Carl Freund, who was a key director and cinematographer from Hollywood film productions,

08:53hired Jess Oppenheimer as one of the first head writer slash executive producer positions, and created I Love Lucy that

09:02would be shot with a three camera setup and shot on film. Many scripted shows before I Love Lucy were either

09:11aired live, and the only version we have of them are kinescopes. I Love Lucy determined they were going to use high

09:18quality film stock. CBS was like, this is too expensive. So Lucy and Desi and Desilu Productions

09:24basically said, we'll cut out some of our salary for an ownership stake in the show. Key, key, key decision.

09:31This was the seed of a lot of where we are in the media industries today. By thinking about this as not

09:37just as it airs, as live broadcast, but thinking about as a show that could be preserved and then sold

09:43later on, we get this idea of television being valuable not just when it airs, but also

09:50for re-watching or re-airing really from I Love Lucy. That's also why it's more prominent in our

09:55cultural memory. And because I Love Lucy was such an investment, it was a big hit. From the history

10:02subreddit, when did television with programming actually start? Television as a technology actually

10:09started in the 20s and 30s. So there are a couple of TV stations as early as the 1930s,

10:16but the 1939 World's Fair television was presented by RCA as coming soon to your living room and

10:24promising programming to come soon as well. Of course, World War II interrupted this development

10:30and manufacturing was needed for other means. So when the war ends, 1945, we have this battle of what

10:38television could be. RCA said, we need to go TV now and black and white because that's the technology

10:45we have ready to go for manufacturing. Westinghouse said, but we're close to color. We could potentially

10:53have more channels. And the FCC in 1945 sided with RCA and basically adopted their TV now plan. So we

11:01actually see a lot of wrestling and boxing and pretty much only at nighttime. It's not until about 1948,

11:0849, that we really start to see television programming as we know it. Studio One on CBS,

11:14a live anthology program, basically a play a week, starts in 1948. The Goldbergs, a sitcom as we'd

11:21recognize it today, starts in 1949. Daytime doesn't really become a factor until the early and mid 1950s,

11:30as we get the Today Show starting in the early 1950s and then expanding the daytime schedule from there.

11:37But in general, late 1940s is when TV programming actually starts.

11:42Let Bugs Live 2 asks, what makes Star Trek, Star Trek? Star Trek is an incredibly successful TV

11:49franchise. Part of what makes Star Trek, Star Trek is this idealized future that sometimes is called a

11:56kind of liberal humanist future where so many of the struggles we encounter today, we have found a way past

12:03them. And so it's a way to allegorically engage with political issues at a bit of a distance.

12:10It tells compelling stories. You know you're going to get a conclusion by the end of the episode.

12:15But Star Trek really is Star Trek because of its fans. The Star Trek fandom, one, created a letter

12:23writing campaign that helped to ensure that the series originally in the 1960s could get a third season,

12:31to be then syndicated in reruns so that it could keep being a part of the television schedule even

12:38after it ended in 1969. They created fan conventions, fanzines, kept a lot of the actors when they were out

12:47of work after the series in kind of decent money standards by paying for their appearances at conventions.

12:55And so it built a really strong connection between the franchise and the fans that I think really

13:00makes Star Trek stand out as a TV franchise.

13:03LoweAirport397 asks,

13:06What TV shows do you think made an impact on society?

13:09The thing about television is that it and social change are always in this dance with each other.

13:15So we have this kind of like increased movement of counterculture, protests, shifts of the generation in

13:21the 1960s. And we don't really see that reflected on network television until the 1970s.

13:28Maud showed the first time a main character has an abortion even before Roe vs. Wade was decided.

13:34I don't understand your hesitancy when they made it a lie you were for it.

13:38Of course I wasn't pregnant then.

13:40These shows were all about bringing the explicit political discussions of the 1970s into the comedic

13:47situation and really getting at some of that reality.

13:51Television brings a sense of simultaneity into the living room.

13:56And so we see that with the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War as well, where these stories of

14:02these struggles and the inequalities are in your living room and you can't really ignore it when it's

14:10there regularly on the nightly news. You could also look at the 90s with Ellen coming out on her sitcom

14:18Susan, I'm gay.

14:21As really normalizing a particular type of queer representation, but absolutely bringing

14:29conscientiousness into living rooms of a lot of people who maybe hadn't encountered a lot of gay

14:35people in their lives before then. Fossils222 asks, what happened to Discovery, History,

14:42I think that means TLC, and other educational channels? It's 99% reality TV. Discovery, History,

14:49The Learning Channel, these are cable channels that at various points were more oriented towards

14:55education and have since become more oriented towards entertainment. But there's one cable channel

15:00that's not featured in here because it's become so associated with reality TV that we forget it was

15:07once a more educational and high-end channel. And that's Bravo. Bravo started out as international,

15:14independent films and performances and operas and the like. And then it was bought by NBC and started

15:21to shift. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy hit and then we get Project Runway, Top Chef, and the first of

15:29the Real Housewives franchise. And now we think of Bravo as the home for reality TV and reality TV

15:36franchises. But I want to talk also about reality TV. Reality TV has its origins not on network TV. The

15:44PBS docu-series An American Family in the 1970s followed The Loud Family. It was meant to be a fly on

15:51the wall kind of documentary TV series, but there was a lot of drama that happened with their divorce,

15:57The Sun came out as gay. We see a lot of the seeds of reality TV. But MTV really set a lot of the

16:04standards of kind of exaggerated editing, emphasized conflict with the real world that premiered in the

16:131990s. And then we get reality TV as we understand it and that high melodrama, high conflict, really

16:22entertaining reality TV show hit with Survivor on CBS in 2000. That's also why we see it coming up

16:29everywhere on cable because reality TV is much cheaper to produce than scripted TV. A question

16:34from Cora. How did life change when the television was first released? Television took quite a while to

16:41become heavily adopted, but it really was building on some changes that had already started in radio

16:47of setting a clear schedule. But now you had to sit and watch it in what was increasingly

16:54designated rooms and homes for the television set. So it changed architecture, creating the den. It

17:00changed some habits, like we have to eat dinner before our show comes on, but also the new industry of

17:07the TV dinner. So you could watch television and eat dinner together. There was a lot of anxiety about how

17:12much TV children were watching, but that's true of pretty much, I mean, comic books, video games, rap music,

17:18whatever. But in general, those were some of the key changes. From Ellie Kitchi on Reddit.

17:24I'm a wealthy American early adopter of TV in the 1940s. What's on? Well, it depends on what time in the 1940s

17:31you're talking about. If it's like 1946 or 47, you'd pretty much have to be in New York, maybe DC, maybe

17:39Philadelphia to even get a TV signal. You're still mainly getting primetime programming. But there were

17:46actually a lot of ethnic, immigrant, and Black-led sitcoms in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Life with

17:54Luigi about an Italian immigrant in Chicago. The Goldbergs about a Jewish American family in the

17:59Bronx. That started in 1949. I Love Lucy, a white woman and a Cuban man in a relationship. This was a

18:07time that was speaking directly to urban audiences who were generally understood to be multicultural.

18:12You also have live anthology drama series, which are really well-regarded. This is where screenwriters

18:19who maybe had been playwrights before really got their start. They wrote plays for television to be

18:25broadcast live. You have 12 Angry Men, which started on television and then was turned into a play and then

18:31was turned into an Oscar-winning film. And you have live programming. Variety shows, some sports,

18:38but it's mostly wrestling, boxing, indoor because baseball stadiums didn't all have lights at that

18:45time. So you have a real mix, but it is a lot of live programming. Gummy Worm Guy asks,

18:53which shows represent the modern golden age of television? Well, the idea of a golden age really

18:58is about kind of critical consensus. In fact, many of the shows considered and praised for golden ages

19:05or as quality television don't have a lot of viewers, but they have the right viewers, according

19:11to advertisers, sometimes subscribers. A lot of people would point at the start being the Sopranos

19:19in 1999. HBO tends to be where people point to the start of what is considered by critics,

19:27by awards granting industries, by a lot of kind of the general public as the golden age. The end

19:33point probably ends around the time that Breaking Bad ends because soon thereafter we enter a period

19:38of peak TV where more and more television gets made, but just don't get the noise and attention and

19:45eyeballs. A golden age, it's about differentiation from what is considered the norm of television.

19:52So if we look at this modern golden age from, say, The Sopranos to Breaking Bad, including

19:58kind of the usual suspects, Mad Men, maybe Game of Thrones, Dexter on Showtime, a lot of shows that

20:06feature male anti-heroes, a lot of pushing the boundaries and the edginess of TV and really reacting

20:14to what was very popular on broadcast TV at the time. So a golden age often is only golden because

20:21it's burnished by the perceived lack of shine of some of what is considered regular TV.

20:28Decap's World asks, What five to ten shows revolutionized TV and why? Dallas and General

20:35Hospital in the 80s are a combo deal. The rise of the soap opera is so important to how we get

20:42more widespread serial dramas and television production these days. We don't get Grey's

20:48Anatomy without Dallas. Julia, 1968, starring Diane Carroll, a complicated but really big leap forward

20:55in terms of representation of Black women on TV, a middle-class Black woman raising her son. It was

21:02really about modeling a kind of a civil rights figure and bringing a different type of Black representation

21:09to American homes. All in the family, discussions of abortion and homosexuality, trans characters,

21:17women's rights, all of these different topics featured very prominently in one of the most popular

21:23shows at that time. And we don't get Cartman on South Park without Archie Bunker and his bigotry

21:29on All in the Family. Shuffleupagus asks, How the F did TV work before digital? Essentially, television

21:39before the digital transition was over-the-air analog signal broadcast. A local station would create a

21:49carrier signal to bring the signal that contained the audio and visual components to everybody's antenna

21:59within reach. And then the antenna would gather the signal and translate it into audio and image

22:06format. This is why you could have traveled TVs in the 1960s. If it had an antenna and a battery pack,

22:13you could watch TV anywhere. Rihanna's side dude asks, How is South Park even approved? This show got

22:21Family Guy, American Dad, and The Simpsons beat. South Park in the 90s started out as an experimental short

22:28film that went kind of proto-viral online. Trey Parker and Matt Stone decided to develop it as a

22:37TV show. And eventually that show landed at Comedy Central. It's a cable channel, so it has more First

22:43Amendment protections and more protections about vulgarity and profanity, which of course this show

22:49revels in portraying. How would you like to go see the school counselor? How would you like to suck my

22:55buzz? South Park got written up in the New York Times multiple times. The controversy was good

23:01publicity in a lot of ways, and it has continued to be South Park a key example of the kind of brand

23:09that Comedy Central was and that now kind of can be integrated into various streaming platforms.

23:16Wooful124 asks, Explain it like I'm five. How did black and white TV turn to color? Television could

23:24have always been in color. And there have been TV shows shot in color since the early 1950s. As long as

23:33people were still buying black and white television sets, there was no incentive to transfer to color.

23:39NBC really starts experimenting with some color broadcasts, mainly of one-off spectacles. So the

23:47Rose Parade, Broadcast in Color, the 1955 production of Peter Pan on NBC. And then it's really when we get

23:56to the kind of mid-1960s where we start to see multiple nights of programs in color. We move into

24:03essentially a color mandate of broadcast. And you could only see these fabulous colors if you had a

24:11brand new color television set. Any time we have new media technology, the whole reason to get people

24:18to buy it is to have programming on it that they can only watch or engage with on that. It's the same

24:24logic we see of streamers with exclusive TV options nowadays. It was you want to be able to see

24:32these shows in color so you will buy a new TV set. And oh, by the way, Westinghouse, RCA,

24:38all of these throughout TV history have a long history of investment in television networks.

24:44So they can kind of drive the production cycle somewhat as well.

24:47Our Mega asks, what exactly is a syndicated TV show? Syndicated just means a company that sells

24:55directly to local stations. Now you've seen your local station probably show local news.

25:01That's one way to fill in time. But on weekends, afternoons, what we often see is syndicated shows.

25:08Either second-run syndication, what we would call reruns, or it's a first-run syndicated show.

25:14Bypasses the network entirely, sells directly on off-network schedule time slots to the local station.

25:21Baywatch started one season on NBC. NBC decided not to go forward with it. Its producer decided to keep

25:28making it and try in syndication. Incredibly successful. Xena Warrior Princess and Star Trek The

25:34Next Generation. Natalie2727 asks, why do you think westerns were so popular on TV in the 1950s?

25:42The decline of the Hollywood film western is one of the main reasons. They weren't producing the same

25:49amount of films that they had during the 1930s to 1950s. Meanwhile, television has moved out to Los

25:56Angeles and realized that there are all of these resources put in place in making dozens of westerns

26:04a year. So you have experts in horse training, stunt people, you have the sets in the ghost towns.

26:10There's also a social reason, right? The 1950s is a time of some dramatic shifts in terms of gender roles.

26:18The move to white-collar work was really kind of destabilizing for these ideas of masculinity.

26:24And the western has always been a text about masculinity, a frontier masculinity. And that,

26:31I think, was also really, really resonant for the 1950s. From just day 1788,

26:38does anyone else feel like network TV really just gave up after the rise of streaming?

26:43There's this assumed differentiation between the networks and streaming. But in a lot of cases,

26:50the networks and streaming services are owned by the same conglomerate parent company. Now,

26:56I think what this is really addressing is the feeling that a lot of emphasis now from production

27:02companies, from the major studios, is on streaming. And I think that's true. That's the audience they're

27:08chasing. Network TV, as some executives have described it, is essentially one shelf for a TV

27:16show to wait to be licensed for streaming services and to build an audience to make that deal sweeter.

27:22But always remember, it's a couple of companies that basically control everything.

27:27Sick Thighs asks,

27:28Is public access still a thing? Could I watch a public access channel on my TV right now if I wanted to?

27:35If you have cable, probably. Public access really rose to prominence around cable because cable providers

27:41were required to carry local public education and governmental channels. And some of them,

27:47at early points, actually provided studio space, camera equipment, support for public access programming.

27:56In New York in the 1970s, there was avant-garde, like, man sits in a bathtub for a half an hour,

28:03programs on the local cable access channel. There were forums of lesbian groups, punk shows.

28:09Public access is the promise of television that's more democratic, more local. But as with many things,

28:15it's largely gone away because it's too expensive. Much of what would be on public access has moved in

28:22the last 15 years to YouTube. SnowyEclipse01 asks,

28:27Why did old television stations sign off after dark? They didn't have any more programming left.

28:32We don't get 24-hour programming really until cable. CNN is one of the kind of early,

28:39let's program for 24 hours, mainly because they had to hit a wide variety of time zones. And cable channels

28:46really had to do that, whereas local TV stations only had to reach their local TV audience. The network

28:53wasn't providing content after late night, and it was too expensive to run and maintain the local

28:59station and pay for programming. So they signed off and that was it. That's everything for today.

29:06I hope you learned something. Thanks for watching TV History Support. Catch you next time.

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