Fifties Television:
The Industry and its Critics
By William Boddy
University of Illinois Press, 194 pages, $29.95
In television, business is to culture as sex is to creation. That is the theme of ”Fifties Television” by William Boddy, and if it seems a bit jaded, it`s only because we`ve been fed so much those-were-the-days drivel about the 1950s.
This book is part of a recent and welcome trend to shake off the nostalgia and examine instead the hidden economic factors that propelled the networks into media supremacy (Boddy would say ”monopoly”). Here`s an example. Live drama, the crown jewel of television`s Golden Age. Right? Not so fast.
Live programming was indeed uniquely television, with a look and aesthetic all its own. Only television could produce television, the networks argued earnestly, not Hollywood.
To the networks, though, Boddy says, live drama was simply a tactic to freeze independent film producers out of television and buttress network power over affiliates and advertisers. The goal? Network monopoly.
The irony, says Boddy, was that ”the networks succeeded in gaining control over prime time programming at the same time they abandoned” live in- house production for-what else?-film. They found they could make more money by licensing production to independent studios and attaching long residual strings to the deals.
Control over prime-time programming also gave the networks a free hand to develop and schedule their own program inventories, free of sponsor review. We take this for granted today, but in radio and early TV it was the sponsors and ad agencies who hired the talent, produced the shows, decided the content and virtually owned the time slots in which they ran.
By the late `50s, though, those days were gone. ”Participating sponsors” bought one-minute windows from an inventory of increasingly homogeneous programming produced, scheduled and controlled by the networks. But, as Boddy shows, in their march toward monopoly, the networks turned out to be even more rigid and formula-driven than the sponsors had been.
In the `40s, Boddy finds a new industry with five established centers of power: networks, advertisers, manufacturers, government and the movies, all existing in a web of conflicting and complimentary interests. The fundamental economic and regulatory decisions made during TV`s infancy have determined its history ever since, he argues.
Have you ever wondered why TV had only 12 channels for so long? Well, the big three of radio (NBC, CBS and ABC) intended to be the big three of TV. To make sure, NBC developed a strategy. An artificial license scarcity had to be built into the system at the beginning. This is why, according to Boddy, the Federal Communications Commission was persuaded to locate TV in the 12-channel VHF band and ignore the 70-channel possibilities of UHF. And guess who controlled the manufacturing patents for VHF? None other than RCA, which by 1940 was eager to start making money on them. So the FCC set up the National Television Standards Committee, which prematurely fixed the American scan line standard at 525.
A lot of TV history has been written and made, of course, since the end of Boddy`s story. But the strategies and maneuvers by which network television controlled its destiny over its first half-century are told here in fascinating, if somewhat academic, detail. It`s a story impossible to read with rose-colored glasses on.
