TV is the quintessential mongrel medium, comprising little bits of all the other arts and treated with the respect of a stray dog.
So the idea of doing a primer on it probably strikes some people as similar to doing a primer on the ABCs. What, as the journalism saying goes, is the second paragraph?
But television is also our most ubiquitous and, to hear politicians tell it, influential of the arts. It is not difficult to make the case that, rather than just being passive consumers of it, people should take the time to understand its inner workings.
The obvious thing is to watch more TV. I’ve selected a handful of shows that are representative of the major genres, most of which can be seen in reruns on current TV and are also available through various video services.
But I’ve also offered a number of books, partly to disprove the maxim that reading and television are mutually exclusive. Just don’t try to do both at the same time.
APPLIANCES
– A 27-inch set (or larger)
Sure, you can get by on less. One professional I know very well, a TV critic, makes do with just a 20-inch set at home, although marital negotiations on that score are rumored to be ongoing. But sets are cheap enough now, and the quality of imagery presented on TV is strong enough, to justify having at least a medium screen. This recommendation will change, of course, and a whole new set of negotiations will begin, when High Definition TV becomes more commonplace.
TV SHOWS
– “I Love Lucy”
In the original incarnation (1951-61) of Lucille Ball’s and Desi Arnaz’s tales of married life, it didn’t just define situation comedy, with a screwball slant. It also pioneered or popularized many TV practices that have become standard: The simultaneous 3-camera format; filming before a live studio audience; and getting everything down on tape so that quality copies existed and could play on, earning money endlessly.
– “Gunsmoke”
Running from 1955 to 1975 on CBS, this Western drama was in some ways a forerunner of current television drama, focusing more on Marshall Matt Dillon (James Arness) and his “family” of friends than on the horse-and-wagon chases of Western movies. Strangers came to town to upset the order of community life and were either socialized or punished.
– “The Dick Van Dyke Show”
The first of two nearly perfect situation comedies that would feature Mary Tyler Moore. This CBS series (1961-66) brought together impeccable casting-Van Dyke as an easily flustered TV writer and Moore as his tightly wound wife-and some shimmering scripts.
– “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”
Four years after “Van Dyke,” Moore was back as the star of another standard bearer for what the medium could be: weekly plays that illuminated human behavior, as seen through the eyes of that new creature in the 1970s, the independent career woman. “MTM” ran, also on CBS, from 1970-77.
– “All in the Family”
Norman Lear’s series for CBS (1971-1983) was groundbreaking. Before Archie Bunker and the explorations of social issues fueled by his unmitigated bigotry, sitcoms had been the province of the terminally inoffensive. There was always the question of whether people were laughing at Archie’s ignorance or with it, but on balance hate revealed is hate diminished.
– “Sesame Street”
The answer to every critic who has ever bemoaned TV’s effect on the nation’s youth. This long- and still-running PBS series has taught a couple of generations about numbers, letters and grouchy hand puppets.
– “Dallas”
One of TV’s enduring genres, the daytime soap opera gets its ultimate incarnation in this primetime, phenomenally popular version, which ran on CBS from 1978-1991.
– “Hill Street Blues”
The first of the ensemble dramas that would come to define quality television in the 1980s and into the ’90s. “Hill Street,” from NBC and the soon-to-be prolific hand of Steven Bochco, focused on cops not so much as crime fighters but as human beings, and the combination of gritty realism and dark humor struck viewers as something new.
– “Saturday Night Live”
Again, look only to the early years, when NBC’s brilliantly lucky combination of cast and writers seemed to believe itself on a mission to test the boundaries of TV comedy. In a similar vein, and more clever in concept and execution, albeit Canadian, was “SCTV,” about life at and around a fictional television network.
– “Roots”
The prototypical miniseries. This 1977 version of Alex Haley’s book defined event television, the kind of show that gets viewers to treat the TV set like an important entertainment source rather than merely the most vivid of the home appliances. Nearly half the country-100 million people-watched the last of its eight nights. Trying to create similar events has become the strategy of choice for current TV programmers.
– “Late Night with David Letterman”
The ultimate late-night talk program, Letterman in his early years on NBC offered a giddy synthesis of his best forerunners (Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson) filtered through his own, anarchic comic brilliance. Notice how different these shows are from his attempts to be celebrity friendly in his current, CBS gig.
– “The Civil War”
The “Roots” of documentaries, Ken Burns’ 1990 epic not only was breathtaking in and of itself, but served to highlight television’s continuing service as a home to documentary films. This finds its most notable expression in two PBS series, the history-minded “The American Experience” and the newsy, investigative “Frontline.”
– “The Larry Sanders Show”
Garry Shandling’s current sitcom for HBO makes the list in part because it is so sharply and unconventionally written and played, an example of where the medium ought to be heading. It is also here because in its backstage look at a “Tonight”-style talk show, it offers a graduate-level education in the workings of the Hollywood entertainment machine.
SERVICES
– Cable television
At this point in the evolution of the medium, not having cable is like not having color TV would have been in, say, 1980. So much of what makes television exciting now is on cable, where the need to attract only a niche, as opposed to a mass, audience allows for more innovative work than on networks.
– Nick at Nite and Nick at Nite’s TV Land
These cable channels deserve a mention because, while their goals are decidedly commercial, they function as the de facto daily museums of television. Much of what has been first-rank in TV gets an airing on these channels, and tuning them in becomes perhaps the most pain free way to get up to speed on where TV has been. They also know how to have fun: TV Land began life by only airing vintage commercials, a cultural education in itself.
PUBLICATIONS
– “The Box”
Jeff Kisseloff (1995) has crafted a lively oral history of television from infancy to adolescence, an invaluable aid in understanding how TV came to be.
– “Encyclopedia of Television”
Its $300 price tag means it is more for everybody’s local library than for their personal collection. But the new three-volume set, put out by Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communications and curator Horace Newcomb, offers scholarly (but not too) articles on the people, programs and practices that have defined TV.
– “One Nation Under Television: The Rise & Decline of Network TV”
This 1990 work from local tube historian J. Fred MacDonald is one of the livelier overviews of the landscape. Also recommended, in a similar vein: Erik Barnouw’s “Tube of Plenty.”
– “On the Air!”
The first collection from Tom Shales, who, working for the Washington Post, became the first TV critic to get across to a national audience that writing about the medium didn’t have to be all handwringing about the decline of the culture. Shales’ sense of joy at being turned loose on this relentlessly democratic, gloriously polyglot medium, shines through every page of his 1982 collection.
– “The Complete Directory to Prime Time, Network and Cable TV Shows 1946-Present: Sixth Edition”
That’s a lot of title, but you might just call Tim Brooks’ and Earle Marsh’s encyclopedia of programming “The TV Junkie’s Bible.” Its nearly 1,400 pages contain casts and synopses of most every primetime show ever aired, from “Mister Ed” to “Mr. Belvedere.” A close second: Alex McNeil’s “Total Television.”
– “Television: The Critical View”
Edited by Horace Newcomb, this is the standard anthology of academic TV criticism. Mark Alvey, the chief archivist at Chicago’s MBC, calls two of the articles, Newcomb’s “Toward a Television Aesthetics” and David Thorburn’s “Television Melodrama,” “still the best articles on TV aesthetics yet written.”
– “DAVID COPPERFIELD”
The MBC’s Alvey explains: “Charles Dickens invented serial narrative, and purveyed social realism and social comment in an accessible language and often melodramatic style via a popular (mass) medium. Understand him, you understand American TV.”
– TV guide
It has drawbacks, such as being list happy, owned by Rupert (Fox Network) Murdoch, and more prone to star puffery than investigative journalism. But the magazine is also the best national source for keeping abreast of what’s new and intriguing in the current, constantly shifting world of television. Another good source is Entertainment Weekly.
MOVIES
“Network”
– Paddy Chayefsky’s blistering script for the 1976 movie paints a portrait of television news that will do anything to win viewers. It’s a portrait that grows more true day by day.
MUSEUMS
– Museum of Broadcast Communications
This young Chicago institution (in the Chicago Cultural Center) may have a somewhat scattershot collection of tapes, but it is one of the best that is available to the public. In New York, check out the Museum of Television and Radio.
