Television in the Antenna Age: A Concise History
Television in the Antenna Age: A Concise History
ISBN: 978-0-470-77687-2 April 2008 Wiley-Blackwell 152 Pages
$35.99
Description
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.
- 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.
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
- Provides a brief, accessible, and engaging overview of television’s history and development in the US by two prominent experts on television and popular culture
Covers the entire history of American television, from its urban, middle-class beginnings, through its arrested development in the late 40s, its rise to dominance as a mass medium in the 50s, and its slowly maturing content stream throughout the 60s and 70s
Explores the effect, since the 80s, of competing technologies, consolidation of media ownership and the emerging aesthetics of 21st-century programming
Includes interview segments with industry insiders, pictures, and sidebars to illustrate important figures, trends, and events.