50 Years of TV: A Wasteland and a Wonder

It’s adored and it’s vilified. It’s feared by some as a mind-altering drug or a subliminal messenger, ridiculed by others as a trivial boob tube, an idiot box, a vast, gray, barren, parched wilderness.

To still others, it’s a revolution, a religion, a behemoth and quite simply the most profound development of modern times. It’s a diversion, a companion, a family member, a Big Brother, a Big Baby-Sitter. You watch it, it watches your kids.

And this is the year that American television turns 50.

Only a shrinking minority of Americans can recall when there wasn’t TV, or even when it began. It barely crawled in 1939, slept through World War II, awoke and began to walk only in the late 1940s and grew a full head in the 1950s.

Time flies when you’re having fun.

It seems like only yesterday that television was all gangly legs and pimples, when Americans plopped their TV dinners on their TV tables in front of their TV sets and got excited watching even the test pattern.

It seems like only yesterday that a man who was supposed to be shot dead in a live TV play got up seconds later and walked away, not realizing the camera was still on him.

It seems like only yesterday that Betty Furness was unable to open the door of a refrigerator that she was demonstrating in a live TV commercial. After she repeatedly failed to budge the door, stage hands had to come over and yank it open.

“Well,” Furness said about the fridge, “it’s usually automatic.”

Only yesterday.

Flash back to 1950 and you see Faye Emerson’s ratings soar as her necklines plunge. Return to 1952 and you see early morning TV born when NBC’s “Today” show takes to the air.

Relive 1956 and you see “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” premiere on NBC, forging the way for anchors to become the gleaming hood ornaments of news and the messengers who overshadow the message. The same year you see the declining age of live drama anthologies and the emerging era of the big-money quizzes, to be followed by the quiz show scandals.

Rerun the 1960s and you see live TV covering the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. You see TV making the Vietnam War as available to American homes as “F Troop” and “Hogan’s Heroes.” You see the arrival of “60 Minutes,” the CBS series that would contribute to the decline of the long-form documentary while also proving that prime-time news shows can be commercial.

Replay the 1970s and you see CBS’ “All in the Family” redefine situation comedy. You see NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” revolutionize Saturday nights. You see ABC’s landmark “Roots” fail to translate landmark ratings into more acting jobs for blacks. You see ABC’s “Nightline” revitalize wee-hours-TV for the serious-minded.

Look back at 1980 and you see Ronald Reagan begin to affect TV significantly as not only a great communicator but as a great deregulator who placed his trust in “market forces.”

Half a century of TV.

Put on your 3-D glasses and look at it now.

A whopping 98% the nation’s households have at least one TV set. The typical household has a set on more than seven hours a day, and the typical viewer watches TV at least four hours a day.

More than half the nation’s households are wired for cable, giving viewers so many channels to choose from that their thumbs are raw from operating their remote-control devices.

You’ve got your instant news on CNN, your instant sports on ESPN, your instant Congress on C-SPAN, your instant rock on MTV. You’ve got your regional cable networks, your shopping networks, your pay networks like HBO, Showtime and The Movie Channel. You’ve got your home video, your VCRs for taping “Nightline” and watching it the next day. You’ve got your communication satellites, your instant live TV anytime, anywhere--the world in a microwave.

In shrinking the globe, television has altered our perceptions of ourselves and others. Thanks to TV, for example, Mikhail Gorbachev is not merely a Soviet leader peering over the Kremlin wall. He has access to our homes, live from Havana or London, as easily as President Bush does, live from the White House.

Yet even as TV has expanded our international outlook and made us smarter in some areas, it has just as surely fractured attention spans and hampered learning skills in other areas. How could it not when so much on TV is capsulized, miniaturized or abridged?

There are a multitude of studies on TV that yield a multitude of conflicting data. TV’s total impact may never be known, or, at the very least, may vary from generation to generation and depend on other environmental factors.

In some instances, however, its reality does seem to merge with our reality. The preponderance of crime that is covered and depicted on TV has surely made us a more fearful society, and perhaps even more conservative in our willingness to reach out and touch others.

TV is now so vast and powerful that its influence extends to all areas of society, but none more so than politics.

The fusion of television and politics is almost complete. The single biggest expenditure of a political campaign is inevitably television. Candidates reach the electorate through television. To win an election, a candidate increasingly has to perform well on television. The President communicates to the people through television.

What television does best, though, is shape political agendas. It does that by telling us what to think about, if not what to think.

Meanwhile, TV’s impact will grow as its technology grows.

As TV begins its second 50 years, the technology will be exciting. The predictions are that TV screens soon will be almost paper thin, that satellite dishes will be tiny enough to keep on a table, that TV will be in 3-D. And, of course, there will be high-definition TV, screens with vastly more reception lines, screens that will produce sharper, clearer pictures with no interference.

“Hollywood Wives” in high definition? It’s almost too exciting to imagine.

That--content--is what television is really about, though, isn’t it? The technology has always been exciting at its various stages of development. It’s the human factor--the programming--that inevitably lags behind.

In 1938, E. B. White predicted that TV would be either “a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky.” In its first 50 years, it’s been both.