The TV Big Picture, in Three Volumes

How deflating. Just when you’re satisfied that your knowledge of television is encyclopedic, along come 240 scholars to prove you wrong.

Their essays nourish and fatten the “Encyclopedia of Television,” a much-welcome, much-needed three-volume work (nearly 2,000 pages) recently published by Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communications.

Priced at $300, the set is aimed primarily at libraries and college campuses. But it’s a browser’s paradise, and anyone soaking up its history and insights will be all the wiser about television and its role in society.

The encyclopedia is generally quite terrific. How terrific? So much so that editor Horace Newcomb had the foresight to include two pages on TV criticism. All right!

Going both small picture and big picture, the set even includes a section on the remote control, with a full-page reproduction of a print ad from 1957 featuring George Burns crowing: “Look out, Gracie! With Zenith Space Command TV, I can change programs from across the room.” And just like that, couch potatodom was born.

Much thinner broadcast encyclopedias surface from time to time, and you can buy scores of monographs on TV and books galore that list and describe series. But this is by far the most exhaustive work of its kind, a comprehensive TV repository that not only examines programs but also does so in their historical context while noting their relationship to the broader TV landscape. There are profiles of industry VIPs here, too, and smartly written essays on major trends that span the medium’s history.

The scope is global, moreover. TV in Kenya, you say? Page 888, nearly two pages. And what is Channel Four? No, not the NBC station here where Fritz forecasts the weather. It’s the British TV enterprise that somehow has found a way to successfully balance the avant-garde with the commercial, while also helping stimulate that nation’s film industry.

The trio of books includes a section on local TV and its distinctive infanthood in Los Angeles. News is examined separately: “Local television news in the United States is television at its best, and at its worst.” You’d have to call that a generous definition, even though the essay’s conclusion is more to the point: “It is rarely determined how much viewers actually learned from TV news, but existing research suggests it is very little.”

The range is wide, from a section on media events to another on the meaning of program development, an initial step in the seeding process by which shows ultimately reach the air. Following an ample essay on war on TV, meanwhile, comes another examining the Vietnam conflict as it appeared on the small screen, contradicting the conventional wisdom that the coverage was overwhelmingly anti-war.

There are more than six pages here on “Racism, ethnicity and television” in an essay noting the way that TV for years made “social whiteness” appear natural and reasonable, and how racial stereotyping can be shaped by class.

And what about attitudes being shaped by advertisers? An especially strong section on the evolution of detective programs begins by noting that “Man Against Crime” (1949-56) and “Martin Kane, Private Eye” (1949-54) were conceived and produced by New York ad agencies and firmly guided by their tobacco sponsors. “Martin Kane” was known for incorporating pipe-smoking spots into the show by having Kane regularly pop by his favorite tobacco shop. And media historian Erik Barnouw is quoted here recalling that tobacco sponsors of “Man Against Crime” banned coughing from the show’s scripts. Call it secondary censorship.

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The encyclopedia is especially strong in tracing the connecting threads--discussing the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, for example, in conjunction with such other televised proceedings as the Army-McCarthy and Watergate hearings, with “visual imagery and symbolism” among their most important legacies.

And a short history of blacklisting notes that TV lagged behind the movie industry in making amends: “Not until the fall of 1967, on ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,’ was blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger finally ‘cleared’ for return to network television.”

When it comes to individual programs, among the many miniseries covered here in some depth are four of the best ever, each a British production aired on PBS: “Prime Suspect,” “I, Claudius,” “The Jewel in the Crown” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” An essay about the latter recalls John le Carre being so struck by Alec Guinness as minimalist spy chief George Smiley that the author had Guinness in his mind while later writing “Smiley’s People.”

No encyclopedia is all-inclusive. Not only do choices have to be made, but issues and events speed on without waiting for publication dates, with the result that such encyclopedias are dated to some extent as soon as they are in print.

Thus, this one’s five pages on sexual orientation and TV contain no reference to ABC’s “Ellen.” Another lengthy section on religion omits the widely beloved CBS hit “Touched by an Angel” and ABC’s controversial “Nothing Sacred.” Nowhere in an otherwise brawny essay on violence, moreover, is there a reference to TV’s program content ratings or the coming V-chip. The next edition presumably will be thicker.

Meanwhile, there are those rewarding other nooks and crannies, such as a section on the role of the writer in TV. What, you thought “Baywatch” wrote itself?