Go ahead-say that word aloud a few times.
THE WHO SELL OUT TV
Through reading TV Guide and other sources, I discovered that there was one word commonly applied to a certain type of comedy, a word that has fallen out of favor but was formerly used to entice potential viewers to watch shows like Car 54, Where Are You?, Gilligan’s Island, My Mother the Car and It’s About Time. I loved those fall preview issues best of all, because they’d have mini-treatments and plugs for all the new shows. No shit! While I am deeply offended when people refer to my kinky activities as “weird,” even I think it’s weird for a hyper-horny teenager to put satisfaction on the back burner so she can spend the day reading features on Bill Bixby, Donna Douglass and Amanda Blake. Once I spent an entire day in a library reading old TV Guides. Its most popular issue was the fall preview issue. That set of circumstances changed over time, but there is no question that during its heyday, people watched their favorite shows religiously, and the bible of the new faith was the TV Guide, available for fifteen cents a copy in 1961. Of course, American television nearly always depicted women as housewives or secretaries, Asians and Hispanics as gardeners or servants, gays did not exist and African-Americans were primarily used for comic relief until Bill Cosby co-starred in I Spy. The crude rating numbers from the era will tell you that everyone watched the latest episode of I Love Lucy, everyone took in the Miss America pageant (pointy tits and all!), everyone saw the Wizard of Oz in its annual spring rebirth, everyone tuned into the Bob Hope specials and everyone awaited the annual broadcast of the Oscars with great anticipation. The case for television as a catalyst of cultural cohesion is strengthened by the evidence that there were certain shows that everyone watched.
My father explained that a greeting like “Hey, did you catch Bonanza last night?” was the conversation-starter par excellence. Anyone could go to school or work the next day and easily find someone who had watched what you had watched, and you could have a nice little chat about the experience. Though it was famously described as “a vast wasteland” by the head of the FCC in the Kennedy administration, early television (pre-cable) was one of the last faint remnants of unity in American culture. I remember my open-mouthed reaction when my dad described a world where television only offered five or six channels, and the sixth channel was iffy depending upon how you positioned a device quaintly referred to as “rabbit ears.” Appallingly primitive as a five-and-half-channel lineup sounds today, the simple fact that your viewing choices were limited served to strengthen cultural unity.
I am especially fascinated by the cultural phenomenon of television, particularly as it developed in the United States. I haven’t talked much about the studies of cultural history I’ve made in conjunction with my studies of music history, but let’s just say that I’m an absolute glutton for relics of the past, whether it’s old baseball broadcasts of Red Barber and Mel Allen, yellowed issues of Glamour or pre-Hollywood Hitchcock. I think a lot of the attraction to the un-computerized past is that society seemed much simpler and more knowable than the complicated, fragmented mess we have today.
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