Golden Age of Television
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
began sometime in the late 1940s and extended to the late 1950s or early 1960s.
Evolutions of drama on television
The early days of television was a time when many hour-long anthology drama series received critical acclaim.As filmed series, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Alfred Hitchcock Presents is an American television anthology series hosted by Alfred Hitchcock. The series featured dramas, thrillers, and mysteries. By the premiere of the show on October 2, 1955, Hitchcock had been directing films for over three decades...
and The Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series)
The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series created by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. The series consisted of unrelated episodes depicting paranormal, futuristic, dystopian, or simply disturbing events; each show typically featured a surprising...
, began to dominate during the mid-1950s and early 1960s, the period of live TV dramas was viewed as the Golden Age. Although producer David Susskind
David Susskind
David Susskind was a producer of TV, movies, and stage plays and also a pioneer TV talk show host.-Personal:...
, in a 1960s roundtable discussion with leading 1950s TV dramatists, defined TV's Golden Age as 1938 to 1954, the final shows of Playhouse 90 in 1961 and the departure of leading director John Frankenheimer
John Frankenheimer
John Michael Frankenheimer was an American film and television director known for social dramas and action/suspense films...
brought the era to an end.
As a new medium, television introduced many innovative programming concepts, and prime time
Prime time
Prime time or primetime is the block of broadcast programming during the middle of the evening for television programing.The term prime time is often defined in terms of a fixed time period—for example, from 19:00 to 22:00 or 20:00 to 23:00 Prime time or primetime is the block of broadcast...
television drama showcased both original and classic productions, including the first telecasts of Walt Disney
Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...
's programs, as well as the first telecasts of Mary Martin
Mary Martin
Mary Virginia Martin was an American actress and singer. She originated many roles over her career including Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and Maria in The Sound of Music. She was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1989...
in Peter Pan
Peter Pan (1954 musical)
Peter Pan is a musical adaptation of J. M. Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan and Barrie's own novelization of it, Peter and Wendy. The music is mostly by Mark "Moose" Charlap, with additional music by Jule Styne, and most of the lyrics were written by Carolyn Leigh, with additional lyrics by Betty...
, MGM's classic The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)
The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was directed primarily by Victor Fleming. Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf received credit for the screenplay, but there were uncredited contributions by others. The lyrics for the songs...
and Rodgers and Hammerstein
Rodgers and Hammerstein
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were a well-known American songwriting duo, usually referred to as Rodgers and Hammerstein. They created a string of popular Broadway musicals in the 1940s and 1950s during what is considered the golden age of the medium...
's Cinderella
Cinderella (TV)
Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella is a musical written for television, with music by Richard Rodgers and a book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It is based upon the fairy tale Cinderella, particularly the French version Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de Vair, by Charles Perrault...
. Critics and viewers looked forward to new teleplays by Paddy Chayefsky
Paddy Chayefsky
Sidney Aaron "Paddy" Chayefsky , was an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay....
, Horton Foote
Horton Foote
Albert Horton Foote, Jr. was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his notable live television dramas during the Golden Age of Television...
, Tad Mosel
Tad Mosel
Tad Mosel was an American playwright and one of the leading dramatists of hour-long teleplay genre for live television during the 1950s. He received the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play All the Way Home....
, Reginald Rose
Reginald Rose
Reginald Rose was an American film and television writer most widely known for his work in the early years of television drama. Rose's work is marked by its treatment of controversial social and political issues...
, Rod Serling
Rod Serling
Rodman Edward "Rod" Serling was an American screenwriter, novelist, television producer, and narrator best known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his science fiction anthology TV series, The Twilight Zone. Serling was active in politics, both on and off the screen and helped form...
, Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
and others.
Most of these programs were produced as installments of live
Live television
Live television refers to a television production broadcast in real-time, as events happen, in the present. From the early days of television until about 1958, live television was used heavily, except for filmed shows such as I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke. Video tape did not exist until 1957...
dramatic anthologies, such as The Philco Television Playhouse
The Philco Television Playhouse
The Philco Television Playhouse, a live television anthology series sponsored by Philco, was telecast from 1948 to 1955. Produced by Fred Coe, the NBC series was seen on Sundays from 9:00pm to 10:00pm...
, Kraft Television Theatre
Kraft Television Theatre
Kraft Television Theatre is an American drama/anthology television series that began May 7, 1947 on NBC, airing at 7:30pm on Wednesday evenings until December of that year. In January 1948, it moved to 9pm on Wednesdays, continuing in that timeslot until 1958. Initially produced by the J...
and Playhouse 90
Playhouse 90
Playhouse 90 is an American television anthology series that was telecast on CBS from 1956 to 1960 for a total of 133 episodes. It originated from CBS Television City in Los Angeles, California...
. Live, abridged versions of plays like Cyrano de Bergerac
Cyrano de Bergerac (play)
Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play bears very scant resemblance to his life....
, with members of the cast of the 1946 Broadway revival recreating their roles, were regularly shown during this period, Shakespeare play, when he made his TV debut at the age of 69 in a one-hour Macbeth
Macbeth
The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...
.
Limitations of early television
TV stations did not broadcast 24 hours per day, as has been customary in North America since the 1990s—technical limitations in the design of TV transmitters at the time forced broadcasters to use a 12-hour to 18-hour-per-day broadcast schedule.Response to television's popularity
TelevisionTelevision
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
did not quite play the role in people's lives in the 1950s that it does now. However, by about 1958, it had become the dominant form of home entertainment, depleting audiences in movie theaters. It was the fear of this that drove movie studios to begin using widescreen
Widescreen
Widescreen images are a variety of aspect ratios used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than the standard 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio provided by 35mm film....
processes in 1952, an effort to lure audiences back with technical innovations they could not see at home.
Cultural milestones
High culture dominated commercial network television programming in the 1950s and 1960s with the first television appearances of Leonard BernsteinLeonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...
and Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory...
, the first telecasts from Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
took place during this era, the first live American telecasts of plays by Shakespeare, the first telecasts of Tchaikovsky's ballets The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker
The Nutcracker
The Nutcracker is a two-act ballet, originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto is adapted from E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King". It was given its première at the Mariinsky Theatre in St...
and the first opera specially composed for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors
Amahl and the Night Visitors
Amahl and the Night Visitors is an opera in one act by Gian Carlo Menotti with an original English libretto by the composer. It was commissioned by NBC and first performed by the NBC Opera Theatre on December 24, 1951, in New York City at NBC studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, where it was broadcast...
. The Bell Telephone Hour
The Bell Telephone Hour
The Bell Telephone Hour is a long-run concert series which began April 29, 1940 on NBC Radio and was heard on NBC until June 30, 1958. Sponsored by Bell Telephone, it showcased the best in classical and Broadway music, reaching eight to nine million listeners each week. It continued on television...
, an NBC radio program, began its TV run, featuring both classical and Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
performers. All of these were broadcast on NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
, CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
and ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
, something that would be unheard of today. Commercial networks now concentrate on more popular items. The networks then had their own art critics, notably Aline Saarinen and Brian O'Doherty.
Radio
Many programs of this era evolved from successful radio shows that brought polished concepts, casts and writing staffs to TV. This is one reason why quality was so consistently high during this period. Even an original show like I Love LucyI Love Lucy
I Love Lucy is an American television sitcom starring Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, and William Frawley. The black-and-white series originally ran from October 15, 1951, to May 6, 1957, on the Columbia Broadcasting System...
drew heavily from radio, since many of those scripts were rewrites from Lucille Ball's late-1940s radio show My Favorite Husband
My Favorite Husband
My Favorite Husband is the name of an American radio program and network television series. The original radio show, co-starring Lucille Ball, was the initial basis for what evolved into the groundbreaking TV sitcom I Love Lucy. The series was based on the novel Mr. and Mrs...
. Shows like Our Miss Brooks
Our Miss Brooks
Our Miss Brooks is an American situation comedy starring Eve Arden as a sardonic high school English teacher. It began as a radio show broadcast on CBS from 1948 to 1957. When the show was adapted to television , it became one of the medium's earliest hits...
, The Burns and Allen Show
Burns and Allen
Burns and Allen, an American comedy duo consisting of George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, worked together as a comedy team in vaudeville, films, radio and television and achieved great success over four decades.-Vaudeville:...
and The Jack Benny Show
Jack Benny
Jack Benny was an American comedian, vaudevillian, and actor for radio, television, and film...
ran concurrently on both radio and TV until television reception reached beyond the major metropolitan areas in the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s, about 90% of American households had a television set. At that point sitcoms and dramas dropped out of radio and became wholly the domain of television, as did Westerns like The Lone Ranger
The Lone Ranger
The Lone Ranger is a fictional masked Texas Ranger who, with his Native American companion Tonto, fights injustice in the American Old West. The character has become an enduring icon of American culture....
and Gunsmoke
Gunsmoke
Gunsmoke is an American radio and television Western drama series created by director Norman MacDonnell and writer John Meston. The stories take place in and around Dodge City, Kansas, during the settlement of the American West....
. At the same time, shows such as Playhouse 90 ended their run.
United Kingdom
- BritishUnited KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
television had a head startHead start (positioning)In positioning, a head start is a start in advance of the starting position of others in competition, or simply toward the finish line or desired outcome...
on American TV, with the BBC TelevisionBBC TelevisionBBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation, which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927, has produced television programmes from its own studios since 1932, although the start of its regular service of television...
Service beginning regular broadcasts in 1936, however these ceased in 1939 (as did the production of television receivers) — resuming in 1946 after World War IIWorld War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. - The golden age of British TV enjoyed its peak around the same time as in the United States, ranging from approximately 1949 to 1955 — although the term has been used to describe the period right through until the 1970s.
- Writers such as Nigel KnealeNigel KnealeNigel Kneale was a British screenwriter from the Isle of Man. Active in television, film, radio drama and prose fiction, he wrote professionally for over fifty years, was a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and was twice nominated for the British Film Award for Best Screenplay...
and producers like Rudolph CartierRudolph CartierRudolph Cartier was an Austrian television director, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer who worked predominantly in British television, exclusively for the BBC...
produced classic programming such as The Quatermass ExperimentThe Quatermass ExperimentThe Quatermass Experiment is a British science-fiction serial broadcast by BBC Television in the summer of 1953 and re-staged by BBC Four in 2005. Set in the near future against the background of a British space programme, it tells the story of the first manned flight into space, overseen by...
and Mystery Story (of which no recording exists). - Other notable programs include serials by the producer Francis DurbridgeFrancis DurbridgeFrancis Henry Durbridge was an English playwright and author. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School in Yorkshire where he was encouraged to write by his English teacher. He continued to do so whilst studying English at Birmingham University...
and classic children's programs such as Muffin the MuleMuffin the MuleMuffin the Mule is a puppet character in British television programmes for children. The original programmes featuring the character were presented by Annette Mills, sister of John Mills, & aunt to Hayley Mills, and broadcast live by the BBC from their studios at Alexandra Palace from 1946 to 1952...
and Andy PandyAndy PandyAndy Pandy is a British children's television series that premiered on BBC TV in June or July 1950. The original series of programmes was shown until 1970, when a new series was made. A third series was made in 2002...
.
Canada
- Canada's Golden Age of Television timeline is very similar to the US's, but there is an overall 5 year delay because of the constraints of economic and physical geography.
South Africa
- South AfricaSouth AfricaThe Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
was one of the last nations in the world to have TV; the apartheid government resisted TV broadcasting until the mid-1970s, with experimental broadcasts only beginning in 1975 and nationwide service starting in January 1976. - The development of TV in South Africa can at least be considered in NZ or Australian context -- although the social and political constraints limit the length of the 'Golden Era' in this nation.
Further Reading
- Averson, Richard (1971). Electronic Drama: Television Plays of the Sixties. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. ISBN ISBN 0807061786
- Bergmann, Ted; with Skutch, Ira (2002). The DuMont Television Network: What Happened? Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-4270-X
- Brooks, Tim; with Marsh, Earle (1981). The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows: 1946-Present. New York: Ballentine. ISBN 0345295889
- Gianakos, Larry James (1992) Television Drama Series Programming A Comprehensive Chronicle, 1984-1986. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0810826011
- Gitlin, Todd (1994). Inside Prime Time. London: Routledge ISBN 0415085004
- Hawes, William (2002). The American Television Drama: The Experimental Years. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN 0786411325
- Herskowitz, Mickey (1990). The Golden Age of Pro Football. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company. ISBN 0-87833-751-2
- Hess, Gary Newton (1979). An Historical Study of the DuMont Television Network. New York: Ayer Publishers. ISBN 0-405-11758-2
- Kindem, Gorham (1994). The Live Television Generation of Hollywood Film Directors: Interviews with Seven Directors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN 089950986X
- MacDonald, J. Fred (1994). One Nation Under Television: The Rise and Decline of Network TV. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. ISBN 0830413626
- McNeil, Alex (1996). Total Television: The Comprehensive Guide to Programming from 1948 to the Present. New York: Penguin. ISBN 0140249168
- Minor, Worthington; with Schaffner, Franklin (1985). Worthington Minor. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0810817578
- Newcomb, Horace (2007). Television: The Critical View. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195301168
- Patton, Phil (1984). Razzle-Dazzle: The Curious Marriage of Television and Professional Football. Garden City, NY: The Dial Press. ISBN 0-385-27879-9
- Powers, Ron (1984). Supertube: The Rise of Television Sports. New York: Coward-McCann. ISBN 0-698-11253-9
- Rader, Benjamin G. (1984). In its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0-02-925700-X
- Skutch, Ira (1989) I Remember Television: A Memoir. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0810822717
- Stemple, Tom (1992). Storytellers to the Nation: A History of American Television Writing. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0826405622
- Sturcken, Frank (1990). Live Television: The Golden Age of 1946-1958 in New York. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN 0899505236
- Wicking, Christopher; with Vahimagi, Tise (1999). The American Vein: Directors and Directions in Television. New York: Dutton ISBN 0525054200
- Wilk, Max (1999). The Golden Age of Television: Notes From the Survivors. Chicago: Silver Spring Press. ISBN 0916562492