Golden Age of Television

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 7th of May 1947, a drama anthology called Kraft Television Theatre aired its first episode, and with it, a new era in American culture quietly began. Nobody called it the Golden Age yet. The sets were cramped, the cameras were few, and every mistake went out live to whoever happened to be watching. But something was happening in those studios that would never quite happen again.

  This is the story of a window in time roughly bounded by 1947 on one end and 1960 on the other. It was an era defined by live production, highbrow ambition, and a medium still young enough to experiment. A period when Leonard Bernstein made his first television appearances, when the first opera composed for television premiered, when a wrestling villain with a flair for the theatrical may have done as much to sell television sets as any comedian on the air. The questions this documentary will chase are simple: what made this moment singular, why did it end, and what exactly was lost when it did?

• 2. The Live Studio Challenge

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  Before Ampex's Quadruplex videotape system arrived in 1957, every dramatic broadcast was either live or filmed, and live meant no safety net whatsoever. A 90-minute drama might require a dozen sets and at least as many cameras. Major set changes had to happen during commercials. There were no second takes.

  The performing casts and crews worked with the knowledge that as many as 10 million people were watching at that moment. Any stumble, any missed line, any malfunctioning prop was seen in real time by the entire viewing audience. That pressure shaped the culture of the era. The urgency was baked into every performance.

  Even after videotape became available, editing it required a razor blade. The practical difficulty meant retakes remained rare. Shows were shot live to tape, preserving the feel of live television while allowing reruns. Networks initially used the new tape technology more for daytime soap operas than for prime time drama. In prime time, the share of filmed episodes grew from around 20 percent in 1951 to roughly 80 percent by the 1961-62 season, a shift that changed everything about how television felt.

• 3. High Culture on the Dial

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  Arturo Toscanini appeared on American television during the Golden Age. So did Leonard Bernstein, making his first small-screen appearance on the program Omnibus. Carnegie Hall was telecast live. The first live American telecasts of Shakespeare plays were broadcast during this period. Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker received their first television performances. Gian Carlo Menotti composed Amahl and the Night Visitors specifically for television, the first opera created for the medium.

  The networks employed art critics, Aline Saarinen and Brian O'Doherty among them, a practice that would quietly disappear by the digital era. CBS's John Leonard was regarded as the last of significant standing. The diversity of Omnibus, which debuted on the 9th of November 1952 and won 65 awards before its final broadcast on the 16th of April 1961, stood as a landmark of what the new medium could attempt.

  Teleplays by Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, Rod Serling, Gore Vidal, Horton Foote, and Tad Mosel generated genuine critical excitement, with audiences and critics alike anticipating each new work. Rose's Twelve Angry Men and Chayefsky's Marty were later adapted for film and went on to wide acclaim. The first screen adaptation of a James Bond story was a 1954 teleplay, a production of "Casino Royale", broadcast years before any Bond film existed.

  The last surviving thread of this highbrow programming was Camera Three, CBS's Sunday morning arts anthology. It launched nationwide distribution in 1956 and ran on CBS until 1979, when CBS News Sunday Morning absorbed its time slot.

• 4. Gorgeous George and the Masses

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  On the 11th of November 1947, Gorgeous George Wagner made his first television appearance. Entertainment Weekly would later name that broadcast among the top 100 televised acts of the 20th century. Wagner arrived at a moment when networks were hunting for cheap, effective programming to fill time slots.

  Professional wrestling, with its theatrical conflict and outsized personalities, delivered exactly what those time slots needed. Wagner's character in particular drew on melodrama and spectacle in a way no other performer was doing. His histrionics and theatrical behaviour turned him into a figure of genuine national celebrity, reportedly at the same level as Lucille Ball and Bob Hope. Bob Hope personally donated hundreds of robes for Wagner's famous wardrobe.

  The source notes he was probably responsible for selling as many television receivers as Milton Berle. In doing so, Gorgeous George did something neither the highbrow anthologies nor the quiz shows could claim: he demonstrated that television could reach millions of ordinary homes and hold them there. His success signalled that the medium's future would be decided not in New York studio control rooms but by ordinary viewers in living rooms across the country.

• 5. Comedy, Westerns, and Journalism

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  Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, and Groucho Marx all had their own comedy programmes during this era. Groucho Marx starred in the quiz show You Bet Your Life. The variety format attracted musical performers as well; Dinah Shore, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Lawrence Welk all hosted weekly musical variety shows.

  Westerns became a genuine television staple. The format's run on television began on the 24th of June 1949 with the Hopalong Cassidy show, initially assembled from 66 films made by William Boyd. Series such as Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, and Wagon Train followed and became classics in their own right.

  Journalism found its footing during the same years. Edward R. Murrow's See It Now, which launched in 1951, and his Person to Person programme helped establish what serious television news could be. NBC's Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, and CBS's Walter Cronkite were central figures; Cronkite became the first journalist described as an "anchor". The Today show, hosted by Dave Garroway on NBC, established the morning news format that still exists. In 1953, Cronkite hosted You Are There, which staged "live" interviews with historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, all played by actors, re-enacting events including the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence.

  I Love Lucy drew on Lucille Ball's late 1940s radio show, My Favorite Husband, for many of its scripts. To produce the show at film quality, Ball and Desi Arnaz hired cinematographer Karl Freund and shot on 35mm film with a multi-camera setup designed to accommodate a live studio audience. The cost of that approach meant the show could not be filmed in color, despite Ball and Arnaz's original hope.

• 6. The End of an Era

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  Sylvester "Pat" Weaver was fired in 1956 after his strategy of scheduling highbrow "spectacular" productions once a month on NBC failed to compete in the ratings against more conventional programming on CBS. The quiz show scandals of 1958 struck a further blow. The Peabody Award committee, issuing its award to The Steve Allen Show that year, stated that television was conspicuously lacking genuine humor and frank experiments. A writers' strike followed in March 1960. The final episode of Playhouse 90, the prestige drama series that had debuted in October 1956, aired in May 1960. Director John Frankenheimer also departed during this period.

  James Aubrey, who led CBS from 1960 to 1965, presided over the network's shift toward lighter fare. A colleague from his ABC days described him as having "a smell for the blue-collar". Aubrey introduced shows such as Mister Ed, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Petticoat Junction. He later admitted that when the network tried to continue purposeful drama, it found that audiences preferred to tune in to Lucy instead.

  In November 1960, Weaver wrote in The Denver Post that television had gone from around a dozen formats down to just two: news shows and Hollywood stories. He placed the blame squarely on the management of NBC, CBS, and ABC. The 1960-61 season was described by Time magazine as the worst television season to that point. Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, used his speech "Television and the Public Interest" to denounce the networks for creating a "vast wasteland".

  Producer David Susskind, in a 1960s roundtable with leading Golden Age dramatists, defined the era as running from 1938 to 1954. The Television Industry: A Historical Dictionary placed its start at the Kraft Television Theatre premiere on the 7th of May 1947 and its end at Playhouse 90's final live show in 1957. By any boundary, what remained of the Golden Age's ambitions retreated to public television, where, as the source notes, older audiences with more money were tolerated.

• 7. Beyond America

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  Canada's Golden Age followed a timeline similar to the United States but ran roughly five years behind, due to the country's more dispersed population. CBC Television launched in 1952, and CTV, the oldest commercial network in Canada, followed in 1962. Most Golden Age programming in Canada was imported from the United States until Can-Con requirements took effect around 1970.

  Actor Lorne Greene, then a CBC news anchor, ran a prestigious training academy for broadcast talent from 1945 to 1952, directly across from the CBC studios. The school was never profitable. Greene refused to expand enrollment enough to make it financially viable, fearing that doing so would compromise its standards. The 1956 CBC teleplay Flight into Danger launched the career of Arthur Hailey, who later wrote the novel Airport; both the teleplay and the novel were adapted for film, and both were eventually spoofed in the film Airplane.

  Nigeria's Western Nigeria Television Service became Africa's first television station, beginning operations in October 1959. Nigeria's television sector grew rapidly; by the mid-1980s, every Nigerian state had its own broadcasting station. A requirement of at least 60 percent local programming content drove local production, including a successful 1987 television adaptation of Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart. D.O. Fagunwa's 1949 novel Igbo Olodumare was also adapted as a television series; the broadcast reportedly left streets deserted in southwestern states during its Sunday evening airings.

  In the Soviet Union, the Golden Age is associated with the Khrushchev Thaw, from the mid-1950s through the end of the 1960s. During its peak years between 1951 and 1954, the Central Television Studio broadcast between three and six plays per week. The Thaw ended with the crackdown following the Prague Spring. Sergey Lapin, installed as chairman of state broadcasting in 1970, increased political oversight and banned critical programming. Most programs except the evening news were recorded and censored in advance. In 2001, Gazprom took ownership of the private channel NTV. The satirical show Puppets, which mocked politicians and celebrities, was terminated in 2002 following pressure from the Kremlin, and in January 2002 the independent channel TV-6 was shut down as well.