Results tagged “The History of Television: A Magnum Opus” from The Mayor of Television

Oddly enough, PBS still has not gotten in touch with me.

It has been several days now since Your Mayor first unveiled the fount of wisdom that is his prospective tome The History of Television: A History of Television, and still no word has come from PBS, which is creating a documentary miniseries on the same topic. I have long pondered why this might be, and came upon an egregious oversight in my overview of Television's celebrated past, one that I now hasten to rectify:

Supplemental Chapter: PBS: Television's Savior

On Monday, October 5, 1970, viewers across America were seized with an otherworldly delight when they turned on their televisions and discovered that a bold, innovative new broadcasting service had emerged to entertain and edify them: PBS, or the Partially Boring System.

PBS was a content provider like no other: Eschewing insipid comedies and plebian melodramas, it instead offered fascinating historical documentaries, jaw-droppingly incisive inquiries into the world of science, exquisite performances of balletic and orchestral genius of unsurpassable brilliance and sumptuously arid adaptations of British literary masterpieces - everything that Joesph Q. Sixpack, his lovely wife Janice and their two kids, Josh and Britney, hungered to ingest after a long, soul-drenching day laboring at the factory, tidying up around the house and memorizing nonlinear partial differential equations, respectively.

And because, unlike the other broadcast networks, which were beholden to income from commercial advertisers, PBS accepted no money from anyone, except "donor viewers" who phoned in offers of money if PBS would halt the practice of "pledge drives" as well as "corporate underwriters" who reached consumers via on-air messages that, despite all appearances, weren't commercials. This meant that, free of money that could taint the integrity of its content, PBS didn't have enough funds to expend on popular stars or eye-pleasing production values known to appeal to viewers.

PBS has been on the cutting-edge of children's programming, as well, with one of its crown jewels being the long-running series "Sesame Street," a powerful inner-city drama about the denizens of a welfare community unhealthily obsessed with consonants and vowels, conjunctions and prepositions, metaphors and STD's. Some of the beloved characters on "Sesame Street" were "Muppets," first seen on TV grousing about unfair stereotypes leveled against them in a popular series of auto-insurance commercials.

Unlike many other characters in children's programming exploited by opportunistic producers, the "Muppets," in keeping with PBS's doctrine of noncommerciality, were not exploited via sales of plush toys, books, musical recordings or board games.

Another favorite "Muppet"-like character looming large on PBS's landscape was "Ken Burns," a genial historian who related stirring, 15-hour-long tales of Americana employing nothing but banjo music, tintype photographs and voice-over narration inspired by "written correspondence," a form of 19th-century communication similar to today's text-messaging, only employing complete sentences, correctly spelled words and coherent thoughts.

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (speaking over banjo music from "The Civil War"): "The story of Ken Burns is the story of America. Here's this hardscrabble kid escaping from the mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, who put down his switchblade and his snub-nose .22 to pull himself up by his bootstraps at a prestigious school, then eventually won three Emmys, two Oscar nominations and even delivered a commencement address at Georgetown University! What Ken Burns had to tell his countrymen goes to the very heart of what it means to be a well-compensated white man who has complete editorial control over his product in this nation."

In 2007, PBS announced plans for an ambitious, multi-part documentary series on "The History of Television," to be aired in 2009. This project promised to be the finest, most exhilarating and likely most important production in the history of the service, if - and only if - its editorial board manages to locate the most insightful and galvanizing talking-head experts to provide context, heft and critical acumen to Television's complex and celebrated narrative history. America can only hope and pray that PBS finds the wherewithal to select the appropriate memoirists capable of bringing Television's glorious narrative to vivid, evanescent life.

This is the eighth and final installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, but let's face it: The Mayor of Television is just phoning it in at this point, despondent that he hasn't heard from PBS to be on its documentary. It would've been nice if you had joined us from the beginning, but we're glad you joined us nonetheless, and if you're from PBS, throw us a bone, already, huh?

Chapter Eight: TV in the Naughts - and Nowhere Beyond, Because We'll All Soon Be Dead

Television entered the 21st century with a sense of dread, thanks to an innovative, multi-platform, long-running dramedy entitled "The Never-Ending War on Terror," a series uneven in tone and one for which even viewers eventually grew weary, though they found they could do nothing to have the show cancelled. It starred George W. Bush as "A President of the United States" and featured a supporting cast of winsomely bungling Cabinet members and White House staffers whose repeated insistences before Congress of "I don't recall" were intentionally designed to self-referentially recall Sgt. Schultz's comical replies in the '60s series "Hogan's Heroes" of "I know nothink!" (See Chapter Three).

Viewers throughout the country were confused as to why neither the networks nor Democrats in Washington could cancel Bush's TV series for all the execrable excesses, while the brain-dead houseguests on CBS's "Big Brother" were capable of banishing on a weekly basis someone who just kinda hacked them off.

"The Never-Ending War on Terror" inspired a number of more palatable spin-offs, such as Fox's "24," ABC's short-lived "Homeland Security," CBS's "The Unit" and "Jericho," Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," MTV2's "Wonder Showzen" and Funny Or Die's "The Landlord."

This last program pointed to a trend disquieting to those who worked in Television: A substantial number of TV viewers began to get their TV sustenance from the Internets from a variety of gadgets ranging from computers to, well, other computers to, uh, the iPod, which was actually just a very tiny computer. Viewers who once could sit still through an eight-part miniseries on slavery in America were now valiantly struggling to focus their ADD-addled minds on a two minute "LonelyGirl15" episode. America couldn't get enough of things that were short and didn't require much thought! Such was the boon to society that "multi-tasking" viewers were now able to watch TV at work, where in the past all they could do was play Spider Solitaire.

With online content expanding exponentially to the point of causing computer screens to burst (forcing yet another recall of Dell laptops), broadcast and even cable television was on the verge of irrelevance. Some pundits argued that the medium had rendered itself irrelevant by not focusing on broader, more important issues in favor of context-free soundbites and celebrity-gossip bullet points, but these pundits were soon drowned out by yet more context-free soundbites and celebrity-gossip bullet points. Meanwhile, interest in the Internets escalated at a dizzying pace, thanks to its diverse offerings ranging from photos of cats in sinks to photos of cats with Hitler mustaches to LOL cats.

In response, Television responded by updating its own technology, developing 72-inch flatscreen plasma TVs and "high-definition" TVs, which were considered a boon to the industry - not the TV industry, per se, but to the makeup industry: People who looked just fine and even kind of hot on regular TV now had to trowel on pancake makeup by the bucket in order to conceal their wrinkles and bad complexions and overly large pores to the point that they recalled Frank Langella's turn as Skeletor in the movie "Masters of the Universe."

Those touting the new Television technologies pointed out the clarity of their images and movie-theater-like quality of their sound systems. Champions of iPods and online content responded that they preferred the mobility and interactivity offered by their technology, so portable 72-inch flatscreen TVs were rushed into production, including the HDTVPhone, which was quickly withdrawn from the market for further tinkering when a number of early adapters threw out their backs answering phone calls.

Another unanticipated result of the burgeoning micro-technology was the horrific TV Critic Uprising of 2007, in which television critics demanded why they had to cover films on the Internets in addition to their tradition 200+ cable outlets, while their paper's movie critics remained content reviewing three or four movies per week. An uneasy truce was reached - TV critics would cover YouTube, while movie critics would handle the iFilm beat - while Television itself attempted to make nice with online programming by offering it on television itself via shows such as The CW's transformative "Online Nation." But it remained a rocky relationship, given that each episode of "Online Nation" began with the host, Alistair Cooke, declaring, "Here's what you could be watching if you weren't watching TV!"

Hence, the question arises: Where will Television lead us in the future? Or, will it be content to merely follow society's trends? Or, might it simply just get out of the way?

As those questions linger in the air, one's mind drifts back to words written by St. Augustine, all the way back in AD 397, in his "Confessions:"

"I hear Television singing, the varied carols I hear;
"Those of edgy cops -- 'You have the right to remain silent,' as they bust the perp's chops;
"The loutish family man singing fondly of his exasperated spouse, as he stumbles and stumbles again, yet his family loves;
"The comical office drone singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, but not as he works, for work he does not;
"The dedicated man of medicine singing in jargon OK'd by technical advisors as he scrubs for the O.R. -- the pitchman in paean to his ointments and autos, his beers and burgers;
"The delicious singing of the whimsical single mother -- or of the talk-show hostess singing self-empowerment -- or of the reality star dishing and dissing her peers -- each singing what matters to her, and to none else;
"The infotainment host's song of blockbusters and fallen starlets -- the cartoon rabbit's ode to carrots and beleaguered hunters poor of aim;
"The news anchor's, about scandal in the morning, or scandal at the noon intermission, or scandal at sundown;
"The late-night wit's song, a wry inversion of the day's events;
"Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs. It is all part of Television, glorious Television; it feeds us, it fills our hearts with rapture, and since there are test patterns no more, it simply will not stop."

Indeed, Television's legacy is so vast that it will prove enduring far beyond our lifetimes. Of course, we'll be dead, so we won't really be able to appreciate it, so one would think it scarcely matters.

This is the seventh and most controversial installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, in which the Mayor of Television ramps up his efforts to be salacious in order to get PBS documentarians to pay attention to him. It began here a long time ago but if you read it all, you'll be worthy of a position as an "expert" in the PBS miniseries, as well.

Chapter Seven: The Terrorists Win: Reality TV

Historians generally place the War on Terror as beginning on Feb. 26, 1993, with the initial (failed) bombing of the World Trade Center, or on Oct. 12, 2000, the date of the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.

In fact, it actually began in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was empowered and MTV premiered "The Real World," the inspiration (if not, actually, the progenitor) for a subsequently noxious genre dubbed "reality TV," the anti-America movement writ large within the realms of American TV itself, a radical-fundamentalist movement to dispirit the hearts and minds of Americans by depicting prototypical young Americans as rampantly vapid, self-involved, distillery-quaffing, opposite-sex-exploiting individuals anxious for vulgar self-promotion and disinterested in the good of the nation.

The fact that initial installments proved so successful in appalling right-thinking Americans only invigorated the insurgents, who further beleaguered the country's can-do spirit with further attention-grabbing explications of stultifying, self-abnegating portraits of socially abject behavior.

Soon thereafter, all networks, incapable of stopping themselves, took to airing their cynical incarnations of "reality TV" - CBS's "Survivor," "Big Brother," "Rock Star" and "Armed and Famous;" NBC's "Fear Factor," "The Biggest Loser" and "The Singing Bee;" Fox's "The Swan," "Temptation Island," "Who's Your Daddy," "Mr. Personality," "Joe Millionaire" and "Nanny 911;" ABC's "Wife Swap," "Extreme Makeover," "Welcome to the Neighborhood," "The Bachelor: Singapore" and "Fat March;" The WB's "The Surreal Life" and "Big Man on Campus;" The CW's "America's Next Top Model," "The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll" and "One Tree Hill;" MTV's "Laguna Hills," "Date My Mom," "My Sweet Sixteen" and "The Hills;" A&E's "Intervention" and "Gene Simmons' Family Jewels;" Bravo's "Being Bobby Brown," "Blow Out," "Workout," "Flipping Out" and "Making Out;" Fox Reality's "My Bare Lady" and "Sexy Cam" - each terrifying viewers to an increasingly amplified degree with craven depictions of the most caustically and soul-atrophying superficial behavior in which human beings can aspire.

But even the most diabolical of reality-TV producers were taken aback when VH1 debuted "The Flavor of Love," which featured a crazy street person with a large clock around his neck in lieu of jewelry training women with Down Syndrome in the art of scraping their teeth on concrete. Stunned at the humanity devastated in this project, insurgent producers agreed to meet with viewers' representatives at The Hague for a series of peace talks, and a hasty arrangement was made that reality television would adhere to the Geneva Convention, that such human degradation would never again be permitted, unless, of course, Howard Stern was involved.

Immediately Spike TV halted development of a show, "Masturbating Maniacs." Though the network's official explanation was that their tissue budget was stretched beyond the breaking point, officials privately crowed that The Hague Reality-TV Conference had claimed its first victory. Its second came when A&E quietly removed "Vatican Hookers" from its development slate.

For a genre that purportedly was not scripted, its product was stultifyingly formulaic. An initial episode would invariably begin with a number of participants confiding to a cameraman that they were going to win whatever carrot was placed on the stick before them because they had the moxie and the attitude and the talent and the will to win. Then, to a host of war whoops and guttural shrieks, the participants would meet the program's host, who always had shiny hair (or a shiny bald pate), extremely white teeth and a manner far too urgent for the show's subject matter, who would warn the participants that what they were about to do was extremely difficult and in some cases illegal, but one lucky person would emerge with a good story to tell at a bar when they were in their 50s. Then, as the participants embarked upon their mission, they would invariably complain to the cameraman that this was much harder than they ever imagined and was stretching them to their limits and then they'd weep a solitary tear. Then they'd vehemently bicker with the other participants, and all was well.

A sub-genre emerged: The celeb-reality show, in which someone with whom viewers were vaguely familiar explained that they had a fantastic and kooky life but even if they didn't, the mere fact that they were famous should be enough for viewers to want to watch what amounted to home movies of them shopping and pretending to be nice to ordinary civilians. At some point, the celebrity would visit a psychic, and feign dismay at whatever gibberish the psychic would spout at them.

In each of these programs, a clear message rung out: "Hey, people are stupid."

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (speaking over the strands of the Pussycat Dolls' "Don't Cha"): "Reality TV was the deal-breaker, the life-changer, the thing that transformed everyone, from the most talentless dimwit from the Midwest to the most talentless dillweed from Beverly Hills with a powerful Daddy. Anyone could be a star, anyone, even Rod Stewart's @sshole son, who had neither any discernible ability nor a celebrity parent of significant note who could otherwise call in enough favors to project him into infamy. It was a democratization of television, and viewers soon discovered that they really didn't mind TV's oligarchy after all."

Coming soon: The bitter end.

This is the sixth installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's delightfully educational series that'd serve smashingly as the inspiration for a multipart PBS documentary series. You won't want to miss a verbose word, so start at the beginning and good luck getting back to this point.

Chapter Six: Nothing is Ever the Same Again

(This section - whether on the TV documentary or in the coffee-table book of same - should be accompanied with all manner of computer-generated graphics and swirls and impressive sound effects, since the cable era was nothing if not about cool graphics and sound effects and not so much about content: "Swoooosh! America is over-impressed by 'SportsCenter'-style hyperbole!")

The overriding theory behind cable television was pure genius distilled to one simple thought: These idiots like their TV so much? Let's figure out a way to make them pay for it!

Some date the birth of cable to Dec. 6, 1957, when, on live TV, the United States was boldly propelled into the era of space-age communications when a Vanguard rocket containing America's first satellite exploded two seconds after ignition. (Not a fact you particularly need to know, nor even a terribly germane one, but one that is true and intended to remind us of the seemingly forgotten notion that this is in fact a history lesson.)

Fifteen years later, in 1972, HBO was launched on a cable system in Wilkes-Barre PA using microwave transmission. (Another true fact, though hardly a funny one.) In the intervening years, HBO has emerged as the industry leader in quality television content, so much so that the network rather snobbishly advertises itself: "It's not television. It's HBO."

HBO has created some of the most creatively ground-breaking series TV has ever seen, such as "Sex and the City," "The Larry Sanders Show," "The Wire," "Deadwood," "G-String Divas," "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "The Sopranos," the first TV series in the history of Television to never end. On the other hand, more recent HBO offerings - "Lucky Louie," "The Comeback," "Rome," "John From Cincinnati" - have either eluded or alienated audiences to the point that all the other networks have created a new ad campaign: "It's not HBO. It's television."

But HBO is a premium cable channel, which means you have to pay even more to receive it in your home. There are only a handful of premium cable channels, but scores upon scores of basic cable channels, with the number still growing, each vying for an ever-limited number of viewers. In fact, it is estimated that by the year 2027, there will be one cable network for every 14 "bloggers" in America, and three "bloggers" for every American.

Basic cable channels call attention to themselves by "narrow-casting" and "branding," opposed to the networks' strategies of "broadcasting" and "hoping for the best." Through "branding," cable channels allied themselves with their "target demographic" and, more importantly, made everyone else feel unhip and out of it and undesirable and past their prime. In other words, the declared aim of the coolest cable networks was to wrest viewers from the mollycoddling they receive from self-help gurus and force them to examine the failed, unfulfilled lives they had, inadvertently or otherwise, created for themselves.

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (speaking over "Swooshing" sound effects and an assortment of music-bites from sundry cable outfits): "Because they do not answer to the FCC, or Federal Censorship Commission for the layman, a government agency created to roll back First Amendment freedom-of-speech protections in order to ensure that devoutly religious parents not hear on broadcast TV the sort of language their progeny employs with their schoolmates, cable channels are able to truck in more sophisticated themes. For example, due to their extremely mature content, the last three years of the Clinton Administration could only be covered on cable."

Here's how some of the more high-profile cable networks established firmly entrenched persona that preserved for them lucratively tiny niches in national discussions emanating from the ever-frantically-spinning top that is the Zeitgeist (or, at least, the folks at Entertainment Weekly who decided that liking everything in popular culture would make them look like they had a clue as to what was going on):

* MTV: Became one of cable's most influential and innovative channels almost immediately, based on the heretofore shocking revelation that a certain kind of viewer just really likes to watch sexy women undulating in a promiscuous fashion.

* VH1: Established itself as the cool place for people who weren't quite cool enough for MTV, becoming so successful at it that eventually VH1 viewers discovered they were no longer cool enough to watch VH1.

* Lifetime: Initially attempted to appeal to women comfortable with the notion of women-as-victims, which, it turned out, was a notion with which a disquieting number of women were comfortable.

* Spike: Boldly targeted 14-year-old boys, a demographic almost no one (except every Hollywood movie studio, videogame manufacturer and lad mag) had dared to target.

* Food Network: Went after two ends of a spectrum - the morbidly obese and the morbidly anorexic - because everyone in the middle didn't have all that much interest in merely looking at food on their TV screens.

* FX: Via edgy programming with just a smidgen less nudity and profanity, lured all those viewers a little too cheap to subscribe to HBO.

* A&E: Eradicated "arts" and "entertainment" - which was what its acronym initially stood for - from its schedule when it discovered many viewers had no taste for either, just lurid reality programming.

* TLC: Similarly, truncated its name to an acronym when its original name - The Learning Channel - proved to be a turnoff to its core audience.

* QVC: Focused on viewers who, when extremely inebriated late at night, lost all sense of equilibrium, taste and restraint and would buy anything put before them.

* USA and TNT: Developed shows that, in the heyday of the broadcast networks, easily would've been greenlit and emerged as respectable successes, but now, given the disarray endemic at said broadcast networks, would've been considered perhaps a little too foursquare to air, forgetting that a whole lot of people are perfectly happy with foursquare entertainment, as long as it delivers the goods, narrative- and character-development-wise.

* TV Land: Aimed at people too confused by the current cable universe and current TV programming and our current society in general, and just want to remember life as it was back when it made sense to them.

This further aided cable programmers in wresting viewers from the broadcast networks, and by the year 2005, only 8% of television viewers were even cognizant of the fact that NBC still existed. By 2003, the average viewer was more likely to tune into a cable program than a broadcast network offering - Animal Planet's least popular production had a more loyal fan base than any ABC sitcom - and the average broadcast-network viewer was more likely to have hip-replacement surgery than an original thought.

By the way, additional off-network original scripted programming has long been produced in syndication - "syndication" coming from the original Greek σύνδικος (syndikos), meaning, "not good enough even for basic cable."

Coming soon: Dark (if influential) clouds on the horizon.

This is the fifth installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's increasingly desperate audition for PBS casting agents looking to populate a new series about "experts" on "Television." It began here quite a while back and none of this will make sense unless you read all of it (actually, none of this will make sense even if you do read all of it).

Chapter Five: It's Just One Damn Golden Age After Another

Emerging from the spiritual, political and sociological morass of the 1970s, Ronald Reagan declared the '80s "Mourning in America," and indeed it was, with TV programs such as "Dukes of Hazzard," "T.J. Hooker," "ALF," "Misfits of Science" and "Manimal."

But the '80s also ushered in yet another "Golden Age of Television" with fare such as "St. Elsewhere," "Hill Street Blues," "Cheers," "The Cosby Show," "The Simpsons," "Roseanne" and "Newhart," an age that continued well into the '90s with acclaimed series like "Seinfeld," "Friends," "NYPD Blue," "Northern Exposure," "The X-Files," "Frasier," "L.A. Law," "Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Practice," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Everybody Loves Raymond," "Pinky & the Brain," "M.A.N.T.I.S.," "Homeboys in Outer Space and "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer."

New networks such as Fox were created to handle the overflow of excellent series, while newer networks like The WB and UPN were created to handle the crap programming. (In 2006, when producers grew weary of creating lousy programming, The WB and UPN were forced to consolidate their holdings into one network, The CW, short for "Crap Warehouse.")

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with Huey Lewis and the News' "Hip to Be Square," segueing into Nirvana's "Rape Me," playing in the background): "I defy anyone to find a period with such sustained excellence in the history of television. You could tune in anytime on the primetime dial and find absolute brilliance. This was a time when even Roseanne was funny, for heaven's sake!

"What had happened was, in the early '80s, the network executives had been called on the carpet by the Bilderberg Group, that secret cartel of global leaders who surreptitiously run the planet. They were brought blindfolded to Sandefjord, Norway, and essentially told, 'Look. The traditional methods of distracting Americans with shiny pictures and sloppy scripting will not stand. Your American viewers are getting far too clever for that sort of thing. If they aren't provided more sophisticated entertainment, they'll abandon you in droves. And if they abandon you in droves, they just might start paying attention to the world around them. And if they do that, they might discover our secret plan to rule the world, and we simply cannot have that.'

"Well. This was a wakeup call for the networks - well, more specifically, it was a threat, but let's just call it a wake-up call - and just the thing to inspire them to create such delightful fare as 'Cheers' and other shows that encouraged alcoholism."

But all that didn't really matter so much, because TV was in the midst of eating its young: Cable Television had arrived, and nothing would ever be the same again. Bear in mind that things very rarely stay the same, so that's not quite the portentous declaration it's supposed to serve as. But, honest: Nothing would ever be the same again.

Coming soon: Nothing is ever the same again.

This is the fourth installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's pandering attempt to get his own PBS show. You should start here unless you're one of those people who read the last chapter of the latest Harry Potter book first.

Chapter Four: A Nation Doesn't Chuckle So Much: The '70s

In the 1970s, America was a country cut spiritually adrift, and Television reflected the dissolution of the nation's morale. The ground-breaking series "M*A*S*H" mirrored America's disaffection with the Vietnam War, "Starsky & Hutch" and "SWAT" offered eviscerating, cynically critical portrayals of police officers violently unhinged to the point of lawlessness and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" grimly portrayed the plight of the single woman, battered by injustices in the workplace and the inability to land a decent husband and forced to become a lovable flibbertigibbet.

And Richard Nixon returned to television, albeit in a new program far darker than his '50s series. "All in the Presidency," produced by the innovative icon of the era Norman Lear, was a corrosive comedy starring Nixon now as the utterly corrupt leader of the Free World.

Gone from this series were such softening touches as the lovable pooch checkers; in their stead were such sinister characters as Henry Kissinger, whose war crimes would forever go unpunished, and Chuck Colson, who transformed his life of White House criminality into one of Old Testament brimstone and hellfire. Lighter comic relief came in the form of Nixon's Vice Presidents, the apoplectically inept Spiro Agnew and the genially klutzy Gerald Ford.

Eventually, Nixon and Lear butted heads over "creative differences" involving the direction of his character, and Nixon resigned from the program, only to win an Oscar for portraying himself in a cinematic spin-off, the intentionally similarly titled "All the President's Men." Lear went on to create myriad African-American themed sitcoms that appealed to tens of millions of viewers, a strategy reconfigured recently by the UPN network (now known as The CW) to draw ones of millions of viewers.

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" playing in background): "Norman Lear understood America. Which is not to say that he understood Wyoming - hell, who understands Wyoming? - or that no one else at the time understood America. I mean, when you come right down to it, America's pretty easy to understand. Except Wyoming, and, well, of course, Idaho - what the hell's up with Idaho? But Norman Lear was the only guy working in TV who understood America. Let's face it, everyone else working in TV in the '70s were f@%&ing drug-addled morons."

Due to such hard-hitting shows as Lear's, plus disquieting dramas as "Supertrain," a cautionary tale of the evils of mass transit (underwritten by the auto industry) and "Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell," a cautionary tale of the evils of egotists lacking the skill set to propel a TV variety show (later remade as "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip'), the '70s were also known as "The Golden Age of Television."

Coming soon: Yet another frickin' influential Golden Age.

This is the third installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's effort to insinuate himself into a sprawling PBS documentary on the subject. To start at the beginning, go here and work your way up. It just might be worth it.

Chapter Three: A Nation Continues to Chuckle: The '60s

Television in the 1960s saw a number of innovations, such as the addition of color to the medium. Although the first publicly announced experimental TV broadcast of a program using the NTSC "compatible color" system was an episode of NBC's "Kukla, Fran and Ollie on August 30, 1953, the excitement was tamped down considerably by the fact that the puppets were black, white and grey.

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" playing in background): "I remember seeing my first color TV as if it were a galvanizing, epochal moment in our history's culture. I remember it that way, but in retrospect that might be a little bit of overkill. What I most distinctly recall that was before color TV, if you were watching a science-fiction show, someone would have to say, 'Hey! Look over there at that green-skinned alien!' And then after color TV, you could just tell that the alien had green skin. But that goes right to the heart of the medium's aesthetic edict of 'Show, don't tell,' so all in all, color TV has been a good thing."

Not until the 1966-67 season were all three networks airing all of its primetime programming in color, and not until 1972 did sales of color TVs outpace those for black-and-whites, and then, only because Sears had a big sale. Otherwise, well, we guess there weren't that many other innovations in the '60s.

TV sitcoms, outside of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (about a beloved character, "Dick Van Dyke," who was petrified of sleeping in the same bed as his wife) and "The Andy Griffith Show" (about a beloved character, "Andy Griffith," who was tailor-made to reflect the big-hearted, nonjudgmental attitudes of the rural South), remained formulaic and in need of "laugh tracks" to point out where the jokes were supposed to be. One groundbreaking comedy, a remake of the '50s series "Dragnet," eschewed the laugh track in favor of hyperstylized performances and hyperbolic moralizing and became a long-running favorite amongst those in the then-burgeoning drug culture.

Other comedies trucked in a new form of humor known at the time as "irony." "Batman," based upon a real-life figure from the '30s who explored the nuances of his complicated sexual identity by engaging in physical altercations with others in costumes as colorful and garish as his own, was popular with audiences until it was revealed that the series had been developed by Pope Paul VI at Vatican II. "Hogan's Heroes," a rollicking farce set at a World War II Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, featured a lovable Nazi sergeant whose repeated chorus of "I know nothink!" is often cited as network TV's first lame catch phrase, and therefore exceedingly influential to future generations of TV gag writers. In fact, the series star, Bob Crane, was bludgeoned to death in 1978 by a TV scriptwriter of great subtlety exasperated by his inability to concoct the sort of comic gold found in such catch phrases as "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger" or "Heeyyyyy!" or "Dy-No-Mite!"

"Batman," it should be said, was intentionally ironic, while we're only guessing that "Hogan's Heroes" was, because otherwise, there's no frickin' excuse for it ever getting on the air.

Coming soon: Things take a grim, if influential, turn.

This is the second installment of The History of Television: A History of Television (scroll down one entry for the introduction and first chapter). Enjoy and, above all, be edified.

Chapter Two: A Nation Chuckles: The '50s

By the 1950s, the Television Revolution was underway, with a startling array of diverse programming created to mollify the masses and take their minds off the repression and paranoia of the era. Some of the biggest stars were Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo, a dizzy wife and her long-suffering husband; George Burns and Gracie Allen, a long-suffering husband and his dizzy wife; Jack Benny and Rochester, a long-suffering skinflint and his equally long-suffering manservant; and Milton Berle, who dressed up in women's clothing so that he could play both long-suffering husband and dizzy housewife and thereby save money on hiring an actress.

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with "I Love Lucy's" theme music in background): "Lucy was ahead of her time. She could do it all - she could do physical comedy, she was a supreme verbal wit and, when push came to shove, she could file a legal action faster than nobody's business."

Other shows that delighted viewers in the decade were "The Ernie Kovacs Show," which expanded Television's visual palate, "Dragnet," which expanded acting's emotional palate, and "Gunsmoke," which as the longest-running series in American TV history expanded CBS's financial palate.

Then there was "Vice President Knows Best," a light-hearted family "situation comedy" starring Richard Nixon as a beleaguered patriarch beset by Congressional investigations into ethical lapses, his wife Pat and her "Republican cloth coat" (which became as much a character on the show as Fonzie's leather jacket would two decades later on "Happy Days"), daughter Julie, AKA Kitten, whose indefatigable high jinks included marrying the President's son, and beloved family pooch Checkers, whose colorful array of reaction shots (most involving burying his head beneath his paws in anthropomorphological dismay) anytime Richard would say something xenophobic or anti-Semitic would invariably send audiences into paroxysms of laughter.

The '50s became known as "The Golden Age of Television," mainly among those who wallow in a warm nostalgic bath of their own halcyon days. But then, so did practically every other frickin' decade.

Coming soon: Color Television (which we hear was very influential).

PBS is working on an ambitious multipart documentary series on the history of television, whose working title is, inspiredly enough, "The History of Television." It's scheduled to air in spring of 2009, when virtually no one will be able to see it because they'll still have analog TVs rather than the new-fangled digital ones that will be the only ones working then.

Still, those who have upgraded will no doubt be treated to a series rich in incident and context and insight. "Television is a medium in transition and there is no better time to step back and appreciate where it has been and where it is going," Steve Mosko, chairman of the TV Academy Foundation which will co-produce the series with PBS, said. "This is a milestone for our Foundation, a milestone that may well, given what the euphemism 'a medium in transition' means, signal the final nail in Television's coffin."

In a bald effort to get myself hired as a "talking head/expert" for this upcoming documentary miniseries - or, at least, to land a gig as ghostwriter for the inevitable coffee-table-book autobiography of Mr. Television - Your Mayor has thoughtfully undertaken the massive challenge of writing the first draft for both, in a magnum opus we like to call:

The History of Television: A History of Television

Chapter One: Origins and Afterbirth of a New Medium

In the 1920s, Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin separately developed versions of all-electronic transmitting tubes. Farnsworth based his "television" on a tiny screen that came from a 1980s movie theater that chopped up its single screen into a series of much smaller, virtually unworkable ones that he found inside a time machine developed in 2006 that landed on his doorstep in 1924, alongside a note that read, "Is this possible?"

Not sure how to read the note, Farnsworth took up the challenge and his invention opened up a new world of possibilities for the "TeeVee Camera," which had been developed in 1514 by Leonardo da Vinci but abandoned and nearly consigned to the scrapheap of history due to its having, at the time of its conception, no practical applications.

In London, 1926, John Logie Baird presented the world's first television images: A ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed "Stooky Bill" making wan quips about the day's events ("Stooky Bill" would later rename himself "Jay Leno"). Only 29 people saw this first "broadcast," six of those via bootlegged cable. Critics were instantly divided on the presentation: While the Evening Standard declared, "I have seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen" (a prophetic statement, though one whose meaning eluded citizens at the time), Daily Variety groused, "Wooden perf makes this a less-than-boffo preme; expect so-so jingle at the coffers."

NBC made its first public television broadcast on April 30, 1939, presenting the opening of the 1927 New York World's Fair on tape delay (a practice it would later perfect in its Olympic coverage). By the end of the year, its programming was received by an estimated 2,000 sets, though some 650 of those sets, again, were receiving the signal via bootlegged cable.

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with plaintive passage from Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" playing in background): "It was a miracle, those first TVs. Things were moving around; you could hear something akin to noise. It was just like real life, only tiny and muffled and in black and white. Kind of like my first marriage."

World War II proved an absolute boon to those not aware of the nascent television industry, as production of new TVs and other broadcasting equipment for civilian purposes was suspended from April 1942 to August 1945 by decree of President Franklin Roosevelt who, in declaring "The only thing we have to fear is death itself," banned images of soldiers returning home in flag-draped coffins. (This gambit was revisited during the War in Iraq in the 2000s by President George W. Bush, who, not up to the task of quelling the proliferation of televisions nor capable of banning soldiers' deaths, made cameras and legitimate TV reporters illegal.)

Nonetheless, Television was on its way, and only an over-proliferation of programming choices, a burgeoning public wariness in a monopolized ownership of the medium being consigned to a precious few corporate ideologies and a radical new technology that offered both a greater democratization in communications and the specter of ubiquitous piracy of content could threaten its robust financial future. Like that was ever gonna happen.

Coming soon: Chapter 2, on the '50s, which we understand were very influential.