"The History of Television" continues to continue

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.