Yet more insight into "The History of Television"

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.