Introduction to Television: Television’s Home Invasion

In the late 1940s to 1950s, this thing called television invaded people’s homes, Alrick Brown comments. Film, on the other hand, went from this visual thing that eventually got sound. He says, “people were in their homes listening to radios and getting sound. Imagine what happened when a box came into your home, where an image was broadcast, and you could actually see pictures and people.”
Alrick thinks that television has evolved a lot. But he wants you to understand why TV was built as it tells you a lot about what television is today. At its core, TV was built to sell coffee, knives, vacuum cleaners, and whatever the American housewife needed in the 1950s. If they could just have commercials, that’s what TV would be, Alrick says.
They created television shows as sponsorships, as a part of selling these products. “And so this magical, wonderful thing that we call television, that we consume so much and shapes our understanding of the world, was created to sell products.”
Harry Winer thinks that television had a glorious introduction. Initially, it was film theater. In the 1950s, they were trying to figure out ways to capture an audience once they had this wonderful new tool.
They would take vaudeville comedians and other stand-up comedians and put them up for variety shows, Harry says. They tried to create legitimate storytelling. They would take plays that had been successful on Broadway, or that were part of the American theatrical canon, and stage them for TV.
Harry notes that this is where many directors of a previous generation to his own cut their teeth. For example, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, and a host of others went on to become wonderful filmmakers. They took that understanding of the medium and found new ways of using imagery within a very tight budget and tight time frame in order to tell stories.
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