Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What’s a TV Show?
Television was widely anticipated for a half-century before it finally appeared in the home. You see it as futuristic science fiction in films like Metropolis, Things to Come, Transatlantic Tunnel, and Modern Times. Someday it would provide to every American a front-row seat at public events, like the inauguration of a president, a horse race, or the World Series. There’d be live remote broadcasts from big city theaters, with dramas, operas, and vaudeville, as in International House, complete with pretty singers, leggy dancers, and black comedians. All of that would eventually come to pass, in one form or another. Live news events, sports, and variety are mainstays of television even today. But when we say the words “Last night I watched a TV show,” what we usually have in mind is different.
There was a blank spot in science fiction writers’ imaginations: scripted entertainment. One simple, obvious thing these tele-viewers of tomorrow never seemed to do in these futuristic visions was spend any couch time watching TV, at least in the sense that we know the term. The futurists of the 1920s didn’t anticipate that very soon we’d have a national habit of hanging out each week with the likes of the Ricardos and the Kramdens. Flash Gordon never kicked back with a cold brew to catch an episode of The Adventures of Superman. Inventing television was hard enough; inventing the kinds of programs and formats that people would want to see, week after week, took another kind of talent. In retrospect, it all happened quickly, but it didn’t happen overnight.
TV shows differ in all sorts of ways, but almost anywhere in the world even children recognize the basics (*): a fictional program, either dramatic or comic, that mostly features the same group of characters in every episode. It has catchy theme music, opening titles, and a closing list of people who worked on the show. It’s always aired at the same time of day, every week if it’s new, every weekday if it’s old. That time slot is either 30 or 60 minutes long, no more and no less.
Live television owes much to theater. But plays don’t have strict running times. You don’t go to a theater every week to see a continuation of last week’s play. Filmed television owes a lot to movies, with their camera angles, lighting, musical soundtracks, and editing. But neither theater plays nor movies are interrupted every ten minutes for announcements hawking the sale of cars or weight-loss pills. Television learned it from radio broadcasting, which invented time slots, commercials, and a continuing cast of actors. We’re all so familiar with the format that we’ve long since forgotten how artificial it is.
(* Naturally, there are always creative exceptions. There are anthology shows with different actors each week, like Kraft Suspense Theater or The Twilight Zone. There are entertainment offshoots like game shows, and oddball premises like Sing Along with Mitch, Candid Camera, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living. But I’m talking plain ol’ regular TV shows: Kojak and Sgt. Bilko, Father Knows Best, and The Shield.)
Hollywood had experience in visual storytelling, technicians, and equipment ready to go on location, warehouses full of bought-and-paid-for scripts, and access to big-name talent, if only they would play ball with the networks. But they wouldn’t, not at first. Big studios not only refused to produce new material for TV, they initially refused to sell broadcast rights to their film libraries. That’s why the schedules of local stations in my childhood were loaded with fourth-rate films from third-rate studios: because the majors wouldn’t do it.
Stepping eagerly into the gap, many smaller independent companies were formed to make film series for television, the ones the big boys wouldn’t do. Some of the most famous companies were owned by film actors, like Desilu (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball), Mark VII Productions (Jack Webb), and Four Star (David Niven, Charles Boyer, Dick Powell, and Ida Lupino).
In 1948, one of these new start-up companies, Imppro, (Independent Motion Picture Productions), signed a contract with CBS to produce 12 episodes of a detective show, The Cases of Eddie Drake, to be filmed on the west coast at a cost of $7,500 per half-hour episode, mere peanuts even by 1948 standards. By the end of the year, eight episodes were in the can, and then a mysterious interlude began. The show would have been one of the first, Hollywood-made film shows on the air, but it didn’t get there until DuMont, the runt of the network litter, bought it in 1952. Four years was an eon in early TV time. Like a fly in amber, it was by then a well-preserved fossil of a little-seen past. By ’52, there were plenty of filmed shows, and they’d started to develop a certain style.
But in ’48, they hadn’t, not quite yet. Eddie Drake doesn’t have an eye-catching animated opening with easy-to-remember theme music. It opens like a low-low-budget Hollywood feature of the late Thirties, with a stationary title card. Like a radio show, it has a framing device; each episode is supposedly a story being told by a hard-boiled detective to a psychiatrist writing a book about criminal behavior. Okay, all right, I’ll say it: “a beautiful lady psychiatrist.” Her main acting job is raising her eyebrows at descriptions of other women.
The most prolific of the non-studio TV show factories was Ziv Productions, owned by a colorful, swashbuckling independent named Frederick Ziv. If you are film savvy, you’ve probably heard of Roger Corman. He was a moneymaking producer of cheap action and horror films, but often with a sense of class, a touch of style. Fred Ziv can fairly be called the Roger Corman of early television, before the big studios changed their minds about producing TV shows.
From 1950 through 1956, he produced The Cisco Kid, one of TV’s earliest westerns, and one of the first television series anywhere in the world to be filmed in color. This was expensive, by penny-pinching Ziv standards, and the introduction of color TV was delayed for years longer than expected. But once it did arrive, in the mid-Fifties, The Cisco Kid was one of the few color programs that small local stations could afford, so it finally paid off for Ziv.
One of Ziv Productions’ biggest-ever hits, I Led 3 Lives (1953-’57), was never on prime-time network TV, but it attracted high ratings for local stations all over the country. Only five years after the primitive-looking beginnings of The Cases of Eddie Drake, I Led 3 Lives is a great example of how much and how quickly TV producers had learned about making shows that kept viewers in seats.
Each episode begins with a dramatic musical and visual flourish as the show’s stark logotype swoops onto the cover of the book the show is based on, the memoirs of Herbert Philbrick, who infiltrated the Communist party for the FBI. The narrator intones the show’s premise, reminding the audience of the basics, and says a few words about tonight’s story.
Most episodes involve the hero foiling an act of Moscow-commanded, US Communist party sabotage or espionage. There are no gadgets, no stunt work, no gunplay, just a Dragnet-style procedural about the often-dull daily work of microfilming documents, updating cipher codes, and attending Party meetings. Ziv made a virtue of necessity, using real locations long before that was fashionable. He was too cheap to build sets.
The show was crafted to build tension and suspense before every break for a commercial. When the show came back from commercials, it featured a “bumper”—a short segment of film with that distinctive I Led 3 Lives logo again, to remind you where you were and get you back in its mood. ‘Bumpers” were a small, clever idea that stuck.
At the end of the show, the actor playing Herbert Philbrick said a few words about next week’s episode and then wished us good night. Note that at that time, there was no awareness that this show might be seen any other way than once a week, in the evening. Then the dramatic musical theme plays over the closing credit roll.
Now that’s what a TV show looks like. By then, other early shows like Susie, Topper, My Little Margie, and The Millionaire were mastering the skill of “speaking in television.” Later in the Fifties, the studios caved in, and were soon competing with each other’s new television production divisions. Hollywood films stopped routinely ridiculing their small-screen cousins, as in 1957’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? This was roughly the point at which most American intellectuals decided that they despised TV. There would be exceptions; William Faulkner’s favorite show was Car 54, Where Are You?
The contents of TV writing have shifted with the culture, but the habits and conventions of TV shows have proven to be remarkably durable over the decades. Minor adjustments do get made, like minimizing the changeover point between shows so viewers won’t be tempted to change the channel. For a long time now, the unions and guilds have okayed speeded-up end credits of an outgoing show to be displayed at unreadable size in a small box within the big picture of the incoming show. Plus, the next show begins immediately, delaying its opening credits by a minute.
Today’s streaming era cuts TV loose from narrow selections constrained by broadcast or cable bandwidth, and from being anchored in specific show times. Yet despite new technology, like small high-quality cameras that can go anywhere, few attempts to alter the boundaries of what a TV show is have succeeded.
Fact is, whether we’ve ever thought about it or not, our unstated preferences make it clear that most of us don’t really want our TV shows to be too much like the real world.
We expect modern cop shows to be “dark,” “edgy,” “gritty,” exploring depths of evil. So CSI, set in one of the world’s sunniest major cities, often does its work in the stygian darkness of derelict buildings, basements, lethal meat lockers, and other places of nightmarish shadows, requiring intensely bright little flashlights.
And on the other hand, we expect comedy shows to subconsciously clue us into the fun with shiny, uniform brightness. Some of this is for technical reasons: for example, the bars even in the shows of our esteemed R> brother Rob Long, like Cheers and Sullivan and Son, can never be too real; after all, real bars adjust their 24/7 room lighting according to the “Nobody’s ugly at two a.m.” principle. Dimly lit barflies trying to hide their wedding rings just doesn’t signal “romcom” like a brightly lit, eminently presentable Sam and Diane do. Plus, there’s the issue of sound. Real bars have blaring jukeboxes and are crowded with loud people, often cheering a game on TV. Having to shout over the noise isn’t the best environment for precision joke-telling.
Audiences prefer TV shows with situations and characters that ring true to life, sure, but ones that are in an artificially heightened comedy or action bubble that seldom encounters the real world. All over the world, (and in our part of the world, for three-quarters of a century), we want shows to be original and familiar, novel and predictable. Most of the time, we’re more or less satisfied with what we see, so we snap on the TV and keep watching.
Published in General
I saw the original Avatar in the theater. I don’t remember the runtime, but I remember thinking that they could have had an intermission during which John Kerry lambasted the audience for not electing him president and giving a second term to that evil George Bush. It wouldn’t even have taken people out of the movie, because that seemed to be part of the message, anyway.
One thing about The Cases of Eddie Drake, pointed out by a Rico member lost to time: Eddie’s unique car, a three wheeled 1948 Davis. It was one of a bunch of postwar start-ups in the auto industry (Tucker is a better known example). One of the Drake producers had a small financial interest in the Davis car, which was manufactured just north of Hollywood. Aside from the three wheels, the other most unique feature was it seated four, but all on a front bench seat; there was no rear seat.
Batman was twice a week. At least in the early years. It was an interesting choice, I presume harkening back to movie serials and/or radio. Each week was essentially a one hour episode.
I can’t believe I missed the opportunity to use, “Same Bat time, same Bat channel.”
Yes, the benefactor was kinda like Bosley on the original Charlie’s Angels. Just a voice on a speaker phone… Thats kinda why I think the Benefactor could be replaced by an AI. It wouldn’t matter that the character doesnt have human form to interact with. Just email sent to a law firm to contact someone with a truckload of cash and an offer…
We now live in a society where merit isnt valued. If nothing is earned, then nothing is deserved. Why not have the Benefactor being nearly random in the selection of his largess?
I had never heard of that car. Here is an article on it from Autoweek. That four-across seating must have been for very skinny people.
After fifteen years of Depression and war rationing, people were skinny.
I already beat you to it anyway.
When TV oldtimers used to talk about the Golden Age of Television, they were talking about live, multi-camera TV in the era before videotape. There were writers who became famous for live TV scripts, like Paddy Chayevsky (who later wrote Network) and Rod Serling (you know who he is). The TV scripts tended towards the naturalistic, like Marty and Requiem for a Heavyweight.
There was a faint political tinge in nostalgia for the so-called Golden Age. Live TV usually had a more elevated cultural tone than the Westerns and private eye shows that came out of west coast movie studios. Above all, it originated in New York, subject to the daily scrutiny of Jack Gould, the TV critic of The New York Times.
Just a bit on timeslots and episode lengths… The 30/60 minute time slots, there where some detective shows in the 70s that broke these rules.
Colombo
McMillan and Wife
McCloud
These detectives series were a “Wheel Series” in that they shared the same 90 minute time slot but rotated weekly…
Could this concept work again? With the longer episode you could have more complex plots, more back story and a less demanding production schedule – as you’re only producing 1 episode every 3 or 4 weeks instead of weekly…
Didn’t that run under a title like “NBC (?) Mystery Movie”?
Banacek
Amy Prentiss
Heck Ramsey – is that right? THe one with Richard Boone?
The Name of the Game had a similar format. Universal TV dreamed it up. It had one advantage: weaker shows could be dropped out of the “wheel”, and stronger ones could merit their own series.
The disadvantage of the format was, if you didn’t care for one of the participating shows, you dropped out of the habit of tuning in.
It’s not that other lengths haven’t been used: Playhouse 90 has it right in the show’s name. But it was rare.
It had the day of the week where you have the question mark. Moved around different nights over the years, I think about six of them. Not sure if it was NBC or ABC.
There was also quite a bit of “culture”—Bernstein, ballet, Shakespeare, symphonies, etc. It’s quite a contrast to today.
One of my favorite directors, Arthur Penn, was doing TV work, and I think Sidney Lumet was around too. I have vague recollections of Playhouse 90 being on in the house, and something sponsored by Kraft. Too bad it went over my head at the time.
When TV went on the air overseas, the stations and networks had the same problem we did–too much time to fill. They solved it the same way, programming lots of old American shows. (Dubbed into their own language, of course). European and other producers resented it. They called it “dumping”; the shows had been paid for and become profitable in the US, so they were relatively cheap to rent, and they had fancy sets, props and costumes that few foreign outlets could match.
When travelling I was often amazed at what was popular. I wasn’t surprised that German audiences liked Star Trek, but I was more surprised that Perry Mason was still popular, nearly 30 years after it went off the air here. And I was really surprised to see Hogan’s Heroes dubbed into German.
Baywatch was the single most popular show in Britain for years.
Also The Saint.
American television was, initially, a full-on clone of its radio cousin. Networks sold blocks of time and the advertising agencies filled them. Some were direct transfers: The Kraft Music Hall with Perry Como, The Voice of Firestone, and others were new such as The Chevy Showroom and Ford Television Theater.
The quiz show scandals helped bring that to an end as Congress demanded that the networks have more control over the content of the things they broadcast. The last holdout of this format was The Hallmark Hall of Fame. It aired on all three legacy networks at one time or another and the last to sell them time was CBS. Now Hallmark, of course, runs its own television networks.
As for the Batman question, yes, it ran on both Tuesdays and Thursdays on ABC. That network was always scuffling in the ratings. The standard joke was that all Lyndon Johnson had to do was put the Vietnam War on ABC and it would be over in 13 weeks.
To air a hit show on multiple nights had worked for before, most notably with the soapy drama Peyton Place. It worked so well they tried 3 nights a week over the summer of 1965. That was too much and ratings slipped. They had quite a cast, though. Dorothy Malone and Ed Nelson starred with newcomers Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow in supporting roles.
“Germans Love David Hasselhoff!”
The Saint did run on NBC but not as part of the Mystery wheel. It was an ITV production and ran its first two seasons as a syndicated show in the States. After NBC ran it successfully as a summer replacement they picked up the final two years and paid ITV to film in “colour.”
Because there was no commercial pressure on the UK networks, the BBC and ITV didn’t start broadcasting in color until November of 1969. BBC2, built from scratch, went on the air in color in 1967.
Which may also be why the last US series purportedly telecast in Black and White was on PBS: Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.
Now having seen photos of the Davis Car… Suddenly I get Gray Davis…
I’m not a big tv watcher, but you always make me interested. Great piece!
European TV had all sorts of different line standards after the war. The British were on 405 lines; the Germans and most of the others, 441; the French had an incredible 819, true high definition but only in black and white. They all agreed to standardize new channels on a standard of 625 lines, but split on how to encode the color signal. Most went with the German standard, PAL; the Communist countries agreed to use the new French system, SECAM. As a result, east Germans and west Germans could watch each other’s TV shows, though only in black and white.
Many thanks, Dotorimuk!
First TV show I remember watching was Treasury Men in Action. It was pretty good.
South Park and Seinfeld also did it
Wanda the Weather Bunny!
@hoyacon
Thanks, Gary! This time I’ve been gone because I’ve been in bed with pneumonia for over a month. Here is my nebulizer that they gave me to breathe into:
Sorry to hear it! You deserved a better month than that!