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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
In honor of RightAngles’ being in this TV history thread, a picture of another brainy young lady–
We just had Albert the Alley Cat
https://www.fox6now.com/news/people-were-fascinated-with-a-sock-puppet-where-is-he-whats-he-up-to-in-search-of-albert-the-alley-cat
“The National Association of Television Program Executives picked the pair as the top weather team in the country in 1968. ”
IIRC, WBAP in Fort Worth and WFAA were the first stations in the country to highlight their weather forecasts. With graphic devices no more exciting than a chalkboard, they made it a competitive selling point of their news. Part of the reason why they had such good information was the local presence of American Airlines and its nationwide teletype network with weather reports from all over the US.
I’m glad you guys (and a gal!) liked your weather hosts. In New York, probably our best known weather man was Tex Antoine, who doodled cartoons while he spoke, sketching in an umbrella or an overcoat. He’d been on the air since 1949. He was funny and popular, but gradually the ol’ demon bottle began to get the better of him.
Rumors that he was a nasty drunk off the air began to seep into public consciousness. He slipped up a few times on the air. Finally, in 1975, clearly bombed, he slurred his way through a rape joke, and they canned him. Yeah, call it cancel culture…but Tex had run out his string of luck and practically begged to be cancelled.
Antoine was succeeded by Storm Field.
One never-quite-made-it oddity of late Forties and early Fifties TV history is theater television. It was expected to be a much bigger deal than it turned out to be. In our lifetimes, it’s only been a minor novelty, used for occasional things like the prizefights of the pre-pay-per-view era. Inner city theaters sometimes used theater TV for special events like Louis Farrakhan speeches. This started to fade once nearly everyone had cable, and really faded once the internet took over many specialized video uses.
The video projection equipment was expensive and not something movie theaters normally had installed. Nowadays, it’s somewhat different, because the “movie” projectors are digital, so they can show live events just as easily as they can show a feature film. It’s still rarely used, for things like live opera.
But in 1948-51, it was imagined that some kind of new entertainment form might come out of the combination. People were in the habit of going to the movies then. Why not do extra-special live events to keep them in the theater-going habit?
I can see ‘live events’ being shown at theaters making a comeback. Not so much for sporting events – ESPN has that locked down, and most sports fans are too set in drinking beers and eating pizza in their own homes during the game…
I can see concerts breaking into this space… Going to a concert is ridiculously expensive. Joan Jett was recently touring with Motley Crew , I looked at going to an event in Edmonton, ticket prices ranged from just over $400 to just under $1500… If this concert was also seen on a few thousand movie screens and millions of people could see the concert – instead of the 20 000 or so at the arena… Then prices could drop without lowering the revenue to the band.
Also for Broadway… Most Broadway theaters are fairly small – under 2000 seats. But if they could put the hottest plays into movie theaters as well. They could really boost the finances of the play. Most Americans could never afford to see a Broadway play – never mind the cost of travel, hotels, etc – but the ticket prices are also astronomical.
Monty Python did this for their final performance a few years back. And Fathom Events has some shows. I go to the live Rifftrax ones.
This isn’t quite the same thing, but I’ve also noticed that theaters quite frequently have special screenings of classic or obscure films. In the old days, screening an old movie required renting physical film reels (usually a beat-up 16mm print), which I imagine was rarely worth doing for a limited engagement. So generally such movies were shown only at dedicated art-house theaters. (Back in the ’80s I spent many hours at the Nickelodeon in Columbia, S.C., watching classic films like Casablanca and foreign films like Fitzcarraldo. Often there was no other way to see such films.)
I have no inside knowledge, but I imagine nowadays it’s as simple as paying for a rental and downloading the files. So it’s relatively trivial to rent out one of the screens in a multiplex and put on a showing of the latest Japanese anime or Bollywood hit, or a Christmas showing of It’s A Wonderful Life on the big screen.
The real issue is whether or not the owner of the content has it in appropriate digital form. It costs money to digitize film, and money to package it up to send it to a theater. It is not as simple as just downloading it if the owner wants to protect it, you need a digital cinema package and a key to go with it. There are digital print fees, which finance the ongoing digitization and upgrade of theaters, which add costs.
I would say it is much easier to rent a theater and do a screening (a four-wall deal), but the whole process is not trivial.
Longtime R> moderator and great R> participant Skipsul lives near Columbus, Ohio IIRC, and the local art house turned itself into a part-time rental facility to accommodate special one-time screenings. As Clavius says, you can do this with a normal movie theater, but many theaters, which are generally not owned locally, don’t have one-stop shopping for this service. So Provo calls the regional office in Ogden to get permission for the rental, Ogden sends the request to the head office in Denver, and the legal department reviews the request. The theater might require a temporary, one-use liability insurance policy. Most businesses can obtain such a rider without too much difficulty and minimum expense, but few private individuals are likely to want to bother.
My wife worked for the Samuel Goldwyn company, so when our son turned 4 we rented a Goldwyn-owned screen for a Saturday morning show on his birthday. We paid a nominal $1 for the privilege.
Since the setting of this post is (roughly) 1948-’56, it helps to see the prospect of theater TV as it was, only a few years after WWII ended. Only a few thousand sets were left over from before the war, and wartime materials rationing was still in effect until the end of 1946, so it was tough to make new sets until then. In other words, TV was essentially still a blank slate.
So picture postwar America with limited use of black and white TV, which wouldn’t be networked together coast to coast until the mid-Fifties. Remember also that even TV’s biggest proponents thought it would take until 1955 or thereabouts for TV to equal radio in popularity (in real life, it only took until 1951). Theater TV would have been in color right from the start. Since it wasn’t carried on public airwaves, it could have much higher definition; it didn’t matter that it would be incompatible with home TV. Picture the things that baby boomers saw as TV specials, everything from Mary Martin in Peter Pan to the New York Philharmonic to Saturday Night Live, as theater-only entertainment. It could have worked if it had gotten off the ground quicker.
An interesting book, albeit now a dated one, is Kevin Murphy’s “A Year at the Movies,” in which he sets out to see at least one movie every day for an entire year. He sees movies in all settings — from giant multiplexes to tiny theaters set up in the backrooms of bars. And he sees all kinds of movies. But it’s less about the movies themselves than it is about the theater-going experience.
Certainly something’s changing or has changed or its change has been accelerated by the Year of Stupidity (aka Lockdowns), but I’m not sure the solutions I’m seeing in the local theaters is really the right solution. (That is, putting in seats that are more like living room recliners, adding food service, etc.) But then, I don’t know what the solution is.
I have a dream of someday running a sort of revival theater, but I doubt there’s much money in it. But that’s not to say there couldn’t be. If you do it right. The question is, what do people really want to experience when they go to the theater. Giving them “the same things they can get at home” (e.g., living room recliners) doesn’t seem the right answer, because people will opt for home.
“Miss Thomas, a mathematical genius for a girl…”
😂😂😂
Theater-televised prizefights used to advertise, “No Home TV”. (BTW, the fighters always wore trunks that contrasted strongly, because the dim. milky picture didn’t always make it clear who was hitting whom.)
What if Dave Chappelle did six live theatrical specials a year this way, with an all-notorious cast (Louis CK, Aziz Ansari, a surprise guest “cameo” from JK Rowling) and called it “The Cancelled Show–Absolutely, positively, no home TV!”
Movies have usually been a bit pricy but it seems just ridiculous now. I took my wife and daughter to one movie last year. It was a matinee and I think it was around $50 for tickets and some popcorn and drinks. Don’t know what an evening show would have cost. The Year of Stupidity caused both second-run theaters in town to close. Not sure what a solution is, but increasing my disposable income would help.
Don’t you just sneak in your own snacks like I do?
When my daughter was three, she explained to me why she carried snacks to the movies. “Mommy doesn’t like to buy the movie popcorn”. Then she held up her hand, with five tiny fingers. “It costs five moneys”.
(I haven’t read ahead, so this may have been addressed already). Unfortunately there are a lot of licensing issues that come into play. Yo know how all your DVDs say “Licensed only for private home use” or words to that effect? Renting a theater, even for a private party, doesn’t count as private home use.
During the later stages of covid, the local movie theaters were doing a lot of “rent a theater for a private screening”, but you couldn’t just bring in your own media – you had to choose from a preselected list of movies they had gotten the rights to show.
I go to the movies so infrequently I’m out of practice. Did learn that from my dad. We went to Wargames and he snuck in a huge bag of popcorn he popped at home. I remember the night because I was young and got embarrassed when a character said, “piss on a sparkplug”.
I guess I chose my words poorly. I am well aware of the fact that the film must be legally available and that there are licensing issues involved. I simply meant that the mechanics are far simpler, just as they are for those of us renting movies to watch at home. (I sometimes marvel when I remember how inconvenient it used to be to rent a movie. You had to actually put shoes on and go somewhere.)
And that I can agree with.
I go to the movies so infrequently it’s part of the experience. It’s like going to Disneyland or something – I expect to get gouged, and I plan accordingly.
Also if I made popcorn at home either it or me wouldn’t make it to the theater.
Yes, I find that home pop corn doesnt have a shelf life – it has to be eaten while its still warm or it degrades rapidly.
I don’t know if it degrades or not because it doesn’t make it that long.
The best reality show ever created was the UFC’s “The Ultimate Fighter.” You had some of the same conflicts and yelling, though most of the fighters were better-adjusted than most reality show people. What made it great was at the end of almost every show, two of them would get in the Octagon and beat the tar out of each other. That was the missing ingredient from reality T.V.
That’s the opposite of what they did in the ’90s when Comedy Central asked them to create some hour-long episodes (the show was two-hours long.) They chopped episodes in half, and then had “Jack Perkins” (played in a delightfully deranged manner by Mike Nelson) introduce each hour. It was scheduled it as The Mystery Science Theater Hour. That worked pretty well.
And we settled on NTSC: Never Twice the Same Color.
Charlie was the voice on the phone, and Bosley his representative to the Angels. But that’s sometimes hard to remember when you only ever see Bosley.
I can’t believe that made it that long without someone noticing. Well done!