Tag: TV history

TV History 9: Surveillance Television

Gary McVey
By Gary McVey
Gary McVey Contributor
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42 COMMENTS
 

In the late 19th century, when television was first imagined and written about, no one talked about television as broadcasting at all, because the concept of one voice or image speaking to many others in remote locations didn’t exist. It wasn’t even widely understood that there would have to be a camera sending you the picture; many early sketches imagine it as an electrified super-telescope, able to randomly focus in on distant events. Even as late as 1933, Paramount Pictures produced “International House”, a zany, racy comedy about a Chinese hotel full of scheming global businessmen competing to buy “Radiovision”, a television invention that can form an image of entertaining events anywhere in the world.

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TV History 8: High Definition Television

Gary McVey
By Gary McVey
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66 COMMENTS
 

Ask any critic: We’re living in the era of Peak TV, when major cable and streaming projects have become as important and glamorous in our world as theatrical films are, sometimes even more so. Television’s been an important part of our lives for seventy years, but other than for live events, it’s always been the (relatively) family-friendly, 21 inch-wide, generally low prestige cousin of the movies. That all changed in this century, and this post will claim it’s partly due to a non-artistic advance that’s supposedly “merely” technical, as if anything is “merely” technical: The stunning quality, size, and affordability of today’s high definition home screen.

The traditional movie theater is increasingly reserved for spectacle; your living room flatscreen is now your movie screen, just as your laptop or tablet has become your kitchen table TV, and your mobile phone became your daily, carry around computer message center. Just considering sheer cultural impact, “The Sopranos”, became “The Godfather” of our era, and “Game of Thrones” has been “The Lord of the Rings” of the past decade. It’s hard to recall how recent this all is. Even a quarter century ago, you’d have to have been a Hollywood millionaire with a 35mm home theater to see a picture anywhere nearly this good in your living room. Now you only need $500, and 55 inches (diagonal) of wall space. The story of how video reached film quality, and is now approaching the limits of human eyesight, involves enterprise, decades of backdoor deals, art, science, the politics of the Sixties through the Eighties, and a high money stakes engineering fight with Japan; which we won. Here’s how it happened.

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Member Post

Gary McVey
By Gary McVey
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In August 1973, my girlfriend (and future wife!) wanted to visit some friends in Maine, so we drove up there from New York. She loved all this healthy air and the break from living in a city. Me, I was … less enthusiastic about a week or so of rural life, but damned if I […]
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Thursday Night TV History: Syndication and Reruns

Gary McVey
By Gary McVey
Gary McVey Contributor
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55 COMMENTS
 

In “Back to the Future”, one resident of Hill Valley, California in 1955 is puzzled by a word that Marty McFly uses. “What’s a rerun?”, she asks. Like much of the film, it’s a witty exaggeration. Television viewers of the mid-Fifties were just beginning to see reruns show up in morning and afternoon TV time slots.

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TV History: Christmastime and Color Television

Gary McVey
By Gary McVey
Gary McVey Contributor
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81 COMMENTS
 

When I was a kid, children’s books had holiday stories about getting in the family car and driving to Grandma’s farm. (Schoolbooks back then were usually old and worn, and the cars in the pictures had that lumpy round prewar look, so strange to “modern” kids of the Fifties). Amid the ducks and the horses and the sheep, they’d chop down a tree at dawn on Christmas morning and decorate it with candles and strings of popcorn. Then, after a big country breakfast, they’d go to church. More strange stuff: they had “ministers”, not priests, and they were addressed as “Doctor” or “Reverend”, not as “Father”. Weird place, the American countryside. We used to wonder if it really existed. Christmas was nothing like that where we lived.

This was the New York City of The Honeymooners era, of West Side Story. You see a bit of it in The Godfather. For the price of a subway token, you could visit Macy’s, Gimbels, the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store, the gigantic Lionel train layout at Madison Hardware on 23rd Street, and the big tree at Rockefeller Center, a convenient stroll from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Protestants had their own cathedral farther uptown, St. John the Divine.) New York was always a city of tiny apartments. Back then it was also a time of big families; I was the oldest of six boys. Everyone had lots of relatives nearby. Grandparents almost invariably had European accents of one kind or another (In my family, a thick Scottish burr; in my wife’s family, Yiddish). The city’s churches and synagogues were packed year round, but Easter/Passover and Christmas/Hanukkah took it to the highest level.

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TV History Thursday Night, Part 4: You’re (Not) Watching PBS

Gary McVey
By Gary McVey
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44 COMMENTS
 

That’s an article from 13 years ago, at a critical moment in the history of broadcasting. Yes, the American Cinema Foundation was hosting a big Hollywood event, a national online conversation about the future of PBS, sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Yes, the American Cinema Foundation was well known as a group of Hollywood conservatives. The irony of that title is that what keynote speaker Rob Long demanded wasn’t a seat at the PBS table at all. He wanted it ended, but in the nicest, wittiest, most reasonable way. For weeks, the “blob” of employees and administrators of PBS stations sputtered in rage. But what they didn’t do—the only thing that might have saved most of their jobs over the following decade—was to listen to us. We were polite. We were entirely polite. We said, “You’re doomed”.

Public broadcasting wasn’t always a political issue. Well, it was once only a mildly political issue. When the first college instructional stations signed on in the mid-Fifties, there was still widespread, bipartisan belief that TV could bring the very best teachers into every classroom within reach of an antenna. The US armed forces, faced with the Cold War job of instructing hundreds of thousands of recruits about the new mysteries of electronics and atomic energy, worked hand in hand with universities and the corporate world to explore the possibilities of mass teaching through television. This was true on the other side of the Iron Curtain as well.

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TV History, Episode 3: “Personal Video”, A Rare Progressive Defeat in the Arts.

Gary McVey
By Gary McVey
Gary McVey Contributor
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58 COMMENTS
 

Two weeks ago, we made a nostalgic return to the launch of America’s small market television stations. Last week, we took a look at an early form of television that could have blanketed the country twenty years before it did. This week we do an autopsy on a flashy offshoot of television that became famous, then forgotten.

You’ve spent most of or all of your life in a world where you could buy or rent a copy of a movie and see it whenever you wanted. “Let’s run ‘The Godfather’ after the kids go to bed tonight” is a privilege that only a couple of well-heeled electronics hobbyists enjoyed before roughly 1980. That’s the home video revolution you grew up with. It’s centered around pre-recorded tapes, usually Hollywood-made entertainment.

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Thursday Night TV History: TV Could Have Shaped the ’30s and ’40s

Gary McVey
By Gary McVey
Gary McVey Contributor
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57 COMMENTS
 

In last week’s premiere edition of Thursday Night TV History, we talked about the little-known, dollars-and-cents realities of how television came to smaller cities and rural areas between the coasts. Many commenters on that thread contributed their own memories of what the first generation of TV viewers thought about what they were seeing. That was the start of American television as we know it. But what about television as we don’t know it? What about the forgotten What-Ifs that could have happened differently? This week’s TV History is a couple of examples of paths not taken, or long abandoned. First of all, television might have come to the American home much earlier; fifteen to twenty years earlier, in most cases.

Here’s history as it was: A relative handful of rich or fairly well to do people had TV in their homes before World War II. (One of them was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had a set at his Hudson Valley estate.) The price of a television set had dropped since they first went on sale in 1939, but was still roughly half as much as a car. Of the roughly 5,000 U.S. sets sold by late 1941, about 2,000 were in the New York City area, more than half of them in bars or a handful of other public places like hotel lobbies, department stores, or the YMCA. The other 3,000 were split between Schenectady-Albany, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. There, too, most people’s first encounter with TV wasn’t in someone’s living room, but in a bar watching wrestling. Pictures were small—about the size of a 12- to 14-inch screen today—but clear enough to be seen halfway down the bar.

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TV History Thursday: Getting In on the Ground Floor Cheaply, 70 Years Ago

Gary McVey
By Gary McVey
Gary McVey Contributor
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152 COMMENTS
 

It’s 1948. After the war, it seemed like everyone was impatient for television to reach them, but incredible as it seems now, radio station owners had a hard time deciding whether or not going into television was worth the financial risk. There were two competing, less expensive prewar experiments ready to be big time postwar realities: FM and facsimile. FM got shafted almost immediately, when the FM frequency bands were abruptly shifted upwards, making every existing prewar FM radio in the country useless. It would take until the mid-to-late Sixties before the superior quality of FM gave it most of the music audience, by then a rock audience. AM went from being “radio,” period, to something you listened to in your car.

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