The 1950s has justifiably been called The Golden Age of Television. With the end of World War II, the economy had recovered and stabilized, and television had become so popular that magazines regularly featured articles on home decorating with the TV set as the centerpiece. The dining room table had been replaced by frozen dinners on a TV tray, and TV Guide, launched in 1953, was on the coffee table. TV producers and writers freely took their programming ideas from radio and traditional theater. TV news, for example, consisted of the anchor simply reading the newspaper and wire reports into camera, with none of the visuals we expect in today’s news broadcasts. CBS and NBC created legendary television with innovative anthology programming.
As programming boundaries expanded, television shows and the creative minds behind them grew bolder. Brilliant young comedic minds like Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar wrote witty and irreverent material, and used TV’s technology to produce special effects that played with the material at hand. Television was moving away from simply adapting traditional radio formats to new and innovative programming concepts. Continue reading Television’s Golden Age
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