Television in the Antenna Age: A Concise History

Television in the Antenna Age is an accessible, engaging, and straightforward overview of the medium s history and development in the United States. Integrating three major concerns television as technology, industry, and art the book introduces the complex, fascinating, and often overlooked story of television and its impact on American life. It ends with a provocative meditation on the effect since the 1980s of competing technologies, the consolidation of media ownership, and the emerging aesthetics of twenty–first–century programming.

Written by the two prominent experts on American television, this book includes several illustrative features on leading figures in TV s development. It is the most compact and authoritative history of the medium to date.

Preface.

1 No Small Potatoes.

Communication and Transportation: The Divorce / Water, Water Everywhere / Electrical Bananas / Here Comes The Judge / Say What?.

2 A Downstream Medium.

The Show Business / Radical Consumerism Occupies the Middle / Networking / Quality Control.

3 A Burning Bush.

Broadcasting: Love It or Need It? / A Vertical System of Culture / Compatible Software.

4 Staging and Screening.

Sets / Getting with the Program / The Origins of ABC.

5 Corruption and Plateau.

Scandals and Shake–outs.

6 Dull as Paint and Just as Colorful.

TV Rules / Just Plain Folks / Television Gothic.

7 A Myth is as Good as a Smile.

When No News Was Good News in Prime Time / Shows Without Trees / As Real As it Got / Regulation and Social Effects / Programming and the Television Industry.

8 Oligopoly Lost and Found.

The Train and The Station / The Shock of The News / The Third Mask of Janus

David Marc is a writer and editor who teaches at Syracuse University and Le Moyne College. He is the author of Demographic Vistas (1984; 1996), Comic Visions (1989; Blackwell, 1997) and Bonfire of the Humanities (1995).

Robert J. Thompson is a Professor at Syracuse University, where he heads the Center for the Study of Popular Television at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. His books include Adventures on Prime Time (1990) and Television s Second Golden Age (1996).

One could hardly ask for a more entertaining introduction to the history of entertainment media and its role in contemporary culture. Stephen O Leary, Annenberg School for Communication, USC