1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
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4 Television Dramas and Variety Shows
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On September 23, 1961, NBC introduced its new series, "Saturday Night at the Movies," featuring Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in "How to Marry a Millionaire." This broadcast was an astounding success and pointed to Hollywood's growing inclination to release its post-1948 movies to television. Seven more series representing all three networks and every night of the week appeared over the next five years. The culmination of this trend was an ABC Sunday telecast of "The Bridge on the River Kwai" in September 1966. "An estimated 60 million viewers in 25 million homes sat down to watch one movie" for which ABC had "paid Columbia Pictures $2,000,000." Even at the price, the American Broadcasting Network was understandably delighted, as the television viewing public clamored to consume big-budget, star-studded, color extravaganzas from Hollywood in the privacy of well over 95 percent of the homes in the United States.
The only drawbacks, of course, were that these feature pictures were still over four years old on the average; and more critically, Hollywood's supply was quickly being depleted by prime-time TV. Consequently, ABC's video stage was appropriately set for the successful nurturing of the American made-for-TV movie.
The precise birth date of the telefilm is arguable, although only a handful of contenders exist prior to 1961. Claims range from Ron Amateau's 60-minute Western, "The Bushwackers, " which appeared on CBS in 1951, to Disney's "Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier," which was broadcast as three separate segments during the 1954-55 debut season of "The Wonderful World of Disney." Also, it was not uncommon during the late 1950s for TV's dramatic anthologies to present some of their teleplays on either film or videotape. Three shows especially, "Desilu Playhouse," "Kraft Theatre," and "The Bob Hope Show," filmed a number of their one-hour offerings, while a few of these presentations were even expanded into a second hour airing the following week as a finale of a two-parter. Still, these haphazard examples have really more to do with trivia than historical precedent, as the man primarily responsible for pioneering the formal properties of the telefeature is Jennings Lang, a New York lawyer who became programming chief for MCA's Revue in the late 1950s.
Sitcoms presented the domestic aspect of patriarchy in their patterning of family life with Father as the stoic centre of a world constantly disrupted by the zany behavior of women and children. The homogenized suburban middle America of Father Knows Best and Leave it To Beaver may never have actually existed outside the world of television, but television brought it into the living rooms of a suburban middleAmerica which instantly recognized the scenarios it enacted. Television's favourite characters were either children or, like Lucille Ball's Lucy or Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners, childlike; a sirnple device to permit a level of exaggeration and unpredictability in the essentially settled domestic world their shows presented.
Unpredictability was a commodity television rationed carefully, as became apparent in 1959 when contestants confessed that, in competing for the big money prizes on quiz shows such as The $64,000 Question, they had frequently been given the answers by the shows' producers to engineer exciting results. The quiz show scandals revealed the extraordinary level of audience manipulation regarded as normal television behavior by the networks.
The subsequent public outcry obliged them to polish their tarnished image by abandoning direct sponsoring of programs and improving their current-affairs coverage. From then on, game shows concentrated on trivia rather than the taxing questions asked on The $64,000 Question, but high-value prizes, and the fantasy they presented of easily acquired wealth, remained central components of television's creation of its own version of the American dream.
4 Next Page: CinemaScope: Hollywood's response to television
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