‘Television’ Archives
Television and Minorities
Television and Minorities Protests by NAACP, La Raza and other activists in 1999 highlighted the absence of minority characters on new network shows, leading NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS to scramble to retrofit, offering and forcing them into negotiations about ethnicity and casting as well as longer-term commitments to employment behind the camera. [...]
Screenwriters
Screenwriters Ambivalent category of Hollywood creators, whose role took shape with the feature film (especially sound). Over the years, Hollywood has hired top writers from William Faulkner to Ben Hecht to John Irving to adapt their own and other works. It also has produced notable talents within the industry. Yet, the role of the screenwriter [...]
Variety Shows
Variety Shows Combinations of multiple acts—singing, dancing, comedy and drama—strung together by a genial host like Milton Berle linked early television to Vaudeville and radio. In subsequent decades, variety shows have gone through cycles of popularity and innovation as well as decline in the 1990s. Ed Sullivan, who moved from Broadway [...]
Christian Media
Christian Media The mere title “Christian media” raises an awkward question—are there non-Christian or atheist media in the US? Certainly statements about God and Christian values in the news, sports, contests, and talk shows, as well as assumptions about church as weekly activity in many series underscore a pervasive civic Christianity. [...]
Lawyer Television Shows
Lawyer Television Shows America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is known as an increasingly litigious society in which trials and verdicts are covered in news and gossip and via books by the participants, guilty or innocent. This coverage enshrines the lawyer celebrity who, while present in films, has been a particular [...]
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation British Broadcasting Corporation, first and biggest broadcasting organization in the United Kingdom. The scientific origins of broadcasting are over 100 years old. However, it took 20 years and a world war to develop technologies enabling signals to go to masses of people simultaneously, rather than to [...]
Nickelodeon
Nickelodeon I INTRODUCTION Nickelodeon, cable television network based in New York City, specializing in programming for children. In addition to its daytime children’s programs, Nickelodeon provides nighttime programming, called Nick at Night, aimed at adult audiences. The name of the network refers to early 20th century movie houses [...]
Public Broadcasting System
PBS/Public Broadcasting System In November 1967 the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. This Act established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) as an independent, non-governmental body formed to serve as the umbrella organization for public broadcasting in the United States. Over thirty years, PBS [...]
Golden Age of Television
Golden Age of Television Epithet applied to the innovative (often live) developmental period of network television from 1948 to 1960. Among the shows taken as high points of this period are dramas like Studio One, Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theater and other sponsored theater shows in prime time. Certainly, this produced many fine pieces in [...]
Miniseries
Miniseries Popular television format since the 1970s, involving 4–15 hours of narrative, somewhere between one-time specials and regular series. Miniseries offer flexible responses to market trends (including news items, historical reflections and popular novels) and may target audiences during ratings “sweeps.” They also allow more [...]
