Rise of network tele (1 gen 1948 anni – 31 dic 1959 anni)

Descrizione:

Much of the culture of the “consumers’ republic” arrived through television. The dawn of TV transformed everyday life with astonishing speed. In 1947, there were seven thousand TV sets in American homes. A year later, the CBS and NBC radio networks retooled for television broadcast and began offering regular programming. By 1950 Americans owned 7.3 million sets, and ten years later 87 percent of American homes had at least one television. With this deep reach into the home, television soon became a principal mediator between the consumer and the marketplace.

Broadcast advertisers mastered the art of manufacturing consumer desire. TV stations, like radio stations before them, depended entirely on advertising for profits. Early television executives understood that selling viewers to advertisers was what kept their networks on the air. Straightforward corporate sponsorships (such as General Electric Theater and U.S. Steel Hour) and simple product jingles (such as “No matter what the time or place, let’s keep up with that happy pace. 7-Up your thirst away!”) gave way by the early 1960s to slick advertising campaigns that used popular music, movie stars, sports figures, and stimulating graphics to captivate viewers.

Aggressive advertising of new products such as the color television helped fuel the surge in consumer spending during the 1950s. Marketing experts emphasized television’s role in promoting family togetherness, while interior designers offered decorating tips that placed the television at the focal point of living rooms and the increasingly popular “family rooms.” In this 1951 magazine advertisement, the family is watching a variety program starring singer Dinah Shore, who was the television spokeswoman for Chevrolet cars. Every American probably could hum the tune of the little song she sang in praise of the Chevy.

By creating powerful visual narratives of the good life, television forever changed how products were sold, in America and around the world. On the popular mid-1950s show Queen for a Day, women competed to see who could tell the most heartrending story of tragedy and loss. The winner won a bonanza of household products: refrigerators, toasters, ovens, and the like. The show implied that consumer bounty cured human suffering. More mundane forms of suffering, along with their cure, were dramatized as well. In a groundbreaking advertisement for Anacin aspirin, a tiny hammer pounded inside the skull of a headache sufferer. Almost overnight, sales of Anacin increased by 50 percent.

What Americans saw on television was not a mirror. The small screen mostly transmitted a narrow set of middle-class tastes and values. Both programming and commercial content centered on an overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant world of nuclear families, suburban homes, and middle-class life. A typical show was Father Knows Best, starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt. Father left home each morning wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase. Mother was a stereotypical full-time housewife, prone to bad driving and tears. Leave It to Beaver, another immensely popular series about suburban family life, embodied similar late-1950s themes. Earlier in the decade, television had featured grittier realities. The Honeymooners, starring Jackie Gleason as a Brooklyn bus driver, and The Life of Riley, a situation comedy featuring a California aircraft worker, depicted working-class lives. Beulah, starring Ethel Waters and later Louise Beavers as an African American maid, and the comedic Amos ’n’ Andy, were the only early shows to feature black actors in major roles. The first wave of television did not capture the breadth of American society, and in the second half of the 1950s broadcasting lost most of its modest ethnic, racial, and class diversity.

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