Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round they all laughed when Edison recorded sound they all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly they told Marconi wireless was a phony it's the same old pride welcome back
[00:00:21] Speaker B: to 100 Years of Television.
For 100 weeks that started in October of 2025, this podcast is going to recall the 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.
This is countdown number 57 coming of age I'm Paul Shatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, the man who invented television made his only ever appearance on it. And today we're going to discuss a range of things that show how television had matured by the end of the 1950s.
By the end of the 1950s, American households were about as likely to have a television set as they were to have hot and cold running water.
The difference being that TV viewers spent a lot more time gazing into the phosphor lit vacuum than they spent dishwashing, cooking, bathing or flushing their toilets.
Nielsen and other industry sources estimated that by 1958American households were watching television for roughly four to five hours a day, the equivalent of more than one whole day per week.
Around the world the numbers were smaller, but growing at an exponential rate.
Britain, Canada, France, West Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union had all moved beyond their cautious post war experiments.
In many countries, TV penetration exceeded the 10% that some considered the threshold between a luxury and a necessity.
The medium that had spent the 1930s in laboratories and the 1940s in limbo was by the end of the 1950s, the command center of a new kind of mass culture.
The growth statistics describe a planet rapidly adapting to a collective consciousness and billions of individual brains being quietly rewired to absorb a relentless bombardment of visual stimuli.
In this context, the years 1958 and 1959 produced several milestones that, taken together, recall a two year stretch when television began to find its own bearings and blaze new trails.
And as much as the world was just beginning to tune in, American producers were forging the template for what television would look and sound like.
We can see 1958 as a year when primetime television began to both reflect and dictate the style of the period.
Three programs in particular, the Rifleman 77 Sunset Strip and Peter Gunn premiered within months of each other in 1958.
Each represented a different facet of television, finding its own forms and learning to look and sound like the post war world. Rather than an extension of pre war radio, the Rifleman brought textured narrative layers to the well worn Western. The father son dynamic between Lucas and Mark McCain added emotional shading to a genre that had grown stale with cookie cutter archetypes.
77's Sunset Strip embraced the glamorous contradictions of late 50s chrome and tail fins Los Angeles, giving primetime its first weekly taste of Hollywood noir.
Ephrem Zimbalist Jr. Anchored the series as Stuart Bailey, the cool, unflappable private detective.
Ed Burns, playing Gerald Kooky Cookson iii, the comb waving parking lot attendant at Dino's Lodge, became the show's breakout youth icon.
And then there was Peter Gunn, which may be the purest expression of television's mid century awakening.
Created by Blake Edwards and scored by Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn brought a new level of polish to the small screen.
Mancini's jazz themes announced something different. The series didn't simply borrow atmosphere from the movies, it transformed a cinematic sensibility and into a television format.
In shows like these, television revealed a fresh capacity for sophistication.
After a decade of conventional westerns, sitcoms and live theater adaptations, here was something sleek and modern.
If 1958 was the year television found its style, then 1959 was the year it discovered its 20th century imagination by slipping into Rod Serling. Serling's Twilight Zone Rod Serling was a disaffected veteran of the TV trenches.
Before the Twilight Zone, he had earned the dubious distinction of being the most honored and the most censored writer of television drama. In the 1950s, he established his bona fides as the author of some of the most memorable episodes of television's golden age of live drama.
His requiem for a heavyweight on CBS's Playhouse 90 is still regarded as one of the great live television dramas ever aired and earned Serling the first of his six Emmy Awards.
Serling wrote dozens of episodes for shows like Studio One, Lux Video Theater and Kraft Television Theater, often dealing with controversial subjects like race, corruption, war and abuses of power, which themes often triggered objections from both the networks and sponsors.
By 1958, Serling was at the top of his game but had grown frustrated with broadcast television. His biggest clashes weren't with the networks but with the advertisers.
In Requiem for Heavyweight, Serling was required to remove brand names so as not to offend cigarette, beer and pharmaceutical sponsors.
He had to rewrite no Time at All, a labor union story after a sponsor objected to the depiction of a strike, and a script he wrote about Emmett Till, the black teenager murdered in Mississippi in 1955, was vetoed unless he removed all racial references.
The sponsors censor everything, Serling complained, but the commercials.
Seeking a forum that would let him explore controversial ideas, Serling pitched CBS with a fantasy sci fi anthology series, but it was a hard sell.
Anthologies that didn't reuse the same sets or locations were expensive.
Fantasy was dismissed as kid stuff, and Serling's reputation for stirring up controversies made sponsors wary to entice the network. In 1958, Serling wrote the Time Element for the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse as a backdoor pilot. When it tested extremely well, CBS ordered a limited trial run. Knowing they could market a new series from the Emmy Award winning writer of Requiem for a Heavyweight, the network watched nervously. When the Twilight zone premiered on October 2, 1959, the audience response and critical acclaim were so strong that the series was quickly extended.
The Twilight Zone ran on CBS for a total of 156 episodes from 1959 to 1964, with Rod Serling himself writing or co writing more than 90 of them.
With its anthology format cloaked in speculative fiction, the Twilight Zone did not merely entertain. It startled, provoked and lingered in the viewer's imagination.
It gave television permission to be philosophical. It gave writers permission to think in original ways. The result was one of the most enduring programs in the history of the medium and paved the way for similar series the Outer Limits, Night Gallery and more recently, the X Files and Black Mirror.
With Rod Serling himself, cigarette in hand, introducing every episode, the Twilight Zone gave a literary quality to a medium often dismissed as mindless and trivial.
His presence encouraged layers of fantasy, parable and science fiction in a weekly exercise of nuance far deeper than anyone expected of the small screen.
After its run on cbs, the show immediately found continued success in syndication and continues to run on the CBS affiliated streaming service Paramount.
The Twilight Zone is routinely ranked among the most watched classic series and remains far more famous now than it ever was during its original run to this day. The opening notes of the show's theme are mimicked when conversations turns to the weird or inexplicable, even among generations born long after the show ended its initial run.
While the writers and producers stretched the medium in studios and on stages, the scientists and engineers in television's laboratories and factories were quietly preparing the medium's next big Technical the All Out Push for Color in the first years after the NTSC color standard was adopted, broadcasting in color remained a rarity. When rca, NBC and Ampex introduced the first color compatible videotape recorder in 1959, the ability to record color electronically set the stage for a full scale push into color tv.
NBC started using the slogan Brought to you in living color in the mid-1950s.
In 1956, the network added an animated peacock spreading its tail feathers. A handful of shows like the Cisco Kid, My Friend, Flicka and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon were filmed in color but remained the exception.
Most regularly scheduled programs continued to be broadcast in black and white.
Anthologies, specials and one offs didn't give viewers enough justification to make the costly leap into color.
What RCA needed was a spectacle, a program that looked better in color week after week that could entice consumers to invest in RCA color televisions that sold for as much as $600, the equivalent of $6,000 in 2026.
With no hint of irony, NBC reached for the prize with a western called Bonanza.
Bonanza followed the weekly tribulations of the Cartwrights widowed patriarch Ben Cartwright, played by Laure, and his three adult sons, Adam, Hoss and Little Joe, as they protected their vast Ponderosa ranch amid the moral thickets of the Old West.
NBC focused on Bonanza after producer David Dortort delivered a pilot shot on 35 millimeter color film.
When NBC president Robert Sarnoff saw the saturated footage of wide open landscapes, brightly lit Victorian interiors and costumes that read vividly in color, he must have thought he was looking at a brochure for RCA Color Televisions.
When it premiered on September 12, 1959, Bonanza was not only the first hour long dramatic series broadcast in color, it was the flagship of a whole corporate strategy.
The program rewarded households that had already invested in color TVs and showed everyone else what they were missing.
When Bonanza went on the air in 1959, there were fewer than 200,000 color televisions in American homes. But annual sales doubled and tripled through the early 1960s as RCA poured millions into marketing and manufacturing.
By 1966, when NBC became the first network to broadcast its entire primetime Lineup in color, RCA's Color Set division was generating more than half of the company's profits.
Though they were initially reluctant to shoulder the added costs of color, CBS and ABC were compelled to follow NBC's lead and converted their primetime lineups to color as well. By the late 1960s, most television programming was offered in color.
The combination of falling prices and Full color schedules on all three networks generated hundreds of millions in annual revenue for RCA and transformed Robert Sarnoff's big gamble on color into, well, a true bonanza.
By the end of its first full decade, television had become the nation's nightly ritual, the glowing electronic hearth around which families gathered not only after dinner, but often during the and nothing on the schedules drew larger, more devoted followings than the primetime quiz shows.
Programs like the $64,000 question, Tic Tac, Doe and 21 turned seemingly ordinary Americans into instant celebrities possessed of superhuman memory and composure.
The games were popular with sponsors, too. For household names like Revlon and Geritol, the relatively low production cost made quiz the most profitable programming on television. They offered suspense, aspiration, and the reassuring fiction that success awaited anyone off the street who could come up with the right answer before the other guy with a buzzer.
But behind the scenes, the economics of authenticity presented unique challenges.
Real competition produced unpredictable results that produced nervous sponsors.
If a charismatic champion lost too soon, ratings fell. If a new contestant froze on camera, tension evaporated.
The pressures of live sponsor driven programming created an environment in which the line between contest and performance blurred quickly and ultimately, fatally.
The most egregious example was 21, produced by the seasoned but ethically elastic team of Barry and Enrigh.
The show's signature device was a pair of isolation booths, fortresses of integrity that shielded contestants from outside queues.
Behind the scenes was a very different story.
Contestants were advised on topics, given answers, and even coached on facial expressions. The drama looked spontaneous, but it was engineered for maximum suspense.
In 1956, 21 found its breakout star, Herbert Stemple, a Queen's postal clerk whose encyclopedic memory made him an unlikely champion.
Though obviously bright and quick on his feet, Stemple came through the screen as clumsy and awkward, decidedly not the sort of character that sponsors wanted representing their products.
Instead, the producers groomed a new contender, Charles Van Doren, a handsome, soft spoken Columbia University instructor who seemed tailor made for magazines covers.
Herb Stemple was explicitly instructed to lose on a question he knew cold.
Van Doren's rise then became a national phenomenon, and 21 garnered its highest ratings.
The deception might have continued had Stemple remained silent. But after his forced exit, he began telling reporters that the show was rigged.
At first he was dismissed as a sore loser, but as other contestants quietly confirmed patterns of coaching and manipulation, the claims gained traction. By 1958, the whispers had become headlines, and in 1959 they became the subject of a congressional investigation.
The decisive moment arrived in November 1959, when Charles Van Doren, after months of public denials, appeared before a House subcommittee and admitted that 21 had been rigged throughout his celebrated run, the confession was stunning. The handsome young scholar who had embodied the promise of television now embodied deception.
NBC cut ties with him immediately, and Columbia University accepted his resignation the same day.
The collapse of the quiz shows was swift. Sponsors fled and networks purged their schedules.
Several states passed laws prohibiting the fixing of contests, and the Federal Communications Commission expanded its oversight.
Within 18 months, the primetime quiz show had virtually disappeared from the airwaves.
The deeper impact was cultural. The quiz show scandals marked the first moment when Americans realized that television could fabricate truth as easily as it presented it. The medium that had promised transparency with its immediacy had instead demonstrated how convincingly it could fake authenticity.
By the end of the 1950s, television had clearly entered a new era, confident enough to stretch its storytelling muscles in filmed westerns and sleek urban dramas, imaginative enough to explore moral riddles in the Twilight Zone and technologically ambitious enough to gamble its future on color.
But maturity brought a different revelation as well. The quiz show scandals made plain that the medium capable of illuminating American life could just as easily manipulate it. Reality and artifice were never more than a camera angle apart from in that sense, the accomplishments and deceptions at the end of the 1950s were less an aberration than an early warning. Television had always been able to blur truth and performance, and the world of fake news that would emerge decades later was not a break with the past, but a continuation of tendencies woven into the medium from its earliest flickering days.
This brings us to the end of no. 57 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when Kennedy and Nixon meet in the first ever televised presidential debates.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more aim a gizmo to 100 years tv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Shatzkin, and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:21:23] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy they laughed at us and how, but how, how, how we got the laughter.
