SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
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I just came across this on You-Tube and killed 25 minutes watching it on a rainy day, waiting for my laundry to get done.
(3) 37 SHOWS OF ABC FALL TV 1961 - YouTube
It's clips of ABC's schedule for the fall on 1961. I turned 8 years old that fall and recall many of these shows, (but not others). This was from the era of the three networks, not the 1,000 cable channels of today. it was also an era controlled by network censorship. Much of it was not of a political nature: you just couldn't show or mention certain things. The stork brought the babies. Politics was avoided because it had been so problematic in the previous decade. people wanted escapism. TV was lily-white because it's creators valued the southern market and there weren't too many ethnic types for the same reason. Actually early TV had more ethnic types than 60's TV: the original Goldbergs, (Jewish), I remember Mama (Swedish) and the Danny Thomas Show, (Lebanese).
As entertainment, at worst these shows were uninspired or silly. They were never disgusting or idiotic. there were a lot of variety shows, something we don't see anymore. Westerns had lost some of their late 50's momentum but were still a major force. We were about to get a run of movies and TV series about WWII because it was the 20th anniversary of everything but that hadn't started yet and neither had the spy craze. Family comedies were popular but they were kind of homogenized, taking place in the suburbs, not in Brooklyn and featuring whitebread families with names like "Anderson", "Stone" and "Douglas" Television production on the east coast had virtually ended and almost everything was being produced in the Hollywood studios. The anthology series, with different casts telling different stories every week, was on the way out, in favor of shows with regular casts of characters you came to feel that you knew and you wanted to re-connect with them every week. It's limiting if you have to get back to square one at the end of an episode with the events of that episode having no permanent impact on the main characters.
But if television had walls and a ceiling, it also had a floor. Stories tended to make sense. Lines seemed like something a character would actually say and their actions seemed logical. the production values, (which varied widely in the 50's and since), were consistently high. There were some major talents in front of and behind the cameras and an army of reliable actors and technicians to make it all seem real. And we didn't know there could be 1,000 channels or CGI or naked people so we thought that what we were watching was, for the most part pretty good stuff. We were entertained.
The poster, RwDt09, has made a lot of these You-Tube posts covering various years or types of shows over the history of television. You might find some of them worth a look:
(3) RwDt09 - YouTube
(3) 37 SHOWS OF ABC FALL TV 1961 - YouTube
It's clips of ABC's schedule for the fall on 1961. I turned 8 years old that fall and recall many of these shows, (but not others). This was from the era of the three networks, not the 1,000 cable channels of today. it was also an era controlled by network censorship. Much of it was not of a political nature: you just couldn't show or mention certain things. The stork brought the babies. Politics was avoided because it had been so problematic in the previous decade. people wanted escapism. TV was lily-white because it's creators valued the southern market and there weren't too many ethnic types for the same reason. Actually early TV had more ethnic types than 60's TV: the original Goldbergs, (Jewish), I remember Mama (Swedish) and the Danny Thomas Show, (Lebanese).
As entertainment, at worst these shows were uninspired or silly. They were never disgusting or idiotic. there were a lot of variety shows, something we don't see anymore. Westerns had lost some of their late 50's momentum but were still a major force. We were about to get a run of movies and TV series about WWII because it was the 20th anniversary of everything but that hadn't started yet and neither had the spy craze. Family comedies were popular but they were kind of homogenized, taking place in the suburbs, not in Brooklyn and featuring whitebread families with names like "Anderson", "Stone" and "Douglas" Television production on the east coast had virtually ended and almost everything was being produced in the Hollywood studios. The anthology series, with different casts telling different stories every week, was on the way out, in favor of shows with regular casts of characters you came to feel that you knew and you wanted to re-connect with them every week. It's limiting if you have to get back to square one at the end of an episode with the events of that episode having no permanent impact on the main characters.
But if television had walls and a ceiling, it also had a floor. Stories tended to make sense. Lines seemed like something a character would actually say and their actions seemed logical. the production values, (which varied widely in the 50's and since), were consistently high. There were some major talents in front of and behind the cameras and an army of reliable actors and technicians to make it all seem real. And we didn't know there could be 1,000 channels or CGI or naked people so we thought that what we were watching was, for the most part pretty good stuff. We were entertained.
The poster, RwDt09, has made a lot of these You-Tube posts covering various years or types of shows over the history of television. You might find some of them worth a look:
(3) RwDt09 - YouTube
