Why Teaching About TV Matters
… Because Before the Stream, There Was an Ocean
As the college instructor I’ve sorta become later in a media career, I know I should be concerned about students not knowing the names Jackie Robinson or Ryan White or Rodney King, not being familiar with the terms Equal Rights Amendment or Harlem Renaissance or Munich massacre, or, in the case of one student at a high-profile East Coast college, not being aware that the Civil War didn’t in 1939. But I’m actually more bothered that none of them know Gilligan’s Island.
The course that I teach, The History of American Television, is one of those Media & Society offerings, exploring TV’s history against the backdrop of the world in which that history played out. (It’s how the above-mentioned names, terms, and events — and those all-too-true sad discoveries — come into play). I’ve taught versions of it at three schools over the past twelve years in three large cities located in three different regions of the country — coming after 20 years in Los Angeles TV.
(It was suggested from on-high at more than one of the schools, by the way, that instructors refrain from leaning too hard on the h-word in both their lectures and class materials, as “students today tend to view history as a turn-off” — a curious bit of academic guidance, especially in light of recent National Assessment of Educational Progress history test scores.)
It’s not a life-or-death course. It’s not Infectious Disease Epidemiology or Environmental Economics or Cybersecurity. But at these three media-centric schools, with their media-focused curricula aimed at media-major students, all of whom stream media 24/7, it’s an important one, I like to think. It serves to frame the bigger picture of the small-screen business in which many hope to work. Know-before-you-go and all that.
But in an era of logging on rather than tuning in — of downloading specific titles rather than “wondering what’s on” — teaching about that big picture can leave an instructor hanging. The blank stares I see when I reference most anything connected to pre-2000s linear-television often have me feeling like I’m teaching about the rotary phone. It’s something students have heard of (maybe) but never used. Or, they tell themselves, have use for.
Understandable, I suppose. But too bad on them. Because that pre-2000s linear-television — going as far back as its 1940s beginnings –informs everything they watch today, serving up an education in the process on how TV once offered experiences connected to real life at the time it was on. And in some cases connected to changes to real life because it was on.
Something that today’s streaming era, by and large, doesn’t really have, can’t really do. (An observation, not a judgement.)
TV helped to changed America’s views on war as “the news from the front lines was brought straight into the living room”? It did? TV can be credited for “spark[ing] a Rock ’n’ Roll Revolution”? It can? TV was “a primary source of America’s racial education” in the entirety of the 20th century. It was?
It was. It can. It did.
Last summer, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and in an effort to keep a yesterday course tied to today, I re-vamped the Fall 2022 syllabus to include the headline into a class session addressing how scripted TV intersected with the divisive issue at the heart of the ruling.
How a sitcom did, in fact.
Fifty years ago.
Two months before Roe v. Wade was decided in January 1973, CBS broadcast a two-part episode of what was then its most popular new series, introduced in September of 1972, in which the title character opts to have an abortion when she finds herself pregnant at 47. (The option was then a legal one in New York State, where the show was set.) It met with fiery public protest that engulfed the comedy and its producer, the network and its affiliated stations, Madison Avenue and its advertising community, and the United States Catholic Conference and its dioceses.
For these two Monday nights, TV was about more than television. It was, wrote Lewis Beale in a 1992 Chicago Tribune 20-years-on retrospective, “an event that brought the battle over choice into the prime-time arena … [and] a watershed in TV history.”
The sitcom, I told the class, was called Maude.
Cue the blank stares.
None had heard of the show, let alone the history-making two-parter. (Actually, and more troubling, more than a few didn’t even know the facts behind Roe. SEE: National Assessment of Educational Progress, above.)
That the series itself was an unknown was mostly a given: Maude isn’t talked about today (its ties to the women’s movement of the early 1970s left it dated even as it aired), nor does it feature any faces familiar to today’s audiences, so it’s not a source of streaming curiosity; and its small-screen presence is generally limited to the retro outlets students aren’t watching on the linear TV they’re not turning on.
And therein was the challenge. To illustrate how both television and the country changed because of a sitcom. To point out how “Maude’s Dilemma” brought a hushed topic into the wide-open of prime-time, for the first time, stirring a heated national discussion. To underscore how the derring-do connected to its content put the TV industry on notice about social pushback if it dares to dare too far. To draw lines between Maude’s opening of the door to more provocative material on TV and TV’s doors-free future, with parallels to be found as recently as this year.
Specific to the episode, we examined how its carefully written script came to include a brief “other side” scene to address the abortion divide (and to calm a nervous CBS) and how it wove the concept of choice (rather than the word itself) into the private bedroom-conversation between lead characters Maude and husband Walter as they debated their decision. We also got into how and why it was the reruns of the two-parter, in the summer of 1973 (post-Roe v. Wade decision), that caused more advertiser-pullout problems for the network than with its original airings the previous November.
Finally, we talked of how the Maude series itself came about, through Norman Lear, producer of the equally controversial All in the Family, from which it was spun, and how both series, in often inflammatory ways, reflected and contributed to the then-current political climate in the United States. Pushing TV (and its viewers) towards change, wanted or not. And of how the young writer of the two-part episode at the center of the storm, Susan Harris, furthered TV’s female-centric revolution in the 1970s, if not the 1970s as a whole, by parlaying its notoriety into becoming a TV showrunner herself by mid-decade, a time when so very few females held such a role. And how TV evolved still further because of her. (Hello, Soap.)
And there it was: the TV business, the advertising world, the women’s movement, plus religion and politics and social protest — the whole experience that was the early 1970s — wrapped up in a single college-class discussion about a single 1972 sitcom involving a word that wouldn’t be able to be said on scripted TV fifty years later (which was perhaps the most significant point.) An illustration of how the television back then that was plugged into the wall further plugged its tens of millions of viewers into the other side of it.
Not sure that can be said about even the best episode of the very good Ted Lasso or breakthrough Atlanta or revolutionary The Last of Us.
In future classes, we used Maude as a springboard for examining other unfamiliar titles that similarly lent themselves to TV experiences — rather than merely TV shows — in the social-landscape-shifting 1970s. And how those experiences led to the programming they’re watching today.
We talked of how TV once got into trouble merely for showing gay characters in background roles (The Corner Bar, Steambath) or for telling gay stories (That Certain Summer) — but how this protested-about representation likely played a role in getting homosexuality declassified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973. (“It did? And it was? A disorder?”)
We discussed how a 1974 sitcom (Chico and the Man) provided fuel for a then-growing Brown Pride groundswell in East Los Angeles, and what that meant for prime-time representation in general. (“There was something called ‘Brown Pride’?”)
We explored how TV movies could be so highly viewed and so influential that they could alter the trajectory of the 300-year-old conversation about race in the United States (Roots: The Saga of an American Family) or effect real-life changes in sexual-assault laws (A Case of Rape). (“A movie could stir things up like that?”)
We got into how daytime TV once proudly targeted teenagers (ABC After School Special) with age-specific storytelling that dealt with divorce or teen alcoholism or feelings of being gay because no other content– and likely few American households — was discussing it. (“They produced stories that covered topics specifically for teenagers?”)
We watched a early-1970s commercial (“I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”) that tapped so deeply into the national mood of its time that its minute-long jingle was converted into two different hit radio-singles from two different groups, selling a combined seven million copies, fueling an entire generation’s search for identity in the process. (“A soda commercial actually became part of a social crusade?”)
TV did all that.
For more than fifty years, before streaming turned the viewing of content into a more solo excursion, TV reflected, contributed to, even played a role in what was going on in the world at the time its programming aired — for all the world to see at the same time.
The way The Cosby Show played a role in helping to quell L.A.’s Rodney King riots in 1992. Or the way the new police-drama NYPD Blue’s adult content in 1993 played a role in an entire TV ratings system being instituted in 1997. Or the way the word dramedy played a role the re-definition of TV comedy — if not the concept of humor itself — when it was introduced to TV in the late 1980s, leading to live-audience sitcoms becoming all but obsolete a generation later. Or the way 1960s shows like The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and Room 222 and Julia played a role in a reckoning then underway in The Divided States of America, becoming prime-time totems of protest. Or even the way a silly often farcial 1950s sitcom played a role in creating a national conversation with a simple episode about the birth of a baby, with 72 percent of all the TVs that were turned on the night it ran tuned in to that show.
Seventy-two percent.
Out of, like, a hundred.
That’s what TV could create. Community — it and the world. Even when it was tied to a trifle like Gilligan’s Island.
That Gilligan’s Island was conceived, pitched, bought, and then produced as a CBS pilot in 1964 is a fair feat, even with the low-creative-bar of the era. (My Mother the Car was a year away.) That it lasted for three seasons and 98 episodes and then went on to be one of television’s most watched reruns for multiple generations seems remarkable.
But Gilligan was, pure and simple, watchable. And re-watchable. Over and over again. In a way that clinicians should study. To watch it was to be part of a fun and entertaining collective. Not despite its inanity but because of it.
And all the better for repeat viewing among future generations the show served as a mid-1960s time-capsule, its sophomoric plots wrapped around stories that reflected the world at the time it was in production — stories about surfer culture, about the folly of war, about U.S./Russian relations and the Space Race, about the British (music) invasion.
To watch Gilligan’s Island is to know the country’s history? Yes, it is.
TV can do that — be of and about its times. Which is how also-little-known-today All in the Family (1971–79) — perhaps the most important TV series ever — gets the Television Critics Association 2013 Heritage Award 34 years after it goes off the air for its “impact on culture and society.”
That impact seems worth passing on to and impressing upon 21st century students of media. Not because stuff was better back then — much of today’s streaming content is infinitely superior — but so they can know what it was like to be alive when it aired. And often what happened because it did. Hell, even that it aired at all. Because the h-word is important. It’s why I (try to) teach whatever I teach. It’s my answer when asked, sometimes with condescension in a universe where the study of Cinema or Literature or even Music seems to offer more gravitas, Why teach about TV?
Because sometimes even a silly three-hour tour can lead to a world of discovery.
Former CBS executive Jim McKairnes is a LA- and Nashville-based writer who wishes more colleges recognized the 100 years of TV’s importance with specific Television Studies curricula rather than folding it into “Media Studies” or “Film Studies” programs — especially when it’s all but certain that the bulk of today’s media students with eyes of the entertainment business will end up working at the many TV streaming platforms.
