ABSTRACT
One morning in November 1976, longtime CBS chairman William S. Paley stood in front of a building in midtown Manhattan and announced the opening of a new cultural institution. The Museum of Broadcasting would join the ranks of familiar New York monuments to the Great Achievements of History, such as the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. ‘‘Now in 1976,’’ said Paley, ‘‘on the fiftieth anniversary of network broadcasting, [radio and television] have become a mature, responsible and important force in our national life . . . it is time that we take stock of our past, so that we can know and understand the heritage of the broadcast media in building our future.’’2 The Museum was an instant success as soon as it doors opened, drawing much more attention than its eight audio-visual consoles could handle. Its thousands of hours of past radio and television were made available to academic researchers and lay visitors alike, legitimating past broadcast media as it had never been before. Still, despite this success, some questioned the validity of a museum devoted primarily to television programs. Noting the popularity of the museum, and the growing enshrinement of television among the arts, New York Times TV critic John J. O’Connor wondered in 1978 if such veneration was appropriate:
The opening of the Museum of Broadcasting was a signal event in media history, as it crystallized a growing legitimation of television in American culture. Once broadcasting’s past was enshrined in monolithic form, it would never be the same. The Museum of Broadcasting is part of a broad cultural shift in the
perception of television that began in the early 1960s and coalesced by the early 1980s. New critical perceptions of what was now as likely to be called ‘‘popular’’ as ‘‘mass’’ culture offered a greater acknowledgement of the everyday culture of modernity. This new validation of the popular was also reflected through an unprecedented and highly mediated nostalgia that defined much of the cultural landscape at this time. During the seventies,4 these discourses, and others, would construct a new narrative of American television. Consider these two statements, from roughly a decade apart. The typical response to television reruns in the mid-1960s was one of disdain or sarcasm, as indicated by Charles Morton’s comment on the sitcom in Atlantic Monthly: ‘‘Laughter, however improbable as a reaction to situation comedy, simply does not deteriorate once it is canned and put in storage.’’ By 1975, Chicago Tribune television critic Gary Deeb could eulogize the oft-ridiculed Ozzie Nelson:
In contrast to Morton’s highbrow bon mot at nameless sitcoms, Deeb’s tribute exemplifies the particular combination of cultural legitimation and generational nostalgia circulating around television by the mid-1970s. Ozzie Nelson meant something different in 1975 than he had in 1965. The seventies marked the beginning of television’s historicity, that is,
its articulation into discourses of history and memory. This is not solely because, as a rather literal-minded view of historiography would have it, that ‘‘enough’’ time had simply passed in order to form something resembling a ‘‘history.’’ Rather, television’s history was already being activated in the multiple contexts produced by the shifts in cultural and industrial production described in the previous chapters. My concern in this chapter is with the primary result of these shifts by the seventies: the formation of the television heritage. The television heritage serves as a base of legitimacy for television, a mechanism for locating television-series, genres, stars, policies, stations, logos, advertisements, or viewing experiences-in American history and memory; i.e., as something worthy of attention, preservation, and tribute. ‘‘Heritage’’ is precisely the right term for this altered perception. Its
etymology lies in the word ‘‘heir,’’ as in ‘‘property that descends to an
heir,’’ as my Merriam-Webster Dictionary puts it.6 It conveys a sense of a natural inheritance to this property, a birthright. Past television clearly functions in this manner today, as a cultural and historical resource for all generations. It is widely used as a cultural touchstone, instantly signifying particular times. Moreover, like particular natural and historic sites considered as ‘‘heritage,’’ past television is now protected and exploited as both private and public property, through copyright and continued cultural recirculation. This transformation of past television into the television heritage was not inevitable. Many other societies have decades of past television to draw from, but none do so near as extensively as the United States. Like all forms of media before it, television had to be placed into history and memory, rendered culturally significant at particular times and for particular reasons. The seventies were that time for television, and the primary spark
was a growing interest in the recent past. In an era marked by political struggle, stagnant economies, and the proverbial ‘‘malaise,’’ the past several decades became a major source of cultural identity and reflection for Americans. Memories of the twenties through sixties were activated through an unprecedented nostalgia that affected virtually every aspect of popular culture during this period. Television-that most uncanny of all the tools of modernity-provided a vivid connection to the recent past, helping cement the dominant narratives of the post-World War II era in popular memory, and fostering the subsequent development of the cultures of retro and nostalgia that pervaded the last quarter of the century. Television had always served, in part, as a kind of time machine, constantly presenting and representing sounds and images of the past. Paradoxically, however, the medium was rarely considered in this light during its first two decades. The idea of seriously studying television as a cultural form of discrete programs and a distinct history-let alone attributing any long-term cultural value to it at all-is a relatively recent development, dating back no further than the mid-1960s. Prior to that time, television was perceived to be any of a disparate array of categories; it was innocuous, therapeutic, apocalyptic, debasing, educational, worthless, and transcendental. Its programs and discourses were perceived as part of a contemporary condition, as symptoms of modern life. Television simply did not, could not, have a past. As detailed in the previous chapter, however, the regime of repetition had already established itself on broadcasting. By the end of the 1960s, recirculated programming, in the form of off-network syndication, filled commercial television, both locally and nationally. The past had become as much a part of television as the present, if not more so, as the sheer volume of reruns on the typical television station of this time indicates.7 As the ubiquitous semiotic capsules of the recent past, off-network reruns played a key role in the new nostalgia of the seventies, and would eventually become legitimated as part of the American cultural heritage.
