Television, 1948-2018
Television
In 1947 American manufacturers produced only 117,000 television sets per year. By 1953, more than 7 million television sets were produced, and I Love Lucy was dominating the airwaves. Cinema audiences dropped in almost direct proportion to the increase in television audiences in the 1950s. By 1971, movies hit an all-time low of 15.8 million movie-goers every week. But Television, by 1976 had 70.5 million households. That is, 96.4% of American households had televisions. All of these millions of households received electromagnetic signals through the air: "airwaves." That new television market had a footprint: The suburban preponderance of population that had been reached by 1970, when more people lived in suburban municipalities than either those who lived in central cities or those who lived in rural areas. The 1970s was unquestionably the Age of Suburbia. TimelineThe 1960s and 1970s upheaval also dispersed its movie-making and media-producing footprint, considerably, beyond Los Angeles, with many competing capitals of production from San Francisco and Vancouver to New York and Bollywood.. All of the major studios were bought up as relatively minor assets by huge corporate "Conglomerates" like Gulf+Western (Paramount) and Seagrams (***). But the Studios were purchased because they were in a weak position, suffering major losses rather than profits, so an assessment of "Hollywood" as a major component of the United States's "ruling regimes," it is important to paint a picture not only of the new kinds of movies and images produced, but the institutional footprint of the industry as a whole, which had characterized social worlds in the region for generations.
Television was the spiderweb that captured the United States and then the world. By 1976, on the eve of the Cable Era, 70.5 million U.S. households--96.4%--had televisions. That was also the low-water mark of Hollywood movies. But the tables were turned once again within 20 years. By 1994, 98 percent, or 94 million of U.S. households had at least one television (millions of these had multiple TVs). And after another two decades, by 2010, most television screens (63%) received their signals via a hard-wired "cable," a delivery model for mass media that once again overturned all previous structures of the public sphere.
Television had a footprint: the living rooms of suburban homes by the millions across America:This landscape shifted visual entertainment from downtown movie theaters to (mostly racially White) suburban television screens, and devastated the Movie industry's oligopolistic business model. This was true all over the United States, but it was especially true in the same Southern California environment in which Movies and Television production grew up. We are talking about nothing less than "Nixonland" as Rick Perlstein dubbed it, or "Reagan Country" as it is better known: From the Southeast suburbs of Los Angeles County, then Orange County south to San Diego, was a vast regional reservoir of support for the New Right. The ground had been prepared for decades by many a John the Baptist. Billy Graham was one of the most influential, and his Southern California Crusade at the Anaheim "A"s Stadium in September 1969 was both a successor to previous Graham mass revivals, but an answer to the decadent immorality broadcast from the Liberal Democratic coalition of West LA, Hollywood, and Central LA.
This page has paths:
- TV Essays All Phil Ethington
