Although its launch was interrupted by the start of World War II, American television emerged as a national medium by the end of the 1940s. Audiences tuned in as NBC and CBS began broadcasting to their East Coast affiliates a wide variety of programs: situation comedies, vaudeville-style revues, and most impressively, live dramatic programming presented on anthology shows.
Within a few years, these shows, including “Kraft Television Theater,” “Playhouse 90,” and “Goodyear Television Playhouse,” launched the careers of soon-to-be famous directors like Arthur Penn and John Frankenheimer, actors like Paul Newman and James Dean, and playwrights like Paddy Chayevsky and Rod Serling. But by the end of the 1950s, the era of live TV “theater” was over. So, too, was New York City as a center of TV production.
Brian Rose, professor emeritus at Fordham University, explores the forces that made this golden age such an intriguing chapter in TV history and the reasons it was so short-lived, including brief examinations of blacklisting and the TV quiz show scandals.
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