The Golden Age of Television in the United States began sometime in the late 1940s and extended to the late 1950s or early 1960s.
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The early days of television was a time when many hour-long anthology drama series received critical acclaim.[1][2]
As filmed series, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, began to dominate during the mid-1950s and early 1960s, the period of live TV dramas was viewed as the Golden Age. Although producer David Susskind, in a 1960s roundtable discussion with leading 1950s TV dramatists, defined TV's Golden Age as 1938 to 1954, the final shows of Playhouse 90 in 1961 and the departure of leading director John Frankenheimer brought the era to an end.
As a new medium, television introduced many innovative programming concepts, and prime time television drama showcased both original and classic productions, including the first telecasts of Walt Disney's programs, as well as the first telecasts of Mary Martin in Peter Pan, MGM's classic The Wizard of Oz and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. Critics and viewers looked forward to new teleplays by Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, Tad Mosel, Reginald Rose, Rod Serling, Gore Vidal and others.[3][1][2]
Most of these programs were produced as installments of live dramatic anthologies, such as The Philco Television Playhouse, Kraft Television Theatre and Playhouse 90. Live, abridged versions of plays like Cyrano de Bergerac, with members of the cast of the 1946 Broadway revival recreating their roles, were regularly shown during this period,[4][5] Shakespeare play, when he made his TV debut at the age of 69 in a one-hour Macbeth.[6]
TV stations did not broadcast 24 hours per day, as has been customary in North America since the 1990s—technical limitations in the design of TV transmitters at the time forced broadcasters to use a 12-hour to 18-hour-per-day broadcast schedule.
Television did not quite play the role in people's lives in the 1950s that it does now. However, by about 1958, it had become the dominant form of home entertainment, depleting audiences in movie theaters. It was the fear of this that drove movie studios to begin using widescreen processes in 1952, an effort to lure audiences back with technical innovations they could not see at home.
High culture dominated commercial network television programming in the 1950s and 1960s with the first television appearances of Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini, the first telecasts from Carnegie Hall took place during this era, the first live American telecasts of plays by Shakespeare, the first telecasts of Tchaikovsky's ballets The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker and the first opera specially composed for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors. The Bell Telephone Hour, an NBC radio program, began its TV run, featuring both classical and Broadway performers. All of these were broadcast on NBC, CBS and ABC, something that would be unheard of today. Commercial networks now concentrate on more popular items. The networks then had their own art critics, notably Aline Saarinen and Brian O'Doherty.
Many programs of this era evolved from successful radio shows that brought polished concepts, casts and writing staffs to TV. This is one reason why quality was so consistently high during this period. Even an original show like I Love Lucy drew heavily from radio, since many of those scripts were rewrites from Lucille Ball's late-1940s radio show My Favorite Husband. Shows like Our Miss Brooks, The Burns and Allen Show and The Jack Benny Program ran concurrently on both radio and TV until television reception reached beyond the major metropolitan areas in the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s, about 90% of American households had a television set. At that point sitcoms and dramas dropped out of radio and became wholly the domain of television, as did Westerns like The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke. At the same time, shows such as Playhouse 90 ended their run.
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