Golden Age of Television

The first Golden Age of Television in the United States began in 1947 and lasted until 1960. Many today argue that after the advent of cable TV, satellite TV, and Internet TV, which have greatly increased the number of TV stations and number of programs, a new golden age of television has begun, but the first golden age was about the availability of high-quality cultural offerings in an era of limited channels, made possible because early television receivers were expensive and could be afforded mostly by the more educated and cultured class of viewers.

The early days of television was a time when many hour-long anthology drama series received critical acclaim. Examples include Kraft Television Theatre (debuted May 7, 1947), The Chevrolet Tele-Theatre (debuted September 27, 1948), Television Playhouse (debuted December 4, 1947), The Philco Television Playhouse (debuted October 3, 1948), Westinghouse Studio One (debuted November 7, 1948), and Your Show Time (debuted January 21, 1949).

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 quiz show scandals of 1959, the final show of Playhouse 90 (debuted October 4, 1956) on May 18, 1960, and the departure of leading director John Frankenheimer brought the era to an end. Indeed, the 1960–61 television season was noted by Time magazine as being the worst season in television up to that point, a sentiment echoed by Newton Minow, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, who lambasted the television networks for creating a "vast wasteland" of inferior programming in his speech "Television and the Public Interest."

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