Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America

This cultural history examines the postwar period, in which television was installed in nearly two-thirds of the nation's homes and replaced the movie theater as the primary source of entertainment. Spigel, who teaches at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-TV, analyzes other popular media, such as women's magazines, to show the ambivalent societal responses to this new technology, which promised both to unite and separate families. Though filled with academic jargon, the book is a thoughtful treatment of a neglected really? aren't there dozens of books about dawn of TV age?/gen says there aren't many books on this topic so please stet/pk area of study, which may interest students of popular culture and perhaps trigger some nostalgia. Spigel places the television in the context of changing technology, suburbanization and a redefinition of leisure. Soap operas and variety shows were designed to accommodate the work pattern of housewives. Spigel argues that television not only intensified the retreat to suburbia but also provided a new form of community. Surveying television comedies, she suggests that they gave viewers the opportunity to laugh at staged domesticity, but at the same time to feel closer to the scene of the action, thus crossing the border between fiction and reality. OK that `fiction/reality' motif closes previous review as well?/stet both/pk (May)