TV Guide: Fifty Years of Television

The engine of American culture receives an affectionate and often perceptive overview in this retrospective from the nation's biggest weekly magazine. Classic shows from I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody to The Sopranos and Survivor are given lavishly illustrated spreads along with quirkier cult favorites like The Prisoner and I, Claudius. TV's milestone discoveries of politics (All in the Family), social realism (Hill Street Blues) and nihilism (Seinfeld) are duly noted, while through-the-years thematic comparison of news broadcasts, sit-com families and TV detectives--and even the antics Ozzy and Harriet and The Osbournes--remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Excerpts from TV Guide back issues include essays by literati like Alistair Cooke (on the""one of a kind"" Mash) and Jay McInerny (on Seinfeld, which he initially thought would fail because it was""way too good to be on TV""), as well as nuanced analyses of television's impact on political campaigns and the Vietnam War. Best of all are the funny and thoughtful capsule appreciations of individual shows: Bewitched is pegged as a 60s microcosm in which a clueless, gray-flannel-suited Darrin goes to the office while""back at home, everybody else was on acid;"" while Hawaii Five-O's Jack Lord""looked like a film-noir refugee who had wandered onto the set of a beach-blanket movie."" Leafing through this volume will provoke floods of nostalgia, followed by the unsettling realization of just how much our memories consist of the TV shows we have watched.