How Tv Got from There to Here

By Richard Zoglin

All right, everybody, ready for a trip down TV's memory lane? You know the landmarks. Milton Berle and the Men of Texaco. Lucille Ball and the vat of grapes. Edward R. Murrow lashing out at Joe McCarthy on See It Now, and Walter Cronkite interrupting a soap opera to report the death of John F. Kennedy. Carlton Fisk coaxing his home run into fair territory in the 1975 World Series, and the U.S. hockey team striking gold in the 1980 Olympics ("Do you believe in miracles?"). J.R. Ewing getting plugged on Dallas, Archie Bunker shouting insults at Meathead, and Richard Nixon saying goodbye to politics -- twice.

Sixty years after crude signals began emerging from America's first regularly transmitting station, in Schenectady, N.Y., TV has stopped to take its longest, most comprehensive look at itself. Television, a series of eight hour-long documentaries exploring the medium's history, originated as a 13- part program on Britain's Granada Television. It has been adapted and Americanized under the aegis of two PBS stations, Los Angeles' KCET and New York City's WNET. Roughly two-thirds of the material in the U.S. version is new, including clips, interviews with key figures from TV's past and narration by former NBC Newsman Edwin Newman.

The aim is nothing less than a definitive survey of the nation's most pervasive and powerful communications medium. It is a venture rich with possibilities and fraught with pitfalls. TV has traded so wantonly in its past -- from documentary retrospectives on the so-called Golden Age to those proliferating "reunions" of old series -- that each new look backward has a tougher job justifying its existence. Dusting off the old kinescopes again is not enough. "All too often," Newman comments at one point, "television is an eye but not a brain." Unfortunately, the same is true of this briskly watchable but ultimately disappointing series.

To be sure, there are marvelous moments, lots of them. Executive Producer Jack Sameth and Writer/Co-Producer Michael Winship have done an impressive job of excavation. Along with the familiar highlights are dozens of more obscure nuggets: the antiquated newscasts of John Cameron Swayze and Douglas Edwards, when stories were illustrated with childlike drawings or photos held up to the camera by the anchorman; Ronald Reagan doing a Mortimer Snerd impression as the mystery guest on What's My Line?, Vladimir Zworykin, one of TV's technological pioneers, being interviewed by former Radio Announcer Ben Grauer in a 1948 oddity called The Story of Television. "Ben," says Zworykin, in heavily accented English, "it is like fever. When the television bug bites you, you never can stop working on it."

The series makes some of its most provocative points in two episodes devoted to TV news. Simply by its presence, television sometimes exaggerated the scope of 1960s street demonstrations: a "mob" looks more threatening in closeup, we are shown, than when the camera pulls back to reveal the relatively small number of people involved. There is much fascinating footage of John F. Kennedy's and Richard Nixon's TV appearances, illustrating once again how friendly the medium was to one, cruel to the other. Nixon's "Checkers" speech, one of his rare TV triumphs, is included, of course -- but not just the familiar passage about Pat's "Republican cloth coat"; also Nixon's closing words, when he leans stiffly into the camera and intones, "Remember folks, Eisenhower is a great man . . ." just as time runs out.

Television gets high marks for inclusiveness, with few notable omissions (cable gets short shrift, and commercials are mentioned only in passing). Organization, however, is a problem; too often it seems arbitrary or wrongheaded. An episode about TV drama contains no mention of Roots, the highest-rated mini-series in history; it shows up later in a section on TV and race. ABC's decision to pair Howard Cosell with Don Meredith on Monday Night Football is examined for several minutes in the opening program, yet Sesame Street, possibly TV's single most important contribution to American society, is tucked into the last ten minutes of the final episode.

What is missing from Television is a critical point of view or guiding theme -- or, indeed, anything that would lift the series above a mere catalog of Great Moments from TV's Past. The uninspired narration does little more than scoot us from one clip to the next ("Dragnet was the first hit police show. It has been followed by a succession of cop shows."), with little insight into how the medium got from there to here. The series focuses, wisely, on programming rather than the business of TV; still, somewhere amid the clips of Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason and Playhouse 90, one longs for at least some discussion of how networks came into being. Nor is there much of a global perspective: despite a few glimpses of TV in Britain, Japan and elsewhere, the program offers no explanation of why TV developed so differently in the U.S.

Images do have a way of pushing out ideas on television, but that is no excuse for the intellectual flabbiness of Television. The series concludes with a sober-minded examination of whether the medium has fulfilled its "promise," which here seems to be identified with opera, ballet and Richard Burton reading selections from Dylan Thomas. So much for all those fun clips of sitcoms and game shows we have been watching for seven-plus hours. Television induces us to wallow in nostalgia, then tries to make us feel guilty about it.