The Show-and-Sell Machine

By Richard Zoglin

Anniversaries are television's most annoying bad habit. No TV series, it seems, can pass a milestone ending in zero (Barbara Walters' 50th special, Sesame Street's 20th season) without leading us on a forced march down Memory Lane. Now, saints preserve us, the 50th anniversary of TV itself has arrived -- at least by one measure. On April 20, 1939, RCA formally introduced the modern system of TV broadcasting at the New York World's Fair. One could just as plausibly trace TV's origin back to 1927, when the nation's first experimental TV stations went on the air. Or ahead to the start of regularly scheduled national TV broadcasts, which did not come until after the end of World War II.

But who's counting? The real problem in celebrating TV's anniversary is not locating the proper date but encompassing adequately a medium whose impact has been so broad, so overpowering, so unfathomable. What should TV's birthday revelers commemorate? TV as an entertainment medium? As a chronicler of our times? A business enterprise? A technological device? A social force?

The folks at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History have come to the wise conclusion that "all of the above" is the worst possible answer. In an admirably focused and thoughtful new exhibit, "American Television: From the Fair to the Family, 1939-89," running until next April, the museum shies away from a nostalgic, you-must-remember- this approach. Imagine a survey of TV history with no mention of Milton Berle, Edward R. Murrow or the Kennedy-Nixon debates.

Instead, the exhibit treats TV as a chapter in American social and economic history: it shows how the medium worked its way into the American home and what changes it wrought there. In the view of curator Larry Bird, who wrote the show's text, television was not just a masterpiece of marketing, it was a key shaper of the postwar consumer age. TV helped induce Americans, still reeling from the Depression and a world war, to start buying again.

Introduced at the end of a decade of economic hardship, TV was touted early on as a creator of jobs as much as a purveyor of entertainment. The centerpiece of the Smithsonian's exhibit is a display of old TV sets -- clunky wooden boxes with tiny, anemic-looking screens. But perhaps more significant is a selection of print advertisements that tried to sell Americans on this strange new gizmo.

The first ads for TV sets showed elegantly dressed models watching in posh surroundings, and often contained practical advice. ("Should the room in which you are viewing television be darkened to resemble a movie theater? Answer: Definitely not!") But soon the marketers of TV had a brainstorm: promoting the new device as a way of bringing the family together again. "There is great happiness," exulted an ad for DuMont sets, "in the home where the family is held together by this new common bond -- television." Another promotional piece listed the things that "took the family away from home" -- including baseball, vaudeville and movies -- and presented TV as the family-saving alternative. (The job may have been done too well; today a lot of parents might welcome a baseball game or two to get the kids away from the set.)

Many of TV's first users were reluctant to give the set a conspicuous place in the home, often hiding it behind cabinets. But the TV set soon became the % focus of the living room. By the early '50s, Motorola was advertising "a TV set for every decorating scheme" -- schemes helpfully defined as "period formal," "period informal," "modern formal" and "modern informal." Only later, when families could afford more than one set, was TV marketed as a personal item -- from the first bulky "portables" to the Sony Watchman.

Once Americans were sold on TV, the new medium began to sell them on a wealth of consumer products -- both through commercials and, more subtly, through the well-appointed suburban homes portrayed in the shows themselves. One of the exhibit's cleverest displays is a caseful of advertiser premiums tied in with popular shows: a Lone Ranger deputy badge (15 cents plus a Cheerios box top), a Captain Video board game, a Cisco Kid writing tablet. Such premiums were one of the first methods used by sponsors to gauge the size and composition of their audience. Also on display is a collection of TV- inspired lunch boxes, as well as a tribute to another important box: the early Audimeters used by the A.C. Nielsen Co. to measure viewership, which helped turn TV into a sophisticated selling medium.

Yes, Fonzie's jacket is here too. So is J.R. Ewing's hat, a coffeepot from The Guiding Light and an "Awwa-a-y We Go" toy bus marking Jackie Gleason's switch from the DuMont network to CBS in 1952. But the Smithsonian has gone well beyond such mementos. Refreshingly, it has illuminated what TV -- the medium itself, and not merely the programs it has presented -- has meant in American life. Not a bad birthday present.