“…I have the TV on as I write. Other people might have the radio on, but I like the images on the screen beyond my laptop. TV is moving from cable to streaming and taking the good shows with it. Viewers are left with reality nonsense and reruns of mediocre films.
But there are rerun channels on now and they run shows so old, some are older than me.
Television was better in black-and-white. The actors are leaner. The scripts are crisper. The world looks better.
Maybe it is all convertibles that inundate the shows. Every model of cars came in ragtop back then. Everyone rode with the top down, including Ike.
A sniper in Dallas ended that in 1963.
Television was better for several reasons. The acting and writing were better because so many actors and writers were veterans of World War II and Korea. War matured and focused them.
Also, there were a bevy of magazine stories to turn into teleplays. Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock and the Perry Mason show based many of their episodes on such stories.
Today’s fiction writing seems limited to news stories in NYT and WaPo. And their stories are lame with holes in their plots even a Russian tank commander could drive a convoy through.
The Westerns featured men dealing with manly problems. Yes, there were battles between the Indians and the cowboys, but often the story line was the Lone Ranger or the Cartwrights standing up for the Indian.
The shows showed the hardships of cattle drives (“Rawhide”) and people drives (“Wagon Train”). The pioneers risked so much for oh so little.
Radio also made TV better as Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, and other comics moved from radio to TV. Benny’s pauses were better on TV.
Then there are the wardrobes. The people who came into your living room in the 1950s were men in suits and ties and women in dresses. For example, when Peter, Paul and Mary were on the Jack Benny show, the men wore ties (one wore a jacket and the other a sweater) and Mary wore a dress and high heels. And as beatniks, they were the nonconformists.
The 1950s empowered women. The 1960s empowered feminists. The feminist embrace of what they call transgenders (and in most cases are really transvestite) shows how little they really care about women.
Mock Donna Reed all you want, but her show was called “The Donna Reed Show.” She made the calls, not Carl Betz. In fact, she called the shots, not ABC. She got the network to back down and reduced her workload to 26 shows so she could spend time with her actual family. Her show sold a lot of Campbell’s soup.
Sexist? The biggest star in the 1950s was not Bob Hope or Jack Benny. It was Lucille Ball.
Liberals scoff. To them, the 1950s were too middle class. Liberals hate the middle class and always have. They want a world where they are the 1% and everyone else is poor…”
