Volume 25, Number 5 · April 6, 1978
TV Guide
By James Wolcott
Television: The First Fifty Years
by Jeff Greenfield
Harry N. Abrams, 280, over 400 illustrations pp., $35.00
Remote Control
by Frank Mankiewicz, by Joel Swerdlow
Quadrangle/Times Books, 308 pp., $15.00
The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate
by Erik Barnouw
Oxford University Press, 225 pp., $10.00
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Jerry Mander
Morrow, 371 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Weighing in at over five pounds, Jeff Greenfield's Television: The First Fifty Years is a huge slab of a book, ugly and sumptuous. Other efforts have been made to honor the kaleidoscopic complexities of TV—e.g., How Sweet It Was, by Arthur Shulman and Roger Youman, TV Book, edited by Judy Fireman—but their texts were wistfully nostalgic and the photos lacked beauty, clarity, suggestiveness.[1] Television, celebratory and lavishly produced, seldom descends into scrapbook drabness: even the black-and-white shots from TV's infancy have a faintly luminous glow. A still from a 1948 'Studio One' play shows Margaret Sullavan—head bowed, eyes shut—sitting at a table in a saloon, flanked by an officious waiter and an apprehensive man in a trenchcoat. The photograph is doubly evocative, capturing not only the glum, sunless realism of TV drama during what is called the 'Golden Age,' but Sullavan's own tragic loneliness. Other shots are cheerier: Arthur Godfrey sways in a grass skirt; Ed Sullivan chats with a demurely slutty Ann-Margret.
Review, 3492 words
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