IN BROADCAST TELEVISION’S experimental first years, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, producers borrowed and adapted formats and representational strategies from existing media: soap operas and serials from radio, comedy-variety shows from vaudeville, and realist drama from so-called “legitimate” theater. On television, these stand-alone plays were united under the umbrella of the weekly anthology, and their theatrical ideals of authenticity, artistry, immediacy, and presence were indicated by their program titles: Kraft Television Theatre (NBC, 1947–58), The Philco Television Playhouse (NBC, 1948–55), Westinghouse Studio One (CBS, 1948–58). These teleplays aired live, bringing Broadway-caliber performances into the living rooms of anyone within range of a station and enough disposable income to purchase a TV set, while giving each viewer the best seat in the house. In its earliest years, television was understood to have the potential to democratize capital-C culture, with the anthology drama as the new medium’s purest form. Writing in 1954, cultural critic Gilbert Seldes described the hour-long live anthology teleplay as the “top of the prestige pyramid of all television drama.”
By the middle of the decade, however, the increasing prominence of filmed programming on the prime-time airwaves would threaten the format’s preeminence, representing for many commentators a loss of dramatic artistry and prestige. The brief period in which the anthology drama flourished is often referred to in retrospect as the original “Golden Age” of television—a time when, as one later critic wrote, “serious people could take TV seriously.” Already in 1959, a major moment of change for the American television industry, promotional discourse about The Twilight Zone (1959–64) emphasized the central role of producer, screenwriter, and host Rod Serling, implicitly calling back to a prelapsarian TV era when Serling had made his name as a writer of live dramas. That the Twilight Zone reboot (2019–20) invoked the literal ghost of Serling—in the context of a self-reflexive episode whose characters questioned the program’s relationship to the category of “prestige” television—demonstrates the power the anthology continues to exert on our understanding of TV’s past as well as its present, when television is, once again, considered a potentially “serious” medium for “serious” people.
In her new book Gold Dust on the Air: Television Anthology Drama and Midcentury American Culture, Molly A. Schneider reexamines the mythology surrounding the television anthology and expands our perception of this format—which, in contrast to its “Golden Age” reputation, varied widely in terms of budget, genre, and ideological messaging. Because anthologies were made up of stand-alone episodes without ongoing plots or recurring characters, they could be particularly nimble in terms of their aesthetics and politics, and take risks that could not have been sustained across full seasons or series. Schneider argues persuasively that the anthology drama provided a venue for discourses on American national identity during the massive cultural, economic, and political changes occurring at midcentury. In particular, she documents the programs’ complex and conflicting messages about the “right” and “proper” role of the individual in relation to the family, the community, and the nation, and deconstructs, through thematic analyses of representative teleplays, how these historically specific constructions of American identity were made.
As the first comprehensive academic monograph on the television anthology, Gold Dust on the Air provides a model of media-focused cultural history based on in-depth archival research. In addition to published material such as contemporaneous newspaper reviews, critical articles, and retrospective memoirs, Schneider assembles much of her history from extensive analysis of business records, scripts, production documents, and correspondence among industry professionals and with their viewers. Schneider combines this archival research with cultural studies approaches, using theoretical frameworks borrowed from Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Raymond Williams, and Michel Foucault.
This dual focus on culture and industry as interdependent, mutually determining forces is one of the book’s main strengths. Gold Dust on the Air traces many questions and concerns about the business of American television back to the medium’s origins in the mid-20th century. The discourses of “quality” and “prestige” that have stuck to the anthology drama series in our shared cultural imagination, and which continue to shape our evaluation of TV, emerged, Schneider shows, in a specific industrial context. While the technology of television was originally believed to hold the potential for a new form of dramatic realism, its American incarnation developed under a privately owned commercial model with the goal of selling audiences to advertisers. The prestige label attached to the anthology drama was thus part of the way the fledgling industry constructed its defense, invoking artistic quality against accusations of misusing the public airwaves for private gain.
Early TV writers, network executives, producers, and commercial sponsors walked this fine line between art and commerce by “articulating American values as consumable through both quality products and quality television.” The characteristic features of this strategy were inextricably tied to the larger contexts in which it took shape—principally, Cold War concerns about the deleterious effects of “mass” media on the American public and anxieties about the place of social elites in a cultural landscape that was beginning to show worrying signs of democratization. As Schneider demonstrates, the Cold War is also crucial for understanding the significance of Method acting to the anthology’s claims to represent everyday Americans and authentic situations. Many high-profile teleplays were recognized for their portrayals of a paradoxical archetype Schneider terms the “misfit everyman.” Proponents of this kind of storytelling often understood it as an implicit critique of the universalizing fantasy of the American dream. Meanwhile, detractors suspected Method-affiliated actors and directors of harboring un-American beliefs, in part because the Method’s middlebrow status threatened the constructed hierarchies of taste that supported dominant conceptions of the national culture.
Throughout the book, Schneider’s analysis leads to conclusions that may challenge present-day assumptions about midcentury American life. Chapter two, “Mythologies of Belonging: Conformity and Neighbor Panic,” invokes some of the most enduring impressions about the Cold War–era United States in order to challenge them. Deviating from received wisdom that midcentury Americans were largely “other-directed” and feared standing out from their peers, Schneider argues, following Foucault, that the era’s concern with the concept of conformity is more significant than the truth or falsity of this characterization. Schneider draws from contemporary African American newspapers to demonstrate that for people of color and other marginalized groups, the concept was not simply coercive and alienating but also could be understood as a positive protection of the rights and privileges of American citizenship: “‘conformity’ was also a word used by the [prominent Chicago African American newspaper] Defender to connote equality and equal opportunity as a promise of American democracy.” Schneider’s third chapter, “A Tired Nonconformist: Censorship and Citizen Serling,” may cause readers to rethink their preconceptions of censorship, another bête noire associated with television (and film) of the postwar era. Schneider details Serling’s efforts to meaningfully address themes such as racism while managing the fears of commercial sponsors and network executives that the resultant controversy might drive down ratings and lead to boycotts.
In this chapter, and throughout the book, Schneider is committed to providing historically nuanced accounts, not simply those that would most appeal to current-day readers. The image of the TV writer as a heroic individualist fighting autocratic network philistines is central to the mythos of Serling as invoked by the Twilight Zone reboot. While Schneider’s sympathies clearly lie with Serling and his repeated efforts to dramatize the brutal lynching of Black youth Emmett Till, she is also careful to provide context for pro-censorship arguments as they were understood at the time. Television, positioned as a “guest” invited into the American home, had a responsibility not to offend its “host.” Content regulation could be justified in the interest of protecting the home and family, which would in turn increase Americans’ trust in the new medium and further its role in promoting “the responsibilities which the citizen has towards his society,” in the language of the National Association of Television and Radio Broadcasters’ code of conduct. The book’s fourth chapter, “A Residue of Ugliness: Traumas and Fantasies of War,” provides particularly vibrant examples of the possible disconnect in broadcast media between the messages of program content and those of the advertising that justified a program’s existence. As Schneider demonstrates, several teleplays that dealt directly with the lingering mental and emotional trauma of combat ultimately served as apologia for their sponsors: companies accused of war profiteering were recast as good “corporate citizens.”
While Schneider gives due attention to such economic incentives, the gender politics roiling just under the surface of these texts receive less consideration. Schneider acknowledges that women both were the target audience for many anthology programs and in some cases wrote the teleplays, which at times dealt obliquely with the question of their own role in the public sphere. However, the writers, producers, and network executives—as well as the misfits and traumatized war heroes—that populate Gold Dust on the Air are primarily male, and their problems generally concern their integration into the public sphere, often seen as a masculine right. The ghettoization of women and their lives that obscured such topics on prime-time “prestige” programs stems from the segmentation of the broadcasting day into “daytime” and “evening” schedules, with corresponding assumptions about audiences and appropriate content. However, given that the central inquiry animating Schneider’s book is what “one might think of as desirable, right, and possible in the context of American life” and how midcentury anthology dramas mediated those questions, the role of women feels particularly resonant. For women as much as men, Cold War discourses sharply delimited appropriate gender roles, family structures, and expressions of sexuality, framing failure to abide by these standards as issues of public concern and even potential threats to national security.
While Schneider’s stated goal is to expand readers’ conceptions of anthology drama beyond the customary canon, the restrictions of length and thematic coherence limit the book’s focus primarily to the kind of realist drama that has received the most cultural acclaim and critical attention. Other programs that fit under the anthology umbrella that made regular use of genre formats are mentioned more briefly. The extended discussion of The Twilight Zone in the context of Serling’s career, for instance, focuses on the ways science fiction and fantasy could convey metaphorical critiques while allaying sponsors’ concerns over potentially controversial material. In fact, even before The Twilight Zone, many anthology programs had strong ties to popular genres such as SF, fantasy, and horror, including the critically acclaimed Suspense (CBS, 1949–54) and the technologically innovative Lights Out (NBC, 1949–52). As part of their interest in cultural anxieties of the time, these programs often dealt with the sorts of “women’s issues” and problems of domestic life otherwise absent from the evening time slots. In discussing the cultural legacy of the anthology beyond the midcentury period, the concluding chapter of Gold Dust on the Air notes that many programs in subsequent anthology cycles fit into these understudied genres. Future work may build on Schneider’s to examine the importance to television history of less culturally legitimated forms and the ongoing influence of the anthology format.
Overall, Gold Dust on the Air’s consistent focus on the rhetoric of (and around) television demonstrates the importance of looking at how textual meanings are made in their respective cultural moment, before their significance is reinterpreted by scholars and nostalgic viewers. Following Barthes, Schneider reminds us that myths are historical constructions that hide their own historical contingency in order to appear natural and eternal. Gold Dust on the Air demonstrates that TV texts are useful objects for examining “the kinds of struggle involved in the production of American mythologies.” Referring to the teleplays of writer Reginald Rose, Schneider observes that they “critique American mythology, they are mythological objects themselves, and they enter into subsequent mythologies about the midcentury period.” Gold Dust on the Air gives readers a sense of what it meant to be an American television viewer at an earlier moment when spectatorship and national identity were in flux. As Schneider observes in the book’s conclusion, the anthology format has had something of a renaissance in the past 15 years. In our current era of globalized, narrowcast entertainment and fragmentation of the mass audience, as we once again consider what it means for television to be “quality” in a rapidly changing industrial landscape, the question of how TV may delineate and promote “American” values may seem both more relevant and more impossible to answer.
