From the "Golden Age" to "Peak TV": What Happened to Television in 70 Years of Emmys

From educating the masses to amusing them to death, from the centerpiece of the living room to a point of attention in the palm of your hand — television drama is cultural change, condensed.

Seventy years ago, on January 25, the first Emmy Awards ceremony took place at the Hollywood Athletic Club on Sunset Boulevard. Television's "Golden Age" had only just begun.

Seventy years on, another term of the same shape describes today's television: "Peak TV."

The two sound alike and describe entirely different eras. In the "Golden Age," television itself was a rarity. "Peak TV" refers to the dazzling supply of big-budget American series that seem to offer us infinite choice — and although the word "television" survives, streaming services are now where the shows actually get made.

From the "Golden Age" to "Peak TV," what happened to the television industry, as told by the Emmys?

How Did Television Lose Its Mission to Educate?

Say "television" or "TV series" today and people picture the same scene: one person, a bag of chips, a whole day on the sofa. Television is a synonym for pleasure, laziness, leisure. But in its early days, television's most conspicuous job was to instruct.

For early programming, that was not an entirely far-fetched idea. What aired carried a high cultural pedigree — shows adapted from the plays of Shakespeare, Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and other masters. For one thing, the households that could afford a television usually had more money and more schooling, so classic literature did not look forbidding to them. For another, videotape did not spread until the 1960s, so early programs were almost all broadcast live, and stage drama had a natural advantage under the pressure of live performance — the actors made their living onstage to begin with. This instructive quality was a defining mark of television's early "Golden Age."

Studies disagree on the exact span of the "Golden Age," but it generally falls between the late 1940s and the late 1950s. The Encyclopaedia Britannica dates it 1948-1959; The Television Industry: A Historical Dictionary puts it at 1947-1957.

Quiz shows were once seen as another genre carrying a heavy educational load. They were enormously popular in the mid-1950s: of the 16 evening-slot quiz shows that aired in the fall of 1956, six ranked in the top 30 by ratings. Then a scandal in 1959 changed everything. Charles Van Doren, the reigning champion of the quiz shows and a teaching assistant at Columbia University, admitted that the producers had given him the answers in advance.

From highbrow drama adaptations to the quiz-show scandal, television's mission to educate — the very quality that tied it to the Golden Age — came into question. The utopian mood television had built for the United States during the Cold War vanished.

Looking back now, no one insists any longer that television must instruct. Such programs still exist, but most of the time entertainment is what audiences want most. What does remain worth guarding against is the faking that the chase for ratings and profit brings with it.

A Vast Audience Pushed Television Toward Entertainment

In the 1950s, as the television industry felt out its own identity, nothing shaped the answer more than the growth of its audience.

As the postwar economy improved, television — once a luxury — moved into ordinary homes. In 1950, 9% of American households owned a set; by 1960 the figure had climbed to 90%. As the economy boomed, the baby boomers' appetite for entertainment rose with it. They had the money to buy the records they liked and see the movies they liked.

Programming follows the consumer; in the entertainment business that law always holds. So television gradually began giving audiences what they wanted.

At first it simply imitated forms of entertainment that already existed. The very first Emmy handed out, for "Most Outstanding Television Personality," went to Shirley Dinsdale, a ventriloquist; her puppet sidekick shared the honor.

Like adaptations of classic plays, talent-show variety programs were widely adopted because they suited live broadcast. But where the former took a certain cultural training to enjoy, variety clearly reached far more people. For the same reason, talk-show variety programs were popular too.

In the 1949-1950 television season, the three highest-rated programs were all variety shows: NBC's Texaco Star Theatre, which mixed acrobatics, opera and music; CBS's Toast of the Town (forerunner of the far more famous The Ed Sullivan Show); and CBS's Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts.

But what finally set television apart was the sitcom.

I Love Lucy, which premiered in 1951, was the top-rated show in four of its six seasons and won five Emmys. Against the prevailing "anthology drama" format of the day, in which each episode told a self-contained story, I Love Lucy gave its story continuity and taught audiences to look forward to the next one.

Networks first favored the sitcom for its low cost: the stories took place in a fixed space, and the sets could be built entirely on a soundstage.

More important, the light humor of sitcoms met the audience's appetite for entertainment exactly — a match that has held ever since. Domestic trivia strikes a chord naturally, but wrapped in comedy, ordinary viewers can be just as amused by geek stories like The Big Bang Theory or Silicon Valley. Television has the advantage over film in sheer entertainment, and shooting while broadcasting even lets writers rework a plot in response to what audiences say.

For Media Conglomerates, TV Series Make More Money Than Films

Neither the studios nor filmmakers thought much of the small screen at first, but television grew fast enough to outrun Hollywood. From the 1950s on, fewer and fewer people went to the movies, while more and more watched movies at home. In 1971, only 15.8 million Americans went to a cinema; in 1929 the figure had been 95 million.

Television gradually became the more valuable screen in American entertainment, and the center of American family life. As a medium, it had natural advantages in getting there.

David Bordwell, author of Film History: An Introduction, traces part of that advantage to changes in American cities. After World War II, "many Americans had enough money to buy houses and cars," and with that the middle class moved out of the cities and into the suburbs. The new residential districts rarely had movie theaters, so a television set became the mainstay of family entertainment.

Americans soon found that television offered no less entertainment than anything else.

The Hollywood giants that had assembled film and television under one roof through mergers and acquisitions naturally judged the two on commercial terms — and the record showed television to be the more profitable business.

In 21st Century Fox's fiscal year 2017, cable networks and television accounted for 76.4% of revenue, film for 28.8% (other segments ran at a loss). Disney's 2018 earnings report showed 41.2% of revenue coming from media networks, a segment that includes broadcast and cable channels, against only 16.8% from studio entertainment.

As a medium, TV series are easier to reach than film; they meet the need for content without leaving the house. Television's genres are varied too — news, sports, dramas of every type (and later the web series that grew out of the internet) — so there is always something to pull an audience in.

Content Exploded, and Television Became a Medium That Answers Everything

Because it could answer reality faster, television became the center of American culture as soon as it spread.

That response covers everything: on the factual side, news and documentary; on the entertainment side, drama, talk shows, animation and variety. The number of Emmy categories alone shows the "explosion" — what we now loosely call "the Emmys" usually means only the Primetime Emmy Awards, which honor primetime programming; there are also Daytime, Sports, and News & Documentary Emmys, among others.

And on television, the line between entertainment and reality was broken long ago.

That crossing can be traced to the 1970s, when more and more shows on the small screen began to reflect social problems. CBS's All in the Family, which premiered in 1971, took on rape, politics, race and sex. Unlike the breezy sitcoms before it, what it said carried urgency, and its language could be offensive. For the first time in television history, a warning ran before the broadcast, telling viewers that what followed might be controversial. All four of the show's actors — two leads, two supporting — won Emmys, a new record.

On Saturday Night Live, which premiered in 1975, both the host's monologue and the comedy sketches drew hard on current events. From the start the show was pitched as sharp, front-edge comedy for viewers aged 18 to 34. Still on the air, it is also the most-nominated program in Emmy history, with 252 nominations.

Television answers reality faster and faster. Set aside round-the-clock news channels like CNN: even entertainment shows react at astonishing speed. The Simpsons has mocked an event less than a week after it happened — shooting while broadcasting found a new use. Trump jokes became standard equipment on late-night talk shows: in the first 100 days of his presidency, late-night shows told 1,060 jokes about him, against 936, 546 and 440 for Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Television's attention to reality has spilled onto the Emmy ceremony itself. Winners use the platform to speak for one group or another in their acceptance speeches. Whether an awards ceremony should carry politics has stirred plenty of argument — and not only at the Emmys; the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Grammys face the same question. In recent years, ceremonies heavy with politics have set one ratings low after another, which has pushed people to weigh the question in ratings terms.

In a commentary arguing that awards ceremonies should engage with politics, The Atlantic wrote that it is easy to see why they prefer to honor artistic achievement rather than risk wearing the audience out: Hollywood is, at bottom, a factory of escape. But it was exactly that urge to look away from what is ugly, combined with a fixation on glamour and ratings, that let men like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein abuse their power for so long without punishment.

The same argument holds for television's attention to reality. And answering reality quickly is what keeps television alive.

TV Series Level Up, and Peak TV Arrives

In 2015, FX chief executive John Landgraf coined the term "Peak TV." In his view, the number of American series, after a stretch of fast growth, had hit a ceiling and was about to fall. In that year, 2015, there were 422 American series — 33 more than the year before, and double the 2009 figure. But the number did not fall as Landgraf predicted. It kept climbing: 455 in 2016, and 495 by 2018.

Behind the surge, the most direct cause is that there are more platforms airing shows — cable channels in the 1980s, streaming services after 2010. Their arrival poured more resources into the business, raised the quality of the shows, and even brought new creative approaches. "American series," covering web series and broadcast drama alike, became the more fitting description.

HBO, founded in 1972, began making original content in 1980, opening an era that belonged to cable. Public networks, which lived on advertising, played it safe for fear that controversial content would offend sponsors. In 1989, an episode of ABC's thirtysomething showed two gay men in bed together; five of the show's sponsors pulled their advertising.

Cable channels, which charged viewers a subscription directly, never had sponsors to offend in the first place. To win specific audiences, they tailored content to them: MTV specialized in music videos, Nickelodeon made children's animation, Lifetime leaned toward programming for women.

For HBO, the route it chose was high-quality drama.

David Chase had pitched The Sopranos to Fox, CBS and ABC, and all three turned him down. Fox wanted a simpler plot; CBS could not see why the lead had to be a man in therapy; ABC said the show had too much swearing. In the end HBO gave Chase his chance. The Sopranos repaid it with 21 Emmys.

More platforms made quality the core of the competition. To guarantee it, spending went up: in 2001 HBO put $125 million into the 10-episode Band of Brothers, a budget nearly twice that of the film Saving Private Ryan. When Game of Thrones premiered in 2011, its first season cost $6 million an episode; by the final season, about to air, the figure had reached $15 million. With one season still to come, Game of Thrones had already become the most-awarded drama series ever, with 47 Emmys.

The machinery of creation began to tilt toward art. American series were willing to hand power to the director. Writers used to be the backbone of a show's creative team, and it was common for a single season to hire different directors for different episodes. Now directors and writers stand roughly level. The industry produced the idea of the "showrunner" — not only the source of the creative vision but the hand on the tiller during production, the counterpart of the auteur director in film.

Where American television encouraged invention, film staked everything on IP projects and lost ground. It is not hard to see, then, why more and more film directors have drifted toward television. While making the Boardwalk Empire pilot for HBO, Martin Scorsese told a friend: "I feel like I'm back in the 1970s, doing what I love in my own style."

To keep from falling behind, the public networks began making high-quality drama too. NBC's Hill Street Blues, launched in 1981, pioneered writing techniques that were later widely copied: each episode developed several storylines, some closed within the hour, others carried across the season. Heavy use of close-ups, quick cuts between scenes and voice-over gave the show a documentary feel. With 98 Emmy nominations in all, Hill Street Blues proved that a public network could reach artistry too.

Even the sitcom, cheap and easy to produce, worked at invention. Take Modern Family, which won ABC five Outstanding Comedy Series Emmys, tying the record: on one hand it folded in the documentary form — the mockumentary — and on the other it used single-camera shooting, rare in sitcoms, a method suited to location work that gave the show a cinematic feel.

And when streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu poured into the drama business to compete, the same story played out again. Their high-quality shows helped heal the wound the quiz-show scandal had left on television, and opened a new golden age.

What Netflix brought was more than another platform. By releasing a whole season at once, it trained audiences to binge, and the habit fed back into the work. Because a full season was finished before release, the thinking behind it grew more coherent; creators no longer adjusted week by week to audience feedback, but took the direction of the plot into their own hands.

At the 70th Emmy Awards, Netflix took 112 nominations, ending HBO's 17-year run at the top of the nominations tally. That year Netflix spent $8 billion on content — by some accounts more — far beyond HBO's $2 billion.

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