Television Was Going to Make America Brilliant. It Had One Job.

Let us begin by taking the optimists seriously, because they deserve it, and because the comedy lands harder if we do.

In the late 1940s, as television sets began appearing in American homes at a pace that astonished even the manufacturers selling them, something remarkable happened among the country's intellectual class. Rather than greeting the new medium with suspicion — which would have been the historically reliable response of intellectuals toward popular entertainment — a significant number of them embraced it with the enthusiasm of people who had just discovered that civilization was going to be fine after all.

Television, they argued, was not merely a novelty. It was a delivery mechanism for everything that had previously been locked behind geography, income, and circumstance. The symphony. The lecture. The Senate debate. The Shakespearean performance. All of it, arriving in the living rooms of ordinary Americans who had never had access to any of it before.

They were not being naive. They were being, in the most generous reading, premature.

The Educators Make Their Case

The educational establishment of the late 1940s and early 1950s came to television with genuine and not entirely unreasonable excitement.

FCC Commissioner Frieda Hennock — one of the few women in that room, which is its own separate article — fought aggressively in the early 1950s to reserve broadcast channels specifically for educational television. Her argument was that commercial interests would inevitably crowd out public benefit if the spectrum were left entirely to the market. She was correct about that, which makes her story more complicated than a simple entry in the wrong-prediction hall of fame.

But beyond the regulatory fight, educators across the country were making bolder claims. Television would extend the classroom. Rural students would access the same quality of instruction as their urban counterparts. Adult learners who had never finished school would receive, essentially, a second chance at education, delivered through the same device they used to watch the evening news.

Elementary school systems in multiple states ran pilot programs broadcasting instructional content directly into classrooms. Universities explored "telecourses." The Ford Foundation poured money into educational television with the confidence of an institution that believed it had identified a lever of civilizational improvement.

Some of this worked, in limited and specific ways. But the vision — television as a great equalizer of American educational attainment — collided almost immediately with the other thing television turned out to be very good at.

The Intellectuals Make Their Case (With Feeling)

Outside the formal educational establishment, a broader class of cultural optimists was making grander claims.

In 1951, a writer for a prominent magazine described television as "the most powerful instrument for democratic culture that civilization has yet produced" — a sentence that requires a certain amount of courage to read aloud today. The argument was that opera, theater, and serious music had always been luxuries of the urban upper class, available only to those with proximity and money. Television abolished both requirements simultaneously.

This was genuinely true, as far as it went. Early television did broadcast opera. It did carry serious drama. Paddy Chayefsky was writing for the medium. Edward R. Murrow was doing journalism of genuine consequence. The cultural optimists could point to real things on actual screens.

What they were less equipped to model was the economics of what happened next.

A Brief Note on What Happens When You Also Broadcast Wrestling

Commercial television, it emerged, was not primarily in the enlightenment business. It was in the advertising business, which meant it was in the audience business, which meant it was in the business of giving the largest possible number of people something they wanted to watch at 9pm on a Tuesday.

This is not a criticism. It is simply a description of incentives.

The ratings arrived, as ratings do, with the blunt honesty of a system that does not care what you hoped would happen. Americans, given free choice and a comfortable couch, watched variety shows, game shows, westerns, and situation comedies in numbers that dwarfed the audiences for educational programming. The opera broadcasts drew respectable numbers by the standards of opera. They drew catastrophic numbers by the standards of "I Love Lucy."

By the mid-1950s, the shape of American television was becoming clear enough that the optimists began quietly adjusting their predictions. The language shifted from "will" to "could" and eventually to "should" — the grammatical retreat of a prediction that has noticed the evidence.

Newton Minow, appointed FCC Chairman by President Kennedy in 1961, delivered what became the most famous single verdict on the medium's first decade. He called American television a "vast wasteland" in a speech that the industry received with the enthusiasm you would expect and the public received with the recognition of something they already knew but hadn't heard said out loud.

The optimists of 1948 had not predicted a vast wasteland. They had predicted the opposite of a vast wasteland. They had predicted, essentially, a vast garden.

The Part Where We Are Slightly Fair to the Optimists

Here is where this website's commitment to intellectual honesty requires a small intervention on behalf of the people we have been gently mocking.

They were not entirely wrong. They were wrong about the primary use of the medium, but not about its capacity.

Television did carry the Kennedy-Nixon debates into living rooms across the country and genuinely transformed how Americans engaged with electoral politics. It did broadcast the Civil Rights Movement into the homes of white Americans who might otherwise have remained insulated from what was happening in Birmingham and Selma — and that broadcast changed minds in ways that are difficult to fully account for. It carried the moon landing. It carried Sesame Street, which has an actual, documented, peer-reviewed educational impact on children that the 1948 optimists would have found entirely vindicating.

The medium was capable of exactly what they said it was capable of. It simply spent most of its time doing something else, because something else was what the market rewarded.

This is the distinction the optimists missed — not what television could do, but what television would do once it was handed to an industry with shareholders and sponsors and an audience that had, after a long day, strong opinions about whether they wanted Tosca or a game show.

The Verdict

The television optimists of the late 1940s were not foolish. They were idealistic about a medium that turned out to be entirely capable of fulfilling their ideals — and almost entirely uninterested in doing so at scale.

The vast wasteland remark landed because it was accurate about the aggregate even as exceptions existed. Public television eventually arrived, funded partly by the federal government and partly by the annual guilt of people who watched three hours of commercial television for every thirty minutes of PBS, and felt the appropriate feelings about that ratio.

The optimists wanted a nation uplifted. They got a nation entertained, occasionally uplifted, and very well-informed about which detergent cleaned the most effectively.

The prophets were wrong. Mostly. But they were wrong in a way that tells you more about human nature than about their failure of imagination — which is, in its own way, a form of being right about something important.

They just didn't air that part during prime time.