Saturday, November 29, 2014

Take-Aways

Now that we're near the end of the semester, what have you learned or taken away from the study of Television History?  Feel free to focus on one topic or provide a short summary of various points. 

10 comments:

  1. As a non-screen arts major, I really did not have much of an idea of what this course was going to entail. Compared to my other engineering classes, I thought this class was going to be a fun way to fulfill my distribution requirements and I was not going to get much out of this course. However, I have been able to take so much more away from this course. First of all, I have never realized how much power there is behind the writing and production of television. Television is truly a representation of times and all of the social context of that time. This has caused me to think a lot of the television I currently watch and the future interpretations of the content.

    I have really enjoyed watching Ellen in screening and the looking into the social issues and connotations of being gay. This is still a large issue that is being portrayed in society and television today in shows like Modern Family. It was very interesting to see to very beginning of this movement with Ellen's coming out episode. I also found the screenings focused on other specific issues such as The Outer Limits (Cold War/nuclear weapons) and Crisis Behind a Presidential Commitment (Civil Right's Movement ) particularly interesting because they help put the social issues of the time in context and make it easier to understand what the people of the time were feeling.

    More towards the beginning of the course, I loved the screenings because I had never watched older television shows. I really enjoyed watching family sitcoms such as I Remember Mama, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and later All in the Family and Rosanne. This transition in the image of the family was interesting to watch and was the topic for my final research paper.

    Overall, I have been able to take a lot away from this course and I have enjoyed it very much. I had an unique perspective coming into this course and I am glad I chose this course. I will never be able to simply watch television again. I will always be looking into to it at a deeper level and finding new meaning (which will help to minimally justify my Netflix addiction).

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  2. History will always be interesting because it is an explanation of how we got to where we are today. It is no different with television history, and I have enjoyed looking back on the evolution of the genre. This holds true in terms of genre, along with race and social issues. We learned how The Cosby Show became acceptable, and it was due to Amos and Andy and Beulah (for being the first show to prominently feature black actors despite less than positive representation), and then Julia (despite its supposed color-blindness), and then Good Tines (for its important depiction of a black family).

    This is also true of issues like sexuality. Fron shows like Ellen, to Queer as Folk, and now it isn't shocking when a gay person appears on television. TV has slowly evolved with the social climate of the era, often acting as a barometer for progress.

    It is also cool to see how television changed from a production standpoint. It drew from an earlier entertainment medium in radio, and also had influences from vaudeville as well. If I were to look at my favorite shows, I could trace things they drew upon from previous shows. Shows like Mulaney today have drawn on the three camera approach of past comedies like Seinfeld. An analysis of Seinfeld could bring up similarities that is shares with previous shows.

    These shows also tell a lot about the era. Dragnet 1967 is a society trying to act against the increased drug usage of young people during the 1960s. The Outer Limits is a show that dealt with the Cold War fear of having an anonymous voice telling a viewer that it now has complete control. Each show drags a little bit of its time frame with it.

    I have really enjoyed seeing the changes in television over tie in the class, and as someone who wants to write screenplays, it shows common conventions over time and what can be played with for future shows.

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  3. Initially, I thought this TV history class would be boring, but it turned out productive and entertaining. Before taking this class, I didn’t really watch any American television shows although I watched a lot of American movies (at least once a week). But after taking this class, I found my favorite television show:I Love Lucy, which was a prefeminist sitcom showing the main character resisting the boundary of the 1950s or the traditional role of women as housewife. Even though this show is produced in 1950s, it is still relevant now because some women are still closely related to gender roles like housewife and mother.
    After taking this course, I feel I can learn a lot more in television shows if I watch it critically rather than just focus on the plotlines. Through critical analysis, I might perceive racial issues in shows like Amos’ n’ Andy, Beulah, and Julia, gender issues in shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, and social issues in shows like Dragnet 1967 (drug), Dynasty (rich; upper class), and Ellen (homosexuality). While entertaining, television provided useful resources for later generations to understand the history by watching shows because it reflected issues of the time.

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  4. This may sound a bit silly, but taking this class made me fully realize the cultural impact that TV has made throughout history. The political and social changes that have resulted through the creators of television content and regulation are profound. For example, when Vietnam War footage entered households across America, citizens saw for the first time the actual conditions as they were happening. This influenced actual protests and change. TV has made huge strides, combating race and gender issues from the 1960s until the present. TV shows like Julia and I Spy have really aided in setting better standards for people of color in the media.

    Before I took this class, I took TV Theory (I sort of did it backwards), so coming into the class I was ready to analyze the texts and dissect the constructs of each program. What I didn’t expect was discovering the eye opening impact that television has. I feel similarly about this class as I did about learning about space in an astronomy class for the first time: I firstly learned about the planet Earth, studying it closely, and then examined it in the eye-opening context of the galaxy. To me this class was like learning about the galaxy, totally awe-inspiring. As a SAC student, I learned a lot about the value and responsibility that we have entering the TV and Film world. I am excited to play an active role of shaping future cultural constructs (and hopefully make some jokes writing for TV along the way).

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  5. I really valued this course because we not only analyzed the history of American Television, but also explored the historical events in the world and how they impacted the television industry. Being an Economics and Political science major, I definitely enjoyed talking about the impacts of the government, such as the regulatory practices in the 1950’s and the deregulation in the Reagan Era. Further, I really appreciated learning about the industrial setup and how the networks exercised oligopolistic strategies until the post-network era.

    More than the history itself, I really enjoyed the screenings in class. I elected to take this course because I absolutely love watching TV. Therefore, I was really hoping to watch some older shows and see how they relate to shows today. In addition, I wanted to be able to have more insight on the television shows that my parents always talked about, such as Dallas and Miami Vice. As many people have already said, this class taught me a lot about how cultural issues, such as gender and racial politics, are represented through the television set. The example that burns in my memory is Kung Fu. It was almost appalling to see how Asian Americans were so poorly represented. Furthermore, the fact that the producers had to cast a lead role to a man who was half white, half Asian shows the tremendous resistance that existed in the 1950s and 1960s. This poor representation was also seen in Texaco Star Theatre. Overall, the dynamics of race and gender were accurately reflected through television and this class provided me with the skills to analyze these issues in any TV show.

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  6. [Ok so everything I write two seconds ago was lost because I forgot to sign in before posting and so when I clicked publish it brought me to the sign in page. Ahh.]

    Before coming into this class, my knowledge of all things related to television is pretty much non-existent. I was just another consumer sitting in front of the television set, taking in everything on screen, including commercials, passively. After taking this course however, I no longer look at television the same way. The history behind television is so complex and so rich that I just cannot look at it the same way. I would never have guessed how television had such a close relationship to radio for instance. I always thought they were two separate entities. I guess one aspect I find most interesting is how the relationship between television shows and advertisement has changed over time. It is amazing to see how far television has come, from having Carnation Whipped cream intrude and affect the storyline of The Burns and Allen Show to having multiple advertisements being screened during the timespan of one episode of for example Modern Family. It is also interesting to learn about the underlying factors that caused shifts like this. For instance, in this case, it was because of a change towards the "magazine" model. Lastly, I also really liked how we got to watch many old, black and white, television shows, such as I Love Lucy (which I am addicted to now).

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  7. Television shows were not a big part of my life at all. I had seen several shows in part, but the only shows that I saw all of were Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Game of Thrones. So coming into this class, I had no idea what to expect. I was taking it just to serve as a humanities required course for the College of Engineering, and because of that, my initial priorities for this class lower than my other classes. The screenings in this class were the first time I had watching any entertainment in black and white. Initially I was biased, thinking oh, these are gonna be sooo boring. But it was actually pretty interesting learning how events in history influenced the radio and television market, then seeing it play out in the screenings that we watched. Through lecture, the readings, and especially section, I really felt that everything I learned was able to help me expand my horizon of knowledge into a completely new world, considering how I basically came into this class knowing nothing about the topic. As I went deeper into the semester, I really came to appreciate the class in that it provided such a relief from my engineering classes and the stress that came with. It was very refreshing.

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  8. This was the first SAC/humanities course that I have taken during my time at U of M, along with being my first history class since 10th grade in high school! Back then I decided that history was not interesting and I just wanted to focus on my science classes. I am so glad that I took this class because it was able to show me how interesting the study of history can be, especially through the eyes of the media. A huge takeaway I got from it was being able to speak to my parents and grandparents about what I was learning about history and get to hear their views of those times. Because of this I got to learn much about their lives that I would have never thought to ask them before. When I told them about the papers I had read about the discourses and trends of the times they had been through, they even had their eyes opened to things they had not realized before. My mom had never really learned what red-lining was, and my dad had forgotten that much of the television he watched had never been in the cumulative narrative format before recently. This course really helped me to see history in a completely new way that I am so grateful for now!

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  9. I had never watched or paid attention to television that much during my life, so learning about the entire history of television was quite a lot to take in. The early years of television were particularly interesting to me because I had no idea what kind of programs played during the 50s or even 60s. I didn't even know that there were only three channels during those years. Something I found interesting about the formative years of television was how radio and vaudeville stars were some of the first big stars because many early television programs were simply the same things except shot on camera. Seeing how television responded to the world around it and how the world reacted to the show was fascinating as well. I would never have guessed that television was so progressive in the 60s and 70s because I was always under the impression that network executives wouldn't have wanted to take risks. The depiction of homosexuals in the 70s and 80s was interesting too with how they were first in television quite candidly, but as soon as the AIDS epidemic happened in the 80s, they disappeared and didn't reappear until the 90s. I was also surprised to see that with how progressive television was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, television these days doesn't seem as progressive but rather building upon the ideas pioneered by shows airing in those decades.

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  10. Coming into this course, I was not exactly sure what to expect as it was only my second SAC course. However, as an aspiring broadcast journalist I found that this course filled in many gaps in my knowledge of my own field. Many concepts that were often ‘over my head’ before from syndication rights to the power struggle of rising networks, suddenly became tangible. That was definitely one of the most key takeaways for me. To be able to speak intelligibly about TV history, to anyone from a TV history scholar to a common viewer of modern TV has become such a valuable skill from this class.

    To dissect that statement further, I found that I was able to talk to my parents about their generation and the shows that emerged due to social factors. I was able to talk to mom about I Love Lucy, a show I had grown up hearing about but never watched until this class. We spoke about her favorite episodes and I elucidated the themes that emerged in this show that were representative of the times. Just last week I had a conversation with my father about Miami Vice’s extended scene that included the entirety of Phil Collin’s ‘In the Air’. While these topics may seem trivial to others, being able to relate to other people’s generations of media make me much more comfortable in my ability to talk about my future aspirations in television as a broadcast journalist in relation to the progression of TV Development.

    Lastly, the ability to think of TV as an advancing art form is also an essential takeaway. While many regard TV as a form of entertainment, segments such as Ernie Kovac’s commercials were regarded as art. Even if not as art, but as elevated forms of media, TV can reflect so much about the mindset of that time period. My research paper comparing Julia and The Mindy Project not only taught me about the cultural climate of the 1960’s and 70’s, but also the modern environment I am immersed in. From feminism to issues of race, suddenly these issues become so much more pervasive as I analyze media everyday.

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