How deflating. Just when you're satisfied that your knowledge of television is encyclopedic, along come 240 scholars to prove you wrong.
Their essays nourish and fatten the "Encyclopedia of Television," a much-welcome, much-needed three-volume work (nearly 2,000 pages) recently published by Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications.
Priced at $300, the set is aimed primarily at libraries and college campuses. But it's a browser's paradise, and anyone soaking up its history and insights will be all the wiser about television and its role in society.
The encyclopedia is generally quite terrific. How terrific? So much so that editor Horace Newcomb had the foresight to include two pages on TV criticism. All right!
Going both small picture and big picture, the set even includes a section on the remote control, with a full-page reproduction of a print ad from 1957 featuring George Burns crowing: "Look out, Gracie! With Zenith Space Command TV, I can change programs from across the room." And just like that, couch potatodom was born.
Much thinner broadcast encyclopedias surface from time to time, and you can buy scores of monographs on TV and books galore that list and describe series. But this is by far the most exhaustive work of its kind, a comprehensive TV repository that not only examines programs but also does so in their historical context while noting their relationship to the broader TV landscape. There are profiles of industry VIPs here, too, and smartly written essays on major trends that span the medium's history.
The scope is global, moreover. TV in Kenya, you say? Page 888, nearly two pages. And what is Channel Four? No, not the NBC station here where Fritz forecasts the weather. It's the British TV enterprise that somehow has found a way to successfully balance the avant-garde with the commercial, while also helping stimulate that nation's film industry.
The trio of books includes a section on local TV and its distinctive infanthood in Los Angeles. News is examined separately: "Local television news in the United States is television at its best, and at its worst." You'd have to call that a generous definition, even though the essay's conclusion is more to the point: "It is rarely determined how much viewers actually learned from TV news, but existing research suggests it is very little."
