The TV documentary tradition started while we were still in elementary school. Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly started the program See it Now on CBS in 1951, when we were in the fourth grade.. The producers shot their own scenes of live, unrehearsed interviews with real people, not actors. McCarthyism was early grist for a mill that confronted controversy. Murrow’s voice lent authority to the show.
See it Now seemed to spawn a new genre of TV documentary programs, at least on CBS and NBC. The NBC network aired the popular NBC series, Victory at Sea in 1952 and 1953. We did not quite have TV in Spokane at that time, but we caught up by watching the replays during the latter half of the 50’s, during our Rogers years. That series is still readily available today on DVD. You can even download the theme song onto your iPod.
CBS ran the popular series, Twentieth Century, from 1957, through 1966. This series was a history class for huge numbers of viewers.
The television market was dominated by CBS and NBC. The ABC network ranked a distant third and they didn’t have the resources to produce documentaries. Would a program such as Twentieth Century earn huge ratings today? Perhaps not.
Most markets, including Spokane, only had three channels of stuff to watch during our 1956-1960 Rogers years. We were happy so see anything that moved, even the silly You Are There, where Patrick Henry talked to the camera as if we were a TV correspondent in the House of Burgesses in 1775.
Today, we often have 150 channels of TV available to us. Many people would rather watch something besides history or news, and that “something” is available on some channel some time. With DVR’s such as, TiVo, the show’s time doesn’t even matter. Still, channels such as CNN, Discovery Channel, and History Channel, seem to garner the ratings necessary to survive and pay stockholders.
- Ed Mauget