The new face of television: how murder, treachery, and mayhem made TV a 'vast wasteland' no more.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Essay

WE ARE LIVING in what is widely acknowledged as the Golden Age of television. What began as a trickle of captivating, intelligent, and creatively challenging series such as NYPD Blue and Oz became a flood with The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire. Now we're drowning in an ocean of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Orange Is the New Black, and House of Cards. Every month it seems a new jolt of inspiration appears from HBO, FX, AMC, Netflix, Amazon, and ever more unexpected corners of the media universe.

How did we get here from the bad old days of the idiot box? Television became truly great when it ceased being television, thus escaping the rules, regulations, conventions, and tastes that for decades kept the boob tube boring, stupid, and safe.

To understand why television was so bad for so long, you have to go back to May 1961. That was when the newly installed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Newton Minow, gave a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters that ruined everything. The address lasted almost 40 minutes and was more than 5,000 words long, but in the days and decades that followed it was remembered almost exclusively for just two words: "vast wasteland."

That was Minow's sour description of the burgeoning world of television. The speech was delivered from his perch as the nation's top broadcast regulator, yet it was framed in more personal terms. "I am the chairman of the FCC," Minow said. "But I am also a television viewer," one who has seen "a great many television programs that seemed to me eminently worthwhile." He had no complaint with those shows, the ones he liked to watch. His objection was to the rest of the TV lineup. It was pulpy, profane, populist, and crude, and he wanted it to change.

Minow wasn't acting as broadcast bureaucrat so much as he was playing amateur TV critic. His complaint was the same complaint made by so many grumbling channel surfers: There's nothing on.

But the difference between his critique and most armchair TV criticism was that Minow's was backed by the explicit threat of enforcement. To the broadcasting professionals assembled, he said, "I understand that many people feel that in the past licenses were often renewed pro forma, I say to you now: Renewal will not be pro forma in the future. There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license." Television was a public good, and broadcasters owed the public for the airwaves they controlled. "I intend to see that your debt is paid with service."

The warning was as subtle as a gun to the head, although Minow probably would have objected to that metaphor. The speech, which had a huge and immediate impact on broadcasters and the public, ranks as one of the highest profile exercises of censorious paternalism in modern history--and also, in its central argument, one of the most blatantly wrong.

What Minow didn't know was that in the decades to come, television would make its biggest cultural impact not in spite of the vulgar genre tropes he despised but because of them, and not thanks to government prodding but by the ability to flee to nontraditional venues where bureaucrats had less power.

By 1960, some 46 million American homes--almost 90 percent of the country--had at least one television. TV had made its mark on politics, launching Minow's mentor Adlai Stevenson to national fame and helping put Minow's boss, President John F. Kennedy, in the White House. In terms of influence, no other form of mass communications came close. In a separate 1961 speech, Minow said that the public "spends more time now with television than it does on anything else except working and sleeping."

Yes, there were pockets of quality. "When television is good," Minow acknowledged in his Vast Wasteland speech, "nothing is better." But "when television is bad," he continued, "nothing is worse."

The FCC chair was explicit about what he disliked, casting the programming of the day as little more than "a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons."

This wasn't Washington's first salvo against televised vulgarity. The Democratic Party was in the midst of a multi-year effort to politicize the perceived decadence of TV programming. The i960 Democratic platform decried a "national mood that accepts payola and quiz scandals" and "the exploitation of sadistic violence as popular entertainment."

The Vast Wasteland...