TV (Object Lessons)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Once upon a time, the news was only fifteen minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting the weekly showing of sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mom wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. The revelation that answers were fed to contestants on quiz shows was a national scandal, the Vietnam War, and JFK’s assassination were unprecedented eruptions of real-time disaster into the placid televisual world. If this seems a distant past, that’s a measure of just how much TV has changed—and changed us. Today we live in an empire of images and there are no protective borders. Weaving together personal memoir and social history, reflecting on key moments in the history of TV programming, the evolution of the material object that once was a “set” and now dominates entire rooms, and how TV has been depicted in movies such as Avalon, Broadcast News and Network, Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV as it has shaped habits of consumption, ethical values, social relations, and our very ability to discriminate between the scripted and the spontaneous, the factual and the spun, image and reality. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Preface Chapter 1: Waiting for Joseph Welch Chapter 2: We Have Six Televisions Chapter 3: Growing Up in the Fifties and Sixties with Television Television’s Split Personality Disney Made Me Diet The Suburban TV Family and Its Shadow Why There’s No Sports in This Book Chapter 4: The Erosion of the Fact-Based Universe Daniel Boorstin’s Prescient Insight Fox and the Ascendancy of “Story” over Fact O. J. and DNA Duct Tape under the Bed Lawlessness in the Superdome Hillary’s Pneumonia I Try (Unsuccessfully) to Tell the Story Chapter 5: If George Orwell Could Critique Broadcast News Dying Metaphors Verbal False Limbs Pretentious Diction Meaningless Words Euphemisms and Clichés Post-Orwellian Fog: Zingers and Gaffes Chapter 6: Intersections of TV, “Reality,” and Reality The Transformation of Donald Trump The Real World and Real Housewives The Best Feminist Moment from Seventies TV What Brett Kavanaugh Learned from Clarence Thomas Chapter 7: TV Deconstructs Gender The Raw and the Cooked Tony Soprano and “College” Don Draper and “Maidenform” Not June Cleaver: From Ally McBeal to Killing Eve Ally McBeal’s “Third Wave” Feminism Conventional and Subversive: Grey’s Anatomy Post-Trump Feminism: The Good Fight Is It a Thriller? Is It a Comedy? Is It a Fashion Show? No, It’s Killing Eve Epilogue: July 4, 2020 Acknowledgments Notes Index Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Once upon a time, the news was only 15 minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting weekly sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mom wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. If this seems a distant past, that's a measure of just how much TV has changed-and changed us. Weaving together personal memoir, social and political history, and reflecting on key moments in the history of news broadcasting and prime time entertainment, Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV and illustrates what a constant companion and dominant cultural force television has been, for good and for bad, in carrying us from the McCarthy hearings and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to Mad Men , Killing Eve , and the emergence of our first reality TV president. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic . "Personal memoir meets television history in a look back at how TV has changed, and how it has also changed us, over the past seven decades"-- Provided by publisher "Personal memoir meets television history in a look back at how TV has changed, and how it has also changed us, over the past seven decades"-- Résumé de l'éditeur