Get Access to Print and Digital for $23.99 per year.
Subscribe for Full Access
Why TV Got Good

Discussed in this essay:

The Platinum Age of Television: From “I Love Lucy” to “The Walking Dead,” How TV Became Terrific, by David Bianculli. Doubleday. 592 pages. $32.50.

Television: A Biography, by David Thomson. Thames & Hudson. 304 pages. $34.95.

Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook, by Clive James. Yale University Press. 216 pages. $25.

In 1970, CBS appointed a new vice president for programming. Within a year, in a move that would soon become known as the “rural purge,” he had canceled Hee Haw, Lassie, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Mayberry R.F.D., some of them among…

Subscribe or to continue reading.
’s most recent book is Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press). His article “A Foreign Cause” appeared in the April 2016 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

More from

| View All Issues |

April 2016

Close
“An unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out amid a homogenized media landscape.” —the New York Times
Subscribe now

Debug