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…