Tracing public and critical responses to TV from its pioneering days, this book gathers and gives context to the reactions of those who saw television's early broadcasts--from the privileged
few who witnessed experimental and limited-schedule programming in the 1920s and 1930s, to those who bought TV sets and hoisted antennae in the post-World War II television boom, to still more
who invested in color receivers and cable subscriptions in the 1960s. While the first two major sections of this study show the views of television's first broad public, the third section shows
how social and media critics, literary and visual artists, and others have expressed their charmed or chagrinned responses to television in its earliest decades.
