Thanks to television, images of middle-class life and advertisements for consumer goods blanketed the country. By the end of the 1950s, nearly nine of ten American families owned a TV set. Television replaced newspapers as the most common source of information about public events, and TV watching became the nation’s leading leisure activity. Television changed Americans’ eating habits (the frozen TV dinner, heated and eaten while watching a program, went on sale in 1954), and it provided Americans of all regions and backgrounds with a common cultural experience.
Introduced in 1954, the frozen TV dinner was marketed in a package designed to look like a TV set. Within a year, Swanson had sold 25 million dinners.
Figure 24.2 AVERAGE DAILY TELEVISION VIEWING
With a few exceptions, like the Army-McCarthy hearings mentioned in the previous chapter, TV avoided controversy and projected a bland image of middle-class life. Popular shows of the early 1950s, such as The Goldbergs (with Jewish immigrants as the central characters) and The Honeymooners (in which Jackie Gleason played a bus driver), featured working-class families living in urban apartments. By the end of the decade, they had been replaced as the dominant programs by quiz shows, westerns, and comedies set in suburban homes like Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet Television also became the most effective advertising medium ever invented. To polish their image, large corporations sponsored popular programs—The General Electric Theater (hosted for several years by Ronald Reagan), Alcoa Presents, and others. TV ads, aimed primarily at middle-class suburban viewers, conveyed images of the good life based on endless consumption.