The Archival Value of Television in the “Golden Age” of Media Collecting

Television’s Golden Age ended almost as quickly as it began, with writers, directors, programmers, and critics pining over the “quality” days of certain live programs. The Golden Age for American television refers to “the medium’s first decade, from 1948–1958, when (or so the myth goes) program forms and norms were not yet entrenched, and the level of ingenuity and sheer talent on display was unparalleled.”¹ The live drama anthology was at the heart of this myth, giving “the new medium respectability and prestige,” especially when stage plays and movies were adapted from the television scripts as a “new body of literature.”² Complicating television historians’ critical assessment of the Golden Age myth is the lack of moving-image records (e.g., films and tapes).³ Yet numerous archives hold manuscript collections documenting the creative and industrial processes behind Golden Age drama anthologies and a larger swath of television from that era and later. These materials began to be collected in the 1960s during what we might call a golden age of (media) collecting—a window of time with favorable conditions for building collections. Although many major archives devoted to television had yet to be fully established, the “Golden Age” label helped launch the acquisition and preservation of television in existing institutions.⁴ This article contributes to television historiography by tracing the entry of television materials into one particular media archive with attention to discourses about the preservation of television (or lack thereof) and factors that influenced the archival process in the 1960s.

Examining the formation of an archive devoted to the performing arts—how archivists and scholars tasked with archival duties decided which materials merited preservation—explains how parts of television came to be thought of as a subject worthy of academic study. Curated repositories preserve important cultural memories and their associated artifacts, generally connoting “notions of sanctioned cultural value, protection, ownership, and power.”⁵ As one film historian explains, “If we understand the archive as a site with its own histories, we can better know the histories of which the archive is a custodian.”⁶ Using the Wisconsin Center for Theater Research (an affiliate of the International Federation of Film Archives) and the Wisconsin Historical Society’s documentation of the relevant archival processes, including solicitation letters, donor correspondence, and internal reports and its first decade of operation in the 1960s, I want to show how a case study of an archival process can reveal the way archivists and academics conceptualized the worth of television as they crisscrossed cultural and economic systems of value.

Although television was not identified explicitly in the Center’s scope, television materials make up a considerable portion of its holdings. Television studies ascended into the academy alongside critiques of literary canons and critical appreciation for popular culture and cultural histories.⁷ To be accepted as a legitimate field, however, television studies required that, one, scholars recognize television as a distinct medium with its own contexts of production and reception and, two, scholars take television as seriously as other cultural forms such as the literary, visual, and established performing arts.⁸ In the early days of archiving television, archivists and academics used relationships between television and already-valued art forms as a means to justify the medium’s entry into archival spaces. Indeed, the scholars in charge of the Center approached television as part of the field of theater rather than evaluating television as its own entity. By the end of the decade, however, new leadership led to new acquisition priorities and a more expansive conception of television’s archival and scholarly worth, welcoming television as a unique medium with its own artistic and industrial properties, albeit limited by markers of taste and quality. Later, though, changes in the federal tax codes effectively closed the golden age of media collecting. As a result, the Center forged a more explicit case for television’s distinct cultural value.

Television in the Theatrical Tradition

The way archivists and academics defined television (and the rigidity or flexibility of those definitions) influenced the...