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To some extent, movies' aesthetic woes can be laid at television's door. There's the old problem of producers having to give audiences something on the big screen they can't get at home for free, which has led film away from narrative and toward sheer sensation. Levinson points out a more nefarious way in which television has undermined its former better: "Studio films are now sold to the public with 30-sec. TV spots, and those generally have to have somebody chasing somebody, somebody waving a gun, a lot of music, and then a dramatic voice that says, 'Opens Friday!' If you can't sell a movie in that 30-sec. spot, your movie won't open. It's hard to sell little, intimate moments where people are just sitting around talking." Of course, people just sitting around talking is a large part of what makes TV worth watching.
While television's current superiority to movies seems incontrovertible, its superiority over its past might to some be a more open question. What about the decade of the 1950s, which by most reckonings was TV's original Golden Age? Not only did the 1950s have brilliant comedians like Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca; the 1950s were also the heyday of serious live drama on television. Will future generations look back as fondly on the current season, which, along with Murder One and ABC's forthcoming six-hour documentary on the Beatles, will be remembered for the premiere of CBS's Bless This House, during which Andrew Clay broke comedic ground by drinking from a bidet?
One shouldn't make the mistake of romanticizing the past. "If you look at the great shows of the past, there really weren't that many," says Carl Reiner, a writer and performer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, creator of the original Dick Van Dyke Show and director of feature films such as All of Me. Reiner believes "there are many more great shows now"--though, he adds, that's probably because there are, simply, many more shows.
To be sure, not every TV veteran is as sanguine. Milton Berle--the man known as Mr. Television back in the '50s, when he would bring the nation to a halt Tuesday nights with his show on NBC--is fed up with network TV. "I know the formulas," he says, adding that he limits his viewing to PBS, politics, sports and specials. One of his favorite recent broadcasts: The Three Tenors.
Ultimately, of course, contrasting the shows of different eras is a bit of a parlor game--like arguing about who would win a fantasy matchup between 1994's 49ers and 1975's Steelers, or a kick-boxing match between Keats and Tennyson. And since parlor games are actually a lot of fun, let's take a look at the 1952-53 season, the very season when Marty, perhaps the quintessential live Golden Age drama, first aired on the Goodyear Television Playhouse. Here are that season's top 20 programs (along with the top 20 from last season):
1: I Love Lucy (Seinfeld). 2: Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts (ER). 3: Arthur Godfrey and His Friends (Home Improvement). 4: Dragnet (Grace Under Fire). 5: Texaco Star Theater (Monday Night Football). 6: The Buick Circus Hour (60 Minutes). 7: The Colgate Comedy Hour (NYPD Blue). 8: Gangbusters (Friends). 9: You Bet Your Life (Roseanne; Murder She Wrote--tie). 10: Fireside Theater.