Black & White Television

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been watching a lot of old black and white TV shows lately, am struck by the high quality of the writing, the acting, the directing, the ideas those old shows dealt with, the credible characterizations, the photography, the tone, the level of sophistication about mundane things, common among even the average middle class American today, now gone, in need of googling of Wiki lookups.

Is it me or did something go terribly wrong with network television programming after the last black and white season of 1966-67? It went from Peter Gunn, Naked City, Mr. Lucky, The Twilight Zone, Thriller (yes, Thriller), The Defenders, Perry Mason, The Outer Limits, The Fugitive and so many other well written dramatic series, many of them anthologies, to Batman, Mannix, The Green Hornet and a host of other so-called action and adventure shows, some better than others, but the one thoughtful show, the kind that made you think on your way to school (or work) had largely vanished.

I’ve wondered about this for years. Movies also went pretty much “all color” after 1966, but without quite the same dramatic decline in quality. TV was never the same. Things improved somewhat after 1970, with the Norman Lear and MTM sitcoms (All In the Family, Mary Tyler Moore’s show), I suppse Saturday Night Live, but overall the quality wasn’t there, especially for serious shows. When even a western like Gunsmoke was in black and white it often told serious, even tragic tales, at times played like Western Noir. When it switched to color it became more family friendly and lighthearted like a Disney show.

This is not a rant :cool:, nor am I obsessive on this topic, though I do feel strongly about it. I wonder if color film stock, even though it’s greaty improved over the years, is simply ill-suited to certain kinds of drama, stories, moods, and that where TV is concerned, it’s like the tail (color) wags the dog. I know that one can’t turn back the clock, not literally, but aesthetically it’s been done many times. Hundreds, maybe thousands, as when an earlier art form or aesthetic was revived centuries after it went out of fashion.

Change isn’t always for the good, and progress just means forward motion. Capitalize it as Progress and it becomes one of those “things you can’t stop”. Put the first letter in lower case, think about what it actually means, and it becomes an issue worth pondering in all its implications. When the Romanov dynasty fell, that was progress, but when Stalin took charge of the Soviet Union, that too was progress. The dynasty was history by then. When Hitler came to power, that too was progress. The next thing, the newest thing isn’t only not only good, it might even be bad. :eek: I think of the term, common in the medical profession, which I’ve heard many times, especially when discussing cancer, which is disease progression. Now I’m not comparing color television to cancer, not literally anyway, but I do wonder if in this case whether the “Progress” of making all television shows in color, while certainly the next thing, was in all cases a good thing. I’m not saying we ought to go to all black and white programming. Now that would be ridiculous: but the aesthetic choice,–whether to make a TV series in black and white or color–is no longer an option these days, and to my way of thinking this limits other corollary options when it comes to the kinds of shows that get made.

This is just a ramble regarding the state of television, comparing the (sometimes) good old days of yesteryear to the not so good days of today. I hope others will think about the issue, specifically black and white film (yes, I know I did some bopping around in this post) and whether it sometimes it or can be a good thing. A very good thing. :slight_smile:

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I don’t know the answer, but I read the OP with interest. When things suddenly went from film stock to Stalin, Hilter and cancer, I thought…that escalated quickly.

I’d like to see some modern shows shot in B&W. Even something like L&O:SVU might have a completely different feel.

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I’ll offer two possible explanations.

  1. The unreality of black-and-white turns characters into archetypes. The main character is not a real person, but the Detective, the Sheriff, the Doctor. It enables grander and more abstract themes. It’s like an untouched coloring book that invites you to fill in the details to make it personal.

  2. The black-and-white shows that you watch now are those that are good enough to be rerun 50 years later. All the black-and-white crap is gathering dust in a vault, if it even exists anymore. When you compare the great shows from one era with whatever you remember from another, guess which one will look better.

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Yes, I realize that was a rapid escalation, Blank Slate. Sometimes, when I post, anywhere, not just here, my enthusiasm carries me away ,and what starts as and ought to be and remain a straightforward linear piece goes global, intergalactic, that could be off putting (or puzzling) to some.

Robot Arm: I agree that black and white’s seeming unreality makes for a different viewing experience from a “color reality”, and yet there are things black and white can do that color can’t. I’m not trained in photography but I know people who are, and while it’s difficult to explain, black and white shows more detail, more texture, within a frame, can offer a deep focus perspective that I believe is still literallty outside the range of color. Don’t ask me how this works (somethign to do with lighting) but it’s what I’ve read. To put it another way, color tends to make a scene, a screen, feel flat, while black and white offers variety, texture.

Indeed, black and white encourages the viewer to use his imagination, which also makes the Detective, the Bad Guys, the Victim, resonate more strongly. To my eyes it makes a black and white movie, when well made, feel larger than life, lends it a kind of shimmering perfection that I’ve never seen in a color film, even of the classic kind, such as Gone With the Wind and The Ten Commandments. Those are glorious movies to behold, and I wouldn’t want to see them in anything but color. There are wholly different factors at work in the black and white classics,–Rebecca, The Grapes Of Wrath, Citizen Kane–right through A Place In the Sun and 12 Angry Men.

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I’m not sure I agree that thoughtful, well-written shows all but vanished after 1965. I can think of many that were shot in color: Mission: Impossible, Columbo, Star Trek, The Invaders, The Fugitive (in its last year), Cimmaron Strip, Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere, Cheers!, and Night Court, to name but a few.

What I do think happened was that public tastes began to change around 1967, especially with the first batch of Baby Boomers coming of age and the flowering of the youth counterculture. This was also around the time SAT scores began to decline, signaling the dumbing down of the American public. (Coincidence? :dubious:) Crap was given a free reign to proliferate.

That said, there are many shows I too prefer watching in B&W, especially when it catches the spirit of the period they portray. The best example of this I can think of is Combat!, which also went to color in its last season. Watching the show was never the same for me after it did; Vic Morrow himself said he was against the change because the reality of WWII was captured by newsreel cameras in black and white.

I can’t imagine watching The Untouchables or Perry Mason in color either.

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I never cared for B/W, but just a thought: presumably completely colour-blind men can’t tell the difference between the same film shown in colour and shown in B/W.
As for WWII, linking the state of technology at a certain period to that period is false. Had colour film of the quality of the 1980s been normal then we would make no such association; just as, if you look at old newsreel from WWI, due to the fewer frames people moving about, shaking hands etc. seem stilted and jittery — if in the 1990s film had just reached that perfection, then in B/W we would watch the Clintons and the Bushes of the day and think it entirely normal they had St. Vitus’ Dance.

As I’ve said before. if the French inventor of photography had been earlier successful, then we’d have photos of the French Revolution.

And had, which was possibly technically possible, photography been invented around 1730, the film industry and TV could have been around by 1790…

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Yes, but it wasn’t and we do. (Actually, I think costs had something to do with it, too.)

Huh? :confused:

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Early writers of TV had been writing for radio or the stage, consequently they were interested in dialogue and plot more than presenting entertaining visuals (for that, you had dancing girls). Around the mid-1960’s some bright boy realized that with color, all you had to do was show a bright, colorful image and everybody would go: “Wow!”. You know, just like when YouTube first hit. (Oh look, a cat falling into a box!) Once they realized that style trumped substance in ratings, it became a struggle to have any kind of actual thought go into the scripts.

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Great question John B. My initial thought was like the Prof’s response above - more to do with the backgrounds of those writing the shows coming from other media.

I don’t know the dates and demographics but would it also relate to television ownership generally? If its assumed a small percentage of households own an expensive item, then maybe the content is pitched at a classier market, but if a higher percentage can access the same medium it gives license for the stations to cater to broader demographics, which means more content that does not require the same level of polish.

In Australia the mid-late 60s was when TVs stopped being a luxury item you visited your friends to watch occasionally, to becoming a fairly mandatory household item. Its precisely when our news-readers began to drop their educated British accents and started using a more recongisably Australian accent.

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It really has nothing to do with color vs. black/white. It’s a whole combination of changing taste and business practices.

In the 1950s (as in radio before TV) the common practice was for advertisers to buy an entire block of time, and put a show into it. The advertiser pretty much dictated the program, and enough of them were interested in being associated with high quality that some good shows came out of the system.

However, sponsor-controlled shows led to the quiz show scandals, weird censorship and a host of other problems. ABC was the first network to come up with the idea of promising a sponsor a set number of viewers by spreading commercials around the schedule. By the mid-1960s, almost the entire prime time schedule was under that business model.

Because the networks were now completely responsible for programming, they emphasized format and consistency over an entire series rather than one brilliant episode. By the same token, viewers strongly preferred a regular cast and consistent characters over an anthology format.

By the mid-1960s the TV industry was producing its first generation of born-and-bred Hollywood TV writers, rather than New York school who would write a play, followed by short stories, followed by a TV script, followed by teaching a class on writing. Of course, the TV writers were superior in the craft of writing a teleplay, and even if what they were writing wasn’t nearly as profound, craftsmanship counts.

And let’s face it, 1950s TV wasn’t great all the time. In the single season of 1958-1959 there were 31 (count 'em!) westerns on prime time. The next year there were 30. There’s never been a time before or since where a single genre dominated a television schedule like that.

I’d also point out that 1965 was the year Don Knotts left The Andy Griffith Show to try his hand in movies. That by itself caused a considerable drop in the quality of television.

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I think this is a big part of it.

Gunsmoke started out on radio, of course, and the radio shows had the same qualities that the OP admires in the B&W Tv show: high quality of writing; serious stories; a “Western noir” feel.

I’m intrigued by people’s theories as to why the black & white format might lend itself to higher quality TV, but I suspect it’s at least largely coincidence. Did Gilligan’s Island see a big drop in seriousness when it went color?

One thing I wonder about is whether there was a change in how TV series were sponsored at around the time of the change from B&W to color: either in how advertisements were actually televised vis-a-vis the programs, or in how the programs were tailored to appeal to the kind of viewership the advertisers wanted.

ETA: kunilou’s post wasn’t here when I wrote this.

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Warehouse 13 will be in B&W next week.

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Why has the movie industry gone from the smart but quirky films of the 1970s to the mindless, explosion- and CGI-laden blockbusters of the 2000s? Because that’s where the audience went. Televisions were expensive in the 1950s. At first the market was concentrated in upper income homes. Those are correlated with more education - especially in the 1950s when only 5% of the population had a college degree - and with large urban areas. As prices came down the market increased tremendously. They had less income, less education, and less sophisticated tastes. Rural areas could be more easily reached and collectively had more viewers than the large cities. And the baby boomer bulge in the population meant that teenagers who had grown up with television were a huge marketing force. Shows were directed at all these alternative audiences. Were some of them dumbed down? Absolutely.

Were the shows in the 1950s somehow superior? My answer is a huge no. Almost everything in the 1950s is just plain awful when viewed today. They uniformly move at a glacial pace. They pack 30 minutes of plot into a one hour show. They concentrated on a single character and didn’t have subplots, what today are called B and C stories. Dialog was full of cliches and platitudes. Directors didn’t know how to frame a show or move a camera. Outdoor scenes were limited to people parking a car. (It’s not just television. Rewatch a Hitchcock movie to be amazed at just how slow the pacing is.) Take any successful show from today and watch it next to a successful show of the 1950s and you’ll be amazed at how much more is packed into every single line and scene and camera shot. You’re getting two or three shows in the same space of time.

Was this an effect of black & white? Not at all. Shows started being filmed regularly in color by 1954. You probably didn’t have a color set then, but the ones who did watched exactly the same shows you did and thought the same of them. It’s true that demand didn’t make color an absolute necessity for shows until the mid-1960s but the shows that made the switch partway through didn’t suddenly get awful.

Talk about rose-colored glasses! Any notion that early television was somehow good is a combination of selection bias, nostalgia, and willful blindness. My parents got their first television in 1954 so I grew up on the early children’s shows and went on to watch all the tv I could until I went off to college. I’ve tried watching many of the series I saw and looking at shows I would have been too young for. Some are watchable, a few are good, and a handful are excellent. But overall I totally reject any notion that the days of black & white television were a great thing we have lost. Just the opposite. Television today is the most advanced art in existence. It’s more better in quality than early tv than any other art is better than that of the period.

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No, it isnt.

Network TV today is a far shallower experience. Rather than a human character use his or her intellect to solve a crime, we now have the omniscient computer which sees everything and accesses anything. Characterization is far shallower mostly due to larger cast sizes and shorter runs.

As noted above, modern TV is aimed at a lower common denominator.

As noted above, style trumps substance.

Older TV has more minutes to tell a story; you seem stuck is a Bruckheimer web of mediocrity.

Older TV actually used older actors who were better trained and more talented…not the fetishization of youth and beauty we have today.

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i.e. it’s a lot more slow-moving. Exapno is absolutely correct about the fact that modern TV shows (both drama and comedy, at least the more sophisticated ones) are denser, more complex, and pack a lot more into the time they have available.

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You have to compare all of TV today to TV yesterday, not just network TV. There are far more shows on today that appeal to a narrow audience than there were back then. Remember, Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech was before color took over.
I’m not sure I buy the elite audience argument by the time we get to 1960. However we only remember the good stuff. Burns and Allen, not The People’s Choice. Dick van Dyke, not I’m Dickens he’s Fenster.
Sure the early 1950s supported quality programming - but it also supported Milton Berle and I Love Lucy - good, I suppose, but not exactly highbrow.

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Another good example is “Have Gun Will Travel” which also started on the radio, but which handled the same kind of social issues that Star Trek later would. (Roddenberry was an early writer.) I’ve just finished watching all the DVDs available on Netflix, and the later seasons actually faced the fact that Mr. killing is wrong Paladin has killed one or two people almost every show. Pretty sophisticated, I’d say.

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OK, this is seemingly difficult to grasp but…

photography was invented at the start of the 19th century >

Niépce began his research in 1793, when as you may have heard, the King was murdered >

Had he been instantly successful, or still earlier, he was born in the 1760s, or someone else forestalled him ( as unheard they may have done in reality ), we could have had photographs of the revolutionaries who escaped from their own guillotine, and anyone else about then; not to mention photographs of the Napoleonic wars as they happened ( just like in the Crimean War ) >

There doesn’t seem any lack of the needed materials a half or full century before the invention; and scientists back then were fully as clever as those of today who stand on their shoulders, so let’s say the loon and genius Newton studying optics invented photography in 1720 instead of the Frenchman in 1822 >

Photography preceded motion pictures by about 70 years in actuality ( Lumiere = 1895 ). Thus 70 years after 1720 and we’d have moving pictures by 1790; and colour movies by 1840.
They might be rather tame for modern-day tastes.

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Thanks, Banksiaman. Lots of good responses here and thus far good manners, too (which is often NOT the case at sites that specialize in films and television). Indeed, the rise in the study of demographics has changed everything. Leaving aside the issue of black and white, television in the old days was much simpler as to its intended viewers.

There were shows for kids (Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo, et al); shows for the “entire family” (most sitcoms, many if not most westerns post-1955, variety shows of the kind Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen and Garry Moore hosted); and then there was more adult-oriented fare, which meant something different back then,–not people having or talking about sex–serious drama of the kind Studio One-Playhouse 90 and many other anthologies specialized in, as well as the occasional Hallmark Hall Of Fame and I suppose the “edgier” anthologies of the Hitchcock kind.

TV network execs back in the old days were very “image conscious”. Of course they wanted to make money, but a lot of high ranking people in the TV biz (Hubbel Robinson, Fred Coe, Martin Manulis, NBC president Pat Weaver) really wanted television to be more than just entertainment. They wanted it to be art, to educate, to enlighten. Since the (so-called) science of demographics was in its infancy back then the people who ran the networks, produced the shows, didn’t have access to instant ratings, overnight statistics, couldn’t always be sure whether there were more or less teens who watched Perry Mason as opposed to, say, Wagon Train.

Because of all this,–the vagueness over who was watching what-- the networks catered to a wide audience, and because, as has already been mentioned in this thread, TV sets were pricey (especially in the 50s) and most of the major broadcast outlets were urban, there was a strong orientation to program shows for urban and suburban viewers in metropolitan areas like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, L.A. and San Francisco, thus early television, so primitive looking as to the technology, thus grainy, stagey, fake feeling, often featured series with surprisingly sophisticated content, in many cases of the kind that one would expect to find only on PBS today. If one looks at the episode titles of Robert Montgomery’s anthology one finds adaptations of classics novels and short stories, from The Great Gatsby to The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. On a somewhat more modest scale there were anthologies that featured adaptations of the works of a single, well known, often classic or semi-classic writer, whether Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, Saki or, more broadly, O. Henry and Zane Grey.

To some extent my lament over the loss of black and white is also a lament over the decline of high quality television, or high quality from the major networks. Black and white just sort of “went with the territory” back in the 1948-66 period, therefore in a way my fondness for black and white is to a degree serendipitous. Still, I do like watching those old shows (and movies) and find the mere fact that I can choose whether to go for black and white over color a pleasant one, though as time goes by black and white anything is getting scarcer and scarcer on television.

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That’s how color TV worked. They drained all the color out of the scripts and put it into the screen.