I am a great fan of old time radio. While not all old time radio is great, from the mid-to-late 30s on, it was a very self-aware medium loaded with self-referential comedy and pop-cultural references. The dramas weren’t afraid to be dark and didn’t shy away from some very bleak endings. Then we get to early television and suddenly it is the era of baggy pants comedians and hammy acting. I have a Roku and, through it, can watch a lot of obscure old time TV including the Dumont Network. Why did so much of it suck for so long?
I think you’ve got part of the explanation right there - the really high quality performers had a place where they could get good pay and an established audience already - radio. Why should they go to TV? Also, it wasn’t clear what would work on TV - so it took some time to get the right people (people who might not have been superstars on radio) to the new medium. The first superstars of TV weren’t unknowns, but they weren’t radio superstars - they were people who did all-right on radio, but were great for TV (I’m thinking of Berle and Ball, of course). Until TV got the right people, doing the right stuff, there were bound to be failures, and second- (or third-) stringers dominating the airwaves.
A lot of it didn’t suck. That’s why that period was called the “Golden Age of Television.” Really, the period 1948-1953 or so was really just a novelty period where both the programmers and the audience were just trying to find out what they could and couldn’t do. From that perspective, television got a lot better a lot faster than either movies or radio.
In the early days the one thing television could offer over radio was visual images. And since Hollywood feared television and refused to work with the networks until Disney and Warner Brothers signed up with ABC in 1954-55, the only place to get visual performers was from legitimate theater and vaudeville. The technical and production considerations of live TV made it insanely hard to do the fast cuts, multiple sets, and reaction shots that you see in filmed comedies from that era (consider* I Love Lucy*) so you ended up with a bunch of burlesque comedians in front of a camera doing what they knew how to do.
As for hammy acting, literally no one knew how to act for TV. Television forced a type of “small” acting with an emphasis on subtle movements and expressions that positively didn’t work on stage, or even in most films, and few early performers knew how to carry it off. Performing without a live audience tended to ruin a performer’s timing, and performing with a live audience meant the performer was playing to the studio audience rather than to the TV audience.
And if you’re watching DuMont shows, remember that DuMont literally had no money. That doesn’t inspire good writing, good acting, or good production. By October 1954, the network only had one surviving show, and that was live wrestling.
TV turned out to be 1000 times harder than radio. In radio, actors showed up, went through a rehearsal and stood in front of mics in street clothes. In television, complete scripts had to be memorized, blocking needed to be worked out in front of barely movable cameras, clothing changes needed to be done on the fly. Performers likened it to doing a new Broadway show every week. Old-timers hated every moment of it.
Television also cost much more than radio, something no network truly understood at first. Programs didn’t have the budgets needed to do the complex work required.
Why? Mostly because nobody understood television. Movie people looked at the budgets and time restraints and thought no audiences would stand for such a shoddy product. Advertisers looked at the tv sets and thought that nobody would want to watch six-inch screens that showed snow and wavy lines half the time. Crews didn’t know how to light or mike or do makeup or move cameras on tv soundstages. Actors didn’t want to work in a medium derided by almost everyone, for far more effot and far less money.
So the people who went into early television were youngsters who hadn’t made a mark anywhere, older actors whose careers never really took off, and a few visionaries who saw a toy they could play with where the stakes were so low that they had room to experiment. You could say that early television almost exactly mirrored the early years of movies, where this exact combination of forces created a raging success after a decade or so of nothingness. TV did much the same. After a decade, the networks were producing major original plays, spectaculars with a 100 stars, and classic sitcoms.
It takes time to create a new medium. TV turned out to be way more than radio with pictures or mini-movies. Nobody knew that until after they threw a million ideas at the wall to see what stuck.
Why does so much of it still suck?
Why does so much of everything suck?
The Jack Benny and Burns and Allen Shows debuted on TV in 1950, and I think were of similar quality to what they had done on radio, although of course TV allowed them to do sight gags. The Hallmark Television Playhouse (later the Hallmark Hall of Fame) started in 1951 and was noted for quality dramas.
I think it was Michael Caine who said that on the stage, an actor acts with his body, in the movies, he acts with his head, and on television he acts with his face.
The early days of radio had the same issues. But very little exists from before the late 30s, so most OTR you hear were after they had years to develop techiniques of dramatization.
And, I wonder how much of what did get preserved was the better stuff; even in the '40s and '50s, I have to believe that there were crappy shows, too, and maybe those didn’t get preserved (or, don’t get played today on the old-time radio programs).
It takes a while to discover how to make good use of a medium. When you learned to speak, write or count, you started pretty simple too then worked your way up on the basis of those simple elements.
By the 1930s, there had been a generation that had grown up with radio and was now making radio shows. Movies in the first few decades also tended to be pretty simple and not watchable by today’s standards unless you’re looking at it from a historical or academic angle. Movies only started getting really good by the 70s (yes, I know, some exceptions as mastery of it ramped up). For TV, it took until the late 90s/early 2000s. Hopefully something like it will happen with video games in the next few years or we might already be in the ramping up phase.
Is it possible to listen to radio shows from the 1900s or 1910s? I bet they suck too by today’s standards.
Commercial radio broadcasts started in 1920, so anything before that would have been amateur at best. Most real radio programming didn’t really get going until after 1925.
But some of those “techniques of dramatization” were still laughably awkward… where TV could show an action, radio even in its heyday had performers explaining what they were doing.
I listen to a LOT of old radio dramas. So many hard-boiled detectives spent their half hour on radio muttering lines like “Ah, the old Bradbury Building, with its imposing art deco facade. I’ll just walk… lightly up the… steps… and try the door… ah, it’s unlocked. I’ll just slip inside and… turn on the lights. That’s funny, lights didn’t go on. I’ll just turn on my flashlight, and see if I can find… ah, I’ll bet there’s a fusebox in this janitor’s closet. I’ll just turn… the doorknob… slowly and… There, it’s open!”
One wonders what you consider “really good.” 
Now that you mention it, early comic books had this same problem. If you look at old comics from the first decade or so of the superhero genre, most of the panels are half-obscured by text boxes telling you what is happening in the illustration. It took quite a long time to develop comic art techniques and standards to the point where the illustrations conveyed what was going on with only minimal need for narration, or no narration at all.
Theatre of the mind. 
DuMont programming exists? I thought most of their tapes were destroyed when the network went belly-up. Maybe enough escaped destruction that it could be digitized and shown on Roku?
Well, the better ones managed to do it seamlessly, often by using a narrator or by having things come out naturally in dialogue. By the 1940s, they had developed techniques to give description without calling attention to it.
But very little radio from before 1935 has survived, so the awkward early efforts are hard to find. Indeed, early radio tended toward music and variety programs, which were easier to run.*
Both radio and TV could look to precursors, namely the theater. TV might look awkward, but that’s a function of the limitations of the medium: scripts were often quite good, but the need to shoot them live on a sound stage made it difficult.
*One interesting side effect is that any guest stars only appeared as themselves, since you couldn’t count on the audience recognizing who they were if they played a character.
Just to continue the hijack a bit longer, IIRC the reason the Shadow got the power to cloud men’s minds was — well, look, in print, when a writer is maybe getting paid by the word, sure, fine, lavishly describe the surroundings so you can then explain just how the stealthy crimefighter is thus able to hide thereabouts. But for a radio show? Ah, screw it; just say he’s an invisible superhero.
Definitely. My old-radio-show listening is limited (Green Hornet and Adventures of Superman), but they have a lot of explaining what’s happening. If you listen to the current Big Finish Audio dramas (Doctor Who for me), they don’t do that anymore. They did at first, kinda. Not with narration, but with clunky dialog describing what was happening. But they’ve really come a long way to getting the action across without actually describing it. At least they had - haven’t listened to the last year or two of audios. Anyway, IMO, this happened well into the '40s with those two particular shows.
Still wish the early Green Hornet radio shows had been recorded. Or even that I could buy a book scripts.
True, to a degree. Also thought bubbles or speech used as exposition. Now we don’t even see thought classic bubbles anymore. Instead of actual bubbles, they are boxes with a diary-like feel, often (and color-coded). Sometimes written to look like script. And very often, it seems to me, limited to one character per issue, so we don’t know what’s going on in anyone else’s head if they aren’t speaking about it or telegraphing it through expression or action.
Now you’ve got me comparing different radio shows and early TV shows to see how they handled doling out information/background/scene details to their audience.
The modern BBC4 radio shows* seem to assume sufficient intelligence on the listener’s part, so that they can “set the stage” with only minor clues. With almost no awkward narration or dialog.
And I think that’s the trick to any effective media. Assume your audience is smart, and you’ll make a better TV show, commercial, magazine, web site, radio drama…
And you won’t have to mention the light switch you’re flipping as you walk in the door.
*like Cabin Pressure (John Finnemore & Bendedict Cumberbatch’s comedy), often set on an airplane. Though they have no problem having hijinks happen in a desert or the arctic. (Oh, here’s a Cabin Pressure appreciation thread…)