Dramatic Inventions: Writers and Producers in Early Network Television

FAIN: FT-278565-21

Caryn E. Murphy
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh (Oshkosh, WI 54901-3551)

Writing and research for two chapters of a book examining how creative personnel in the television industry found opportunities to engage social issues as a result of a changing network system in the 1960s. 

This project examines how television writers and producers approached controversial subjects and introduced new storytelling formats during the 1960s, the early era of centralized network control. The network era is examined as a time of transition, in which the new dominance of the filmed series substantially altered the craft of television writing. The goal of this project is to reassess an era of television history that has previously been dismissed for its reliance on formulaic, audience-pleasing programming. I use archival records to argue that creative personnel were aware of the constraints represented by a three-network system, and they balanced the medium’s desire for convention with measured techniques of invention as they developed, executed, and promoted television dramas.