“Change is neither good or bad, it simply is ” Don Drapper once said in the critically acclaimed television show Mad Men.
Over the last twenty years, the medium of television has come into its own. From its humble beginnings in the late 1940s, the small screen has come to rival movies – something that was previously thought unimaginable. Why and how this happened sixty years later, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, will be the focus of this class.
Series such as The Wire, The Office, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones even have documented TV’s new social role as much as they have entertained us. But it is also a technological story as well: from the living room box, to DVDs, to the emergence of online streaming on phones.
The emergence of the golden age of television is a topic we have only begun to understand.
