In the spring of 1961, the newly appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow, gave a speech in which he described television as “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons…Is there no room on television to teach, to inform, to uplift, to stretch, to enlarge the capacities of our children?”
I’m Mark Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads" and David Kamp in his book Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution that Changed America tells the story of the upheaval that changed children’s television.
In the late 1960’s a loose knit group of highly creative people decided they would do something about the morass that was children’s television. Shows that today are classics: Captain Kangaroo, Mr .Rodgers' Neighborhood, Sesame Street, Schoolhouse Rock and The Electric Company changed children’s television from endless crass commercialism to educational and impactful. These shows and others they inspired, such as Nova, Masterpiece Theater and This Old House showed television could reach the lofty goals Mr. Minow called for in 1961.
Each of these shows had their struggles and enemies they had to overcome. Some did just that becoming better for it, others folded under the criticism, changing times, and endless question of how are the bills going to be paid.
Mr. Camp, in Sunny Days summarizes the impact these shows had, “I prefer to regard the sunny days of the late sixties and early seventies children’s culture not as a failed epoch but, rather, as an inspirational example of what humanity is capable of when it extends its reach: the potential, latent but still present in us today, to accomplish inconceivably great things.”
