TV’S REAL GOLDEN AGE

Fie on the ’50s. The notion is being floated by a few critics around the country that television’s Golden Age wasn’t then, but now.

My first thought is of a viewer sitting with his feet plopped on an ottoman, watching “Pig Sty” and thinking, “Man, it just doesn’t get any better than this.”

Ah well, in 1955 it could have been “Beat the Clock” or Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s weekly sermons on “Life Is Worth Living.”

The argument for the ’90s is based on the fact that two of 10 conflicting forces have swung into parallel orbit: popular acceptance and critical acclaim.

An array of shows that are on the sunny side of the Nielsen roster are also generally well regarded by critics. They include “Seinfeld,” “ER,” “60 Minutes,” “NYPD Blue,” “Roseanne,” “Frasier,” “Grace Under Fire,” “Law & Order” and “Mad About You.”

That’s not always the case. In the late 1970s, such critical fizzles as “Laverne & Shirley,” “Three’s Company,” “The Ropers,” “That’s Incredible,” “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “CHiPs” hovered high on the Nielsen charts.

What’s more, the revitalization of the one-hour drama in the 1994-95 season is restoring balance to television schedules. Dramas are now off the endangered species list.

Nice argument, but no sale here.

The Golden Age of Television is what it has always been: the mid-1950s, with its unique excitement over a developing medium and its eclectic mix of live drama, comedy, variety and even panel shows. We’ll forgive ABC for “Ozark Jubilee.”

In the 1950s, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were defining the TV sitcom, the world’s best acts were performing on Ed Sullivan’s stage, such radio stars as Jack Benny were settling comfortably into TV, Edward R. Murrow was reaching through a haze of cigarette smoke to prod the national conscience, Sid Caesar’s team delivered convulsive comedy, Ernie Kovacs was experimenting with a strictly TV-based brand of visual comedy, Walt Disney was outfitting hordes of children in coonskin caps and Jackie Gleason was in his prime as the Great One.

Live dramas were at the heart of the Golden Age of Television. They didn’t turn up among the top-rated programs of the 1950s, but they satisfied their sponsors. In 1955, that’s all that mattered; TV was years away from being divvied into ad-rich demographic subgroups.

Original dramas were produced for television out of necessity, because movie studios tied up rights to established plays. So the likes of Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose and Rod Serling created original teleplays bristling with young talent and emotional and moral currents.

In the 1954-55 season alone, the anthology dramas included “Kraft Television Theater,” “Studio One,” “Robert Montgomery Presents,” “Philco Television Playhouse,” “Goodyear Television Playhouse,” “Armstrong Circle Theater,” “Ford Theater” and “The U.S. Steel Hour.” “Playhouse 90,” probably the most famous of all the anthology dramas, would debut a year later, in 1956.

If today’s better shows don’t match up to the golden mantle of 40 years ago, they do at least rate a bronze burnish. Television has its up and down fluctuations, and at the moment an upswing seems to be in progress.

The real Dark Ages of television were in the 1960s. In prime time, at least, the medium seemed to be in full and deliberate flight from the changing world it was supposed to reflect.

Just as the civil rights movement flowered and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the top-rated TV show was “The Beverly Hillbillies.” The bucolic “Andy Griffith Show” is fondly remembered, and perhaps rightly so, but it reigned at top of the Nielsen heap at the peak of the Vietnam War. It was the era of “The Flying Nun,” “Green Acres,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” “Bewitched,” “Mister Ed,” “Gomer Pyle” and “The Munsters.”

Looking back in 10-year integrals, the mid-1970s period shows signs of transition. Norman Lear’s comedies, “All in the Family” and “Maude,” willingly dived into real-life issues such as racism and abortion. Mary Richards of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” took her place in popular culture as a representative of the transitional working woman. And “MASH,” in its first years, took oblique aim at Vietnam.

The best shows of 1975 were evidence of a rebirth, if not a genuine TV renaissance But at the end of the decade, they dissolved into “Three’s Company” and the rest. ABC, brassy and brainless, set television’s tone late in the 1970s.

A renaissance was unfolding in 1985. Producers who’d grown up with television were now making television: Steven Bochco (“Hill Street Blues”), Gary David Goldberg (“Family Ties”), Joshua Brand and John Falsey (“St. Elsewhere”). Linda Bloodworth Thomason (“Designing Women”), Diane English (“Murphy Brown”) and Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (“thirtysomething”) were in the wings.

Another child of TV, NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff, was programming an entire network.

Like now, the quality of prime-time television was trending upward in 1985. But that surge sputtered in the early 1990s; talented writers and producers, always in short supply, seemed to spread themselves too thin, tire, and begin to repeat themselves.

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There is, of course, another way to gauge television’s cycles. That’s to look not at how much is good, but at how many bad shows weigh down the medium.

On that score, 1995 loses much of its glow. There has always been rotten lumber at the bottom of TV’s keel. Today a new element contributes to the rot — bad taste sanctioned by the industry.

Not even the worst of the blind dregs from the 1960s could compare with a “Wild Oats” or “Muscle,” two horrendously distasteful shows that popped up during the 1994-95 season.

But perhaps that side of television is a fair reflection of American culture, too. In 1995, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen might need a full hour a week to contemplate the state of the world.