January 17-18, 2026: Crowd-sourced 60s & 70s TVStudying

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ve AmericanStudied those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! Leading up to this crowd-sourced post featuring the responses and recommendations of fellow TVStudiers!]

Gotta start the first crowd-sourced post on the new website with thoughts from my second-most longstanding and thoughtful reader, my FSU colleague Irene Martyniuk. She writes, “MeTV is perhaps the greatest thing ever if only for science fiction Saturday Night. From 1:00 am until 5:00 am, in order—Lost In Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel, and then The Invaders. They are all Irwin Allen shows and so tacky and brilliant and hokey and wonderful. I love them all. They walked so that every version of Battlestar Galactica could fly. And I haven’t even gotten to The Love Boat and Fantasy Island yet. Good times.”

Responding on Bluesky to Monday’s post, John Edwin Mason argues that West’s show is “still the best Batman by far.”

While Marty Olliff adds, “You might have seen me mention this before, but I once served Adam West in a buffet line. Here's one I've never reported: my wife and kids (before I was in the picture) lived in the foothills of Mt. Hood, Oregon, near Lindsay Wagner's local home. They saw her occasionally.”

Responding to Tuesday’s post, Darlene Cypser notes that “Bonanza actually addressed a number of controversial issues.”

Finally, Joshua R. Greenberg requests another B-centered show from the era, BJ and the Bear (Guest Post time, says I!).

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 16, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: The Brady Bunch

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

On how the iconic sitcom avoided controversy, how it got closer to the line, and a secret third thing.

The Brady Bunch only aired for five seasons, from September 1969 through March 1974, which boggles my mind when I think about how often I watched its reruns as a kid (and, yes, how large its shadow looms in the TV world as well as our broader cultural consciousness). But I can’t imagine a more fraught social and political moment in which those five seasons could have been located, from the deepening Vietnam War and its protests to almost the entire unfolding of the Watergate scandal (Nixon resigned just five months after the show’s run ended). And while of course a sitcom wouldn’t necessarily dive deep into those kinds of issues, it’s pretty striking how fully The Brady Bunch avoided even the barest whisper of them. For example, oldest child Greg (Barry Williams) was certainly of the age where he would have been thinking about the war and the draft, but such questions were never mentioned; nor, for another example, did any of the show’s strong female characters (no, not even Alice) ever refer in any direct way to the second-wave feminist movement. Its rough contemporary All in the Family (1971-1979) The Brady Bunch was definitely not.

There are different ways to push the envelope, though, and while the Bradys didn’t generally do so through overt plotlines or dialogue, that doesn’t mean that the show wasn’t without its controversial elements. One of them was controversial enough that it never got overtly mentioned: while Mike Brady (Robert Reed) was a widower, Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) was intended to be divorced, and the subject was still taboo enough that her first husband was simply never mentioned at all. But another controversial element was present on screen in many of the episodes: the fact that Mike and Carol shared a bed, and were frequently depicted talking about the show’s events while getting ready to go to sleep in that single bed. This wasn’t the first TV couple to do so, but it was without question the most prominent such early instance, and I’d say that specific detail reminds us that the show’s overall premise, its presentation and exploration of the challenges and joys of a blended family, was itself at least a bit controversial (or at least unusual) and worth celebrating.

And then there’s what was unfolding behind the scenes for the show’s actors. In that hyperlinked post I highlighted what we’ve learned in the 50 years since the show ended about Robert Reed’s closeted sexuality, his eventual tragic death from AIDS, and most relevantly to this post, what those layers to his identity meant about his experience making this particular show. I quoted in that post and will quote again here Florence Henderson’s thoughtful perspective: “Here he was, the perfect father of this wonderful little family, a perfect husband…He was an unhappy person…I think had Bob not been forced to live this double life, I think it would have dissipated a lot of that anger and frustration.” There shouldn’t be anything controversial about an actor’s sexuality, but the fact that there would have been had Reed been honest about his identity reflects the limits of even the most progressive portrayals of family on 1960s and 70s TV.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 15, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: Bewitched

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

On how Salem both inspired and was inspired by the 60s sitcom, and why that’s profoundly problematic.

According to Walter Metz’s 2007 history of Bewitched, the show’s creator Sol Saks was inspired by two films featuring witchy romance in a contemporary setting. The more famous, Bell, Book, and Candle (1958, but an adaptation of John Van Druten’s 1950 Broadway play of the same name), features Kim Novak as a modern witch who uses a love spell on Jimmy Stewart. But to my mind the more telling is I Married a Witch (1942, an adaptation of James Thorne Smith’s posthumously published 1941 novel The Passionate Witch), in which Veronica Lake’s modern witch seeks revenge on Fredric March’s descendent of Salem Witch Trials accusers but ends up falling in love with him instead. When we take these two cinematic predecessors together, we can see the origins of a show largely focused on sitcom problems (marriage and parenting, home and work conflicts, neighbors, and so on) but with an interesting layer of a multigenerational magical family (main character Samantha Stephens’s mother and later her and her husband Dick’s daughter, both fellow witches, in particular).

If Salem played a small role in the show’s origins, Bewitched would eventually play a very significant role in Salem’s evolving late 20^th-century histories. As that hyperlinked Smithsonian magazine article (itself based on Witch Trials historian Stacey Schiff’s New York Times piece) notes, it was when the show filmed special episodes in Salem in 1970—including one episode where Samantha travels back in time and becomes one of the accused in the Witch Trials—that the city first began to lean into the possibilities of using these controversial and painful histories as a vehicle for tourism. That possibility gradually became not just a reality but the city’s defining one in the 21^st century, to the point where most of its public signage, marketing, and even institutions like the police call it “The Witch City” and—most strikingly when it comes to the influence of Bewitched on this process—since 2005 one of its central public parks features a life-size statue of actress Elizabeth Montgomery in character as Samantha.

I’ve already written a good bit in this space about why that “Witch City” emphasis is at best seriously complicated and at worst deeply frustrating, and I don’t want to rehash all those arguments here. Instead, I’ll just note that it’s particularly fraught to connect this particular sitcom, with its central emphasis on the wacky hijinks that befall a witch and a non-witch who are also a married couple, to the histories of Salem and the Witch Trials. After all, one of the most famous pairs of Witch Trial victims were Martha and Giles Corey, a woman who was executed after her husband testified against her at her witchcraft trial—and after which he subsequently was accused and executed (in the admittedly badass moment with which I began that hyperlinked post) as well. I don’t have any problem with Bewitched’s premise on its own terms, and as those prior pieces indicate I have long since made my peace with the contradictions of Salem. But this seems to me to be a case where life and art should stay quite fully distinct from one another.

Last TVStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 14, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: The Bionic Woman

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

On silly spinoffs that succeed, silly spinoffs that don’t, and what we can make of the difference.

The Bionic Woman, which aired its first episode on this date 50 years ago, was a spinoff from an existing hit show, The Six Million Dollar Man. In April 1975, season 2 of that show had featured a two-part episode, “The Bionic Woman,” in which superpowered protagonist Steve Austin (Lee Majors) reunites with his high school sweetheart Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), almost loses in her a tragic skydriving accident, and convinces his scientist handlers to save her by turning her into a bionic woman with the same procedures that they had used on him. He does so by promising that she will work for the same fictional top-secret office he does (the Office of Scientific Intelligence), and after some hemming and hawing on both their parts she obviously decides to do so. The new episode and character were thus as over-the-top and silly as the original, and that’s precisely the point—Six Million had been an instant hit, and the producers decided, as is so often the case, to repeat the formula in a new show.  

In the fall of 1977, season 3 of The Bionic Woman opened with a very similar two-part episode, “The Bionic Dog.” In it Sommers meets Max (short for Maximillion, named for how much his procedure cost), a German Shephard who she learns had been the first bionic test subject before the later procedures on Austin and Sommers; Max is experiencing some negative side effects and is slated to be put down when they meet, but Sommers rescues him and enjoys some quality time with this appropriately powerful pet. The producers’ intent was that after this two-part introduction, Max would likewise go on to headline his own spinoff show, presumably called The Bionic Dog, in which he would live with Sommers’s forest ranger friend Roger Grette (also introduced in this two-part episode) and, I dunno, fight forest fires alongside Smokey or some such. But the network rejected this second spinoff and Max stayed with Sommers instead, periodically appearing on the show to perform his own spectacular and silly superpowered feats.

I’m not in the heads of those network executives (and let’s face it, if I were I would have greenlit a show about a superpowered little friend like Max), but I would say there are a couple ways to analyze the difference between these two cases. One is what I alluded to above: while of course there can be spinoffs that diverge from the original, it seems likely to me that when a spinoff is going to launch while the original show is still airing (and indeed, still very early in its run), the goal would often be that it replicates the formula closely enough to guarantee (the network believes, anyway) success. A superdog in the woods is different enough from these superhumans working for the OSI that it just wasn’t as sure of a bet, I’m saying. But I would also highlight a broader TV history context—while the first couple decades of TV were rife with animal-centered shows, from Lassie to Mr. Ed. to The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, that trend had largely died off by the late 1970s; and perhaps the timing was thus just wrong for a show entitled The Bionic Dog. Ruff.

Next TVStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 13, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: Bonanza

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

Three diverse characters and plotlines through which the long-running and legendary Western can help expand our collective memories of the West.

1)      Hop Sing: While Bonanza’s main characters, members of the Cartwright family including father Ben and his three sons (and eventually other relatives in later seasons), were all white, the show did feature a non-white recurring character who would become perhaps its most beloved: Victor Sen Yung’s family cook and housekeeper Hop Sing. Much of the time as that second hyperlink illustrates Hop Sing was a minor character used for comic relief, but his presence alone reminds audiences of both the 19^th century Chinese American community and the multiracial diversity of the American West. And his character became so popular that in later seasons the writers created episodes focused on Hop Sing and his own identity and community, including one (“The Fear Merchants”) which deals directly with the anti-Chinese sentiments that led to the Exclusion Act (a couple decades after the show’s 1860s setting).

2)      “Day of Reckoning”: Hop Sing was the show’s only non-white recurring character, but Bonanza did also dedicate full episodes to other non-white characters and related questions of race and ethnicity in its diverse mid-19^th century Western world. One of the most complex is season 2’s “Day of Reckoning,” which features a number of Bannock Native American characters with a range of perspectives on neighboring whites, the future of the West, and more. While the fact that the main such character, Matsou, was played by the Mexican American actor Ricardo Montalban, is a telling one when it comes to indigenous representation in the early 1960s, it also adds one more layer to the episode’s and show’s depiction of the 19^th-century West, and could be a way in to highlighting for white audiences both indigenous and Mexican communities in that place and time.

3)      “The Wish”: As is often the case with long-running shows, by the later seasons some of the show’s stars had the chance to direct episodes, and the season 10 episode “The Wish” was helmed by none other than Michael Landon (Joe Cartwright). It tells the story of a formerly enslaved man, Sam Davis (the great Ossie Davis), who moves to the area with his family and faces post-Civil War racism. Building on earlier such plotlines, including season 5’s “Enter Thomas Bowers” in which the titular touring Black opera singer (played by William Marshall) is mistaken for a runaway slave and apprehended under the Fugitive Slave Act, “The Wish” makes clear that diverse individuals aren’t just visitors to the world of Bonanza, but were part of its community alongside the Cartwrights.

Next TVStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 12, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: Batman

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

How three surprising figures and groups help tell the story of an iconic and influential camp classic.

1)      Hugh Hefner: After 60 years of Batman on the small and big screen (as well as continuing on the pages of comic books throughout those decades of course), it might seem like a given that there would be demand for a Batman TV show. But that wouldn’t necessarily have been the case in January 1966 without none other than Hugh Hefner, who in 1964 had screened all 15 installments of the 1943 film serial called The Batman at his trendy Playboy Club in Chicago. Those screenings led Columbia Pictures to rerelease the entire serial in theaters in 1965 as An Evening with Batman and Robin, and the success of that rerelease in turn contributed to the development (or at least the greenlighting, as it seems to have already been in early development) of the TV show.

2)      The Temptations: That same relative lack of built-in audience—or at least an uncertainty from network executives about whether it was there—meant that the show had to be marketed a lot more aggressively than we might expect. Perhaps the most striking such marketing was Batman Live!, a concert series that toured the country in the summer of 1966. Stars Adam West (Batman) and Frank Gorshin (The Riddler) appeared at each stop, alongside a number of musical groups—and at least at the June 25^th concert at New York’s Shea Stadium, that roster included The Temptations! Talking ‘bout my guy—indeed, my Boy Wonder (although Burt Ward’s Robin wasn’t part of the tour it seems).

3)      Conan O’Brien: Batman was prolific, airing twice a week for its first two seasons; but it was short-lived, as the audience did not entirely emerge and it was canceled after its third season, in March 1968 (it did total 120 episodes in those three seasons). But as its presence in this blog series indicates, its legacy and influence have extended far beyond that moment. Critics agree, as Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz ranked Batman the 82^nd greatest show of all time in their 2016 TV (The Book). And perhaps even more importantly, comedians agree, with Conan O’Brien calling it one of his favorite shows on a 2012 podcast and noting its influence on subsequent successful and likewise influential parodies like Airplane! I’m sure West et al would have liked more than three seasons, but they have to have been very happy with the show’s long and meaningful tail (cape?).

Next TVStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 10-11, 2026: 2026 Anniversaries: Spring 2026 Plans

[The start of a new year meant my annual series on historic anniversaries. Leading up to this weekend post on some of what I’m planning for my Spring semester sabbatical!]

Two works in progress for which I’d love your input and ideas, and one even more direct request.

1)      Podcast season two: Back in September I noted that one main plan for my sabbatical this semester was to work on a second season for my narrative history podcast The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, & the Battle for America. I’m still hoping to get that going soon, with a goal of having it drop around Opening Day in late March; and I’m still interested in the baseball diamond that was built and used at the Manzanar Japanese incarceration camp during World War II as a possible focus. So I’d love any ideas or info you might have about those or related histories; but I’m also not wedded to that topic, so if you have other ideas for a baseball or sports history season two subject, share them in comments or feel free to email me!

2)      Resources for our website: Our awesome new Black & White & Read All Over public scholarly website has been live for just over four months now, and my wife Vaughn continues to put in the work to expand and strengthen it. That’s especially the case with the Resources tab; so far that means the Pitchables page under that tab, but Vaughn and I are also interested in expanding that Resources section with additional helpful links and support for public scholars, AmericanStudiers, cultural studies folks, teachers, and more. If you have ideas for either things we should include or things you’d find helpful, once again share them in comments or feel free to email me!

3)      Guest Posts: The 100-plus Guest Posts I was able to share on the old blog remain my favorite part of that site, and I’m so glad that I’ve been able to share the first three Guest Posts on the new site (they’re at the top of that blog page as all Guest Posts will always be) over the last couple months. But when it comes to Guest Posts, I can never get enough, and I’d really love to share at least one every month. So if you have either specific ideas, general interest, or questions of any kind about Guest Posting on this blog, once more with feeling, share them in comments or feel free to email me!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!