"Tuning in" to TV Guide

review by Mike Gange

TV Guide Fifty Years of Television
Melcher Media
Crown Publishers, $75.00, 272 pages

Although small in format, TV Guide magazine has a huge impact on what gets watched on televison in North America. The diminutive magazine is delivered weekly on a subscription basis to an amazing 11 million households. Since beginning publication on April 3, 1953,  the magazine has told us not only what was scheduled to be on TV, but, through its editorials, has applauded the best of TV programs and dismissed the worst. The cover photographs and artwork have served as a benchmark for the success of TV stars and programs. It comes as no surprise, then, that TV Guide magazine would put together a hard cover edition that celebrates the best of five decades of television and the magazine’s close involvement therein.

TV Guide Fifty Years of Television is filled with full color photos from our favorite TV shows, along with hundreds of reprints of the TV Guide magazine cover that trumpeted the popular shows of the time. The oversize (30 cm x 25 cm) edition is organized much like the magazine, with sections devoted to weekend, daytime, evenings, prime time and late night viewing. Interspersed with the photos of the stars on location are a number of brief but candid essays written by major stars telling what they were thinking at the time of their show and how they thought their efforts would be received.

For example, Rob Reiner, who played Mike "Meathead" Stivic on All in the Family, writes, "Never in my wildest dreams did I think it was going to go past 13 weeks, because it was, as we say in the parlance of stand-up comics, too hip for the room. And that was fine, because we just wanted to be part of something special and different and groundbreaking." Chevy Chase, Alex Trebek, Oprah Winfrey, Susan Lucci, Barbara Walters, Henry Winkler, Tom Selleck, Alistair Cooke all add their own observations.

While the magazine has existed and flourished as an ancillary service to television programming, sometimes it contains insightful analysis that goes beyond entertainment. Back in Jan, 1991, as operation Desert Storm unfolded, TV Guide magazine writer Jeff Greenfeld proved to be amazingly prescient as he wrote "There has never been anything like the way television has colored, shadowed, illuminated and distorted the war in the Persian Gulf." He could very well have been writing about this past month.

On a lighter note, the editors have put together a half dozen lists of their favorites areas. They include their choices for the best musical moment: The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, (1964); best commercial: Apple Computer (1984); best game show: The Price is Right; best character: Louie De Palma (Taxi). While I will tell you that Lucille Ball had the most cover appearances on TV Guide magazine, (34) a record the editors say will likely never be broken, I won’t tell you any of what TV Guide editors says are their choices for the 50 Greatest TV shows. For that, you have to "tune in" yourself.

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High.