Welcome to TV Week, my five-part series on the broad television kaleidoscope — with tips, explainers and insights into this vast landscape, including the hidden strategy of meetings and development, an answer to the debate over movies vs. TV and a glimpse at the medium’s future. Today’s final installment: TV’s Mt. Rushmore.
Movie history is pretty well-trod, familiar territory.
There is no shortage of papers and literature lionizing film’s founding greats and the innovators who moved it forward.
But who gave us television as we know it?
The medium has undergone so many changes, and so much qualifies as “TV,” that there are no commonly acknowledged founders and creators on whose labors everything we see today rests.
But there is no honoring of television if we don’t have gods and deities to worship beforehand. Who is the Louis B. Mayer of TV? The Orson Welles? The Shirley Temple? The Jean-Luc Godard?
It’s easy to list TV’s 100 giants, or the 50 top most important people in TV, and the internet abounds with such lists.
But if we’re going to create a real mythology here, 100 innovators and legends is spreading it too thin.
What we need, I realized, is the Mount Rushmore of Television.
The four great founders worthy of being carved into the mountain, without whom TV as we know it would not exist.
Thinking about TV history with that laser focus allows us to really understand what has been important to the medium’s development and who should get the credit. Is it due to the stars or the executives? Or maybe even those writers? (Ha ha, yes, sure.) The people who created series? The people who created networks?
How much does the TV landscape of today owe to the giants of the 1950s? How sure can we be that what seemed monumental when it happened 10 minutes ago will leave any lasting mark over the next 80 years?
Does Netflix matter in the long run more than RCA/NBC?
Law and Order more than Gunsmoke?
Is TV news more important than Friends or ER?
Big questions, and as I tried to wrap my brain around it, I realized it was too much for one humble columnist who still can’t figure out why they canceled Hello, Larry in 1980.
For help, I reached out to about 50 of the smartest people I know who work in television, asking them to share their picks.
The rules they were given were these:
- They could pick four people and only four people.
- No ties or split awards. Four is all the heads this mountain can handle.
- There were no parameters or guidelines on what types of people, professions or eras should be honored. Their consciences were the only standards.
They were given the choice to keep their ballots anonymous or to publicly reveal their votes. Not surprisingly — given this is Hollywood — almost everyone elected to keep their choices off the record, so we’ll keep the electorate anonymous.
I’ll just say they are all television professionals; their ranks include directors, producers, actors, agents, executives, location managers and, of course, far too many writers.
I tried to get as broad a demographic mix of TV professionals as I could find, and I’ll just say the voters were more diverse than the winners.
Fifty different people received votes in this poll, but the ultimate victors were separated from the pack by a significant margin.
Here then, by the votes of your peers, are your top four — the quartet who gave us TV as we know it.
Welcome to your TV Mount Rushmore!
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