Hundreds of Channels, Nothing to Watch

Stephen Bowie at The Classic TV History Blog reminds us that today marks the 50th anniversary of “Newton Minow’s famous ‘vast wasteland’ speech. That’s the manifesto in which Minow, President Kennedy’s newly appointed FCC chairman, applied that term to contemporary television programming in front of an audience of sour-faced industry executives. In the decades since, there have always been shows of such egregious awfulness, from The Beverly Hillbillies (which debuted the season after Minow’s epithet) to Jersey Shore, that the quote has remained in constant use.” Read Bowie’s whole piece here.