Supreme among the many available symbols of postmodern progress and alienation – more than political assassinations, microwave ovens, gene splicing, moonwalks, family breakdown, AIDS, ozone depletion, youth culture, suburban sprawl, the Cold War, feminism, the computer explosion, Watergate, ethnic conflicts, fast food, homelessness, minivans and economic globalization – the ultimate icon for the final half of the twentieth century is television. Although television predates the 1950s and will certainly survive the millennium, there is no gainsaying that for roughly fifty years the medium has permeated every corner of public and private space, shaping consciousness, defining our “reality,” drawing us together, and pulling us apart, in ways that will uniquely enshrine this historical period as The Age of Television.

Over the past five decades, television has been a perennial and vexing object of passionate debate. Upon it has been heaped immense cultural and intellectual scorn. Feared by the righteous and not-so-righteous, ridiculed by those who never fail to miss their favorite shows, television is continuously lambasted, lampooned and impugned, serving as the culture's straw-man and whipping-boy; yet it is also consumed – assiduously, diligently, almost religiously – by most of us, and in massive doses. There is no better example of a “love-hate relationship” than that between television and contemporary society.