Jennifer Keishin Armstrong - When Women Invented Television

I tell these womens stories as informed by interviews with surviving witnesses to the era and the womens descendants, as well as by archival documents, press clippings, and archived interviews. I re-create narrative scenes using all of those sources. Ive indicated within the text, when necessary, where the accounts come from. I checked scenes using multiple sources when possible; dialogue comes from accounts of those who were present. Full notes on specific sources are available at the end of the book.

JENNIFER KEISHIN ARMSTRONG is the New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia; Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted; and Sex and the City and Us. She worked at Entertainment Weekly for a decade and has written for many publications, including BBC Culture, the New York Times Book Review, Vice, New York magazine, and Billboard. She also speaks about pop culture history and creativity. Armstrong lives in New York City.

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Pop Star Goddesses

Sex and the City and Us

Seinfeldia

Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted

Sexy Feminism (with Heather Wood Rudlph)

Why? Because We Still Like You

WHEN WOMEN INVENTED TELEVISION . Copyright 2021 by Jennifer Armstrong. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Cover design by Caroline Johnson

Cover photographs De Carvalho Collection/Getty Images (White); Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo (Scott); Everett Collection (Phillips); CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images (Berg)

FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition MARCH 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-297333-7

Version 01202021

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-297330-6

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In the fall of 1948, a forty-nine-year-old woman, the absolute prototype of a Jewish mother, marched into the Madison Avenue office of the famous and debonair William S. Paley, the man in charge of CBS, and made a brazen demand. She wanted to write, produce, and star in her own television show. Gertrude Berg believed that she, of all people, deserved a spot on television, and she insisted that one of the most powerful men in media give it to her.

This ultimatum alone would speak to her chutzpah in any TV era, including our own. But she issued it in 1948, not a time we associate with womens liberation.

Five feet five and 150 pounds, the mother of two grown children, Berg proposed an idea that seems radical even today: that she should star in a TV sitcom as the mother of two young teenagers. Of course, she did come with a track record. For the previous two decades, during radios Golden Age, shed written and starred in a radio comedy called The Goldbergs. Radio had been the default, dominant mode of national entertainment. Families had gathered around their living room radios daily to hear the latest installments of their favorite dramas and comedies as well as news and music. She had reigned supreme in this era. She looked like the prototype of the Jewish mother because she had created it.

In fact, she had already lived an entire situation comedy lifetime: on her show The Goldbergs, she had played radios favorite meddling mother, Molly Goldberg, who had raised her children to adulthood over its seventeen-year course. Now she insisted on starting all over again as televisions favorite mother.

And she wasnt the only woman who made such bold claims to the new frontier of television, a discovery I was surprised to stumble upon in the early annals of the mediums history.

I was born in the 1970s, and I grew up with the television on. I watched all the syndicated reruns as a kid, dating back to I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, through The Brady Bunch and The Courtship of Eddies Father, through All in the Family and The Jeffersons. I memorized the theme songs to The Facts of Life and Silver Spoons. I read every TV Guide that came to our suburban Chicago home cover to cover. I led the day-after conversations at school about The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Seinfeld. My family communicated in TV catchphrases: This is Carlton, your doorman. Not that theres anything wrong with that.

When I grew up to become a journalist, I landed at Entertainment Weekly, where I covered the television business for ten years. I specialized in the great women of television, using my deep appreciation for TV history to write stories about Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Alias, and Greys Anatomy; I drew comparisons along the way to Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, and St. Elsewhere. I transitioned to writing books about television history, chronicling the lives and legacies of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Seinfeld, and Sex and the City.

Still, I didnt know until recently, and many of even the nerdiest of TV history nerds dont know, that there was a timea time before, even, Lucille Ballwhen women ran television. Not everything, of course: Paley and his buddies occupied the biggest offices. But a surprising number of women pioneered the genres we still watch today, negotiated contracts, directed, produced, and wrote. But their names and contributions have now been largely forgotten.

I got my first hints of this as I researched The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Reaching back before its 1970 premiere to understand its history, I ran into Gertrude Berg, who came up as I investigated predecessors to Rhoda Morgenstern, Marys no-nonsense Jewish friend. Berg played the original groundbreaking Jewish character Molly Goldberg. Unlike Rhoda in the 1970s, who was only implicitly Jewish until the second season of the show, Mollys identity had been explicit since her first radio appearance. I had never heard of her, but