Television unfolds itself in endless repetitive complexity. We float through it as through a dream, a cascade of images filling our heads with random desires and opinions. It was ever so. And yet, astonishingly, it was not.
Television has a history, albeit a short and inglorious one.
It can be told in many ways. One is as a series of technical innovations culminating in broadcasts from the Empire State Building, through the development of console sets that became the focus of family viewing, and on to color, digital, etc. Another way of telling the history of television is as the development and clash of great commercial fortunes and the Federal Communications Commission, which limited access to the airwaves and thus competition. And they looked upon their inchoate creation and saw that it was not very good at all. Yet because it was a godless world there never emerged a Noachic flood to sweep away the crap.