This course will examine the US television industry during the decade of its most dynamic growth and change, when the business practices, regulatory structures, and program forms of TV’s network era were established.  The course will explore the relationship of the early TV industry to the Hollywood studios, American advertising, and the consumer electronics industry, and analyze television’s position in the wider political and cultural controversies of the time.  The aesthetic and institutional legacies of 1950s television in the contemporary post-network era of TV will also be addressed.