Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Console-ing Passions) - Softcover

Bodroghkozy, Aniko

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822326450 ISBN 13: 9780822326458

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2001

Synopsis

Critics often claim that prime-time television seemed immune—or even willfully blind—to the landmark upheavals rocking American society during the 1960s. Groove Tube is Aniko Bodroghkozy’s rebuttal of this claim. Filled with entertaining and enlightening discussions of popular shows of the time—such as The Monkees, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Mod Squad—this book challenges the assumption that TV programming failed to consider or engage with the decade’s youth-lead societal changes.
Bodroghkozy argues that, in order to woo an increasingly lucrative baby boomer audience, television had to appeal to the social and political values of a generation of young people who were enmeshed in the hippie counterculture, the antiwar movement, campus protests, urban guerilla action—in general, a culture of rebellion. She takes a close look at the compromises and negotiations that were involved in determining TV content, as well as the ideological difficulties producers and networks faced in attempting to appeal to a youthful cohort so disaffected from dominant institutions. While programs that featured narratives about hippies, draft resisters, or revolutionaries are examined under this lens, Groove Tube doesn’t stop there: it also examines how the nation’s rebellious youth responded to these representations. Bodroghkozy explains how, as members of the first “TV generation,” some made sense of their societal disaffection in part through their childhood experience with this powerful new medium.
Groove Tube will interest sociologists, American historians, students and scholars of television and media studies, and others who want to know more about the 1960s.

About this title

From the Publisher

“Groove Tube offers the first comprehensive account of the representation of the youth rebellions in television and of the sparky reception of those representations in the underground press. Bodroghkozy is the model of a new kind of media historian, one who has produced a book that will attract and hold the interest of Generation X undergrads and old hippies alike.”—Henry Jenkins, author of From Barbie to Mortal Combat

“Bodroghkozy is right-on when it comes to the details of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, CBS’s firing of us, and the surrounding controversy. Her observations are certainly worth taking the time to read.”—Tom Smothers

From the Back Cover

"Bodroghkozy is right-on when it comes to the details of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, " CBS's firing of us, and the surrounding controversy. Her observations are certainly worth taking the time to read."--Tom Smothers

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0822326450
• ISBN 13: 9780822326458
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336