TV Show Quiz
Every binge-watch owes something to decisions made in the 1950s.
A TV show quiz with answers about television itself: how series are made, where the jargon comes from and which experiments became habits. It suits any viewer, whatever shows you grew up with.
Did you know?
- The first legal television advertisement in the United States was broadcast on 1 July 1941, before a baseball game in New York. It lasted ten seconds, showed a watch face over a map of the country, and cost the watchmaker Bulova just nine dollars in total.
- 'Sesame Street', first shown in 1969, was unusual because researchers tested its segments on children before broadcast. If young viewers looked away from the screen during a test, the sequence was rewritten. The approach made it one of the most studied programmes in television history.
- Remote controls are older than many people think. A wired model called Lazy Bones went on sale in 1950, and a wireless one using a beam of light followed in 1955. The 1956 version worked with high-pitched sound from small metal rods, whose noise gave the 'clicker' its nickname.
How television shows came to look the way they do
Television was not the work of one inventor. After the mechanical experiments of the 1920s, the American Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first fully electronic picture in 1927, and engineers in several countries improved on the idea. In November 1936 the BBC began the world's first regular high-definition service from Alexandra Palace in London. Regular programmes, schedules and the idea of a weekly series followed quickly.
Seasons, pilots and formats
The shape of a series depends on where it is made. American networks traditionally ordered a trial episode, the pilot, and then a season of about 22 episodes shown between autumn and spring. British series have usually been much shorter, often six episodes written by one or two people. In Latin America the telenovela tells one complete story across roughly a hundred or more episodes and then ends, unlike a soap opera, which is designed to run with no final chapter.
Counting the audience
Because advertisers paid for most programmes, broadcasters needed to know who was watching. In the United States the Nielsen company began measuring television audiences in 1950, using diaries and later meters attached to sets in sample homes. A rating is the percentage of all households tuned to a programme. The largest audience for a scripted episode there is still the final episode of the comedy-drama M*A*S*H in 1983, seen by about 106 million people.
From schedules to streaming
For decades viewers had to be in front of the set at the right time. Home video recorders in the late 1970s introduced time-shifting, and DVD box sets later encouraged people to watch several episodes in a row. Streaming services arrived in 2007, and from 2013 some began releasing a whole season on the same day. Writers responded with longer, more connected stories, and the person in overall creative charge of a series came to be known as the showrunner.