As seen on TV

I picked this book up because I wanted to learn more about 1950s culture in the United States. This book certainly has a lot to offer for those interested in discerning the developments of conspicuous consumption and the rise of mass cultural consumption during the 1960s. However, it doesn't necessarily offer a broad assessment of 1950s culture—it remains far too narrow in the topics it chooses to discuss, leaving out developments relevant to African-Americans and other ethnic groups during the period. There's also little to no theoretical underpinning for Marling's discussion of culture, which is odd considering how theory-laden the field of cultural studies, cultural history, and American studies has become in recent decades. Thus, there's not a lot of structure that helps to reader understand why all these individual topics matter in the aggregate.

As the title of the monograph suggests, Marling centers her discussion of 1950s culture around the advent of color television and breaks her content into a series of chapters devoted to a specific theme: Elvis Preseley, the "aesthetics of cooking", the 1959 Kitchen Debate & household consumption, Grandma Moses' paintings, the rise of hobby crafts, among other things. Marling connects developments in each of these chapters back to the color television, arguing that the invention and the increasing affordability of the color television had significant consequences for how Americans interacted with the products of mass production in their daily lives. One consequence was that an individual preference for bright colors pervaded all levels of the consumer society from the pink Cadillac to the luscious greens and oranges of vegetables in convenient frozen Swanson TV Dinners and the colorful clothing worn by Elvis Presley. In a broader sense, Americans were obsessed with motion—color conveyed motion—and began defining the American way of life as the ability to make choices in consumption. Unfortunately, I didn't find Marling's emphasis on the television as the connective tissue of the 1950s all that convincing and instead treated the book more as a collection of vignettes that said something specific about what Americans preferred in their purchase habits and also the relationship between consumption and individual identity.

There are plenty of interesting factoids throughout Marling's book. For example, Swanson's TV Dinners were developed from earlier packaged, ready-to-eat meals developed for American fliers during World War II. Also, the colloquial "TV Dinner" as a description of all frozen entree meals actually derived from the early Swanson TV Dinner boxes that were designed to look like an early knob-turning T.V. Set. What Marling does well in each individual chapter is connecting these changes in American food ways to simultaneous changes in family eating patterns—the transition from formal occasions with seated, rigid, elaborate meals to the far more common use of informal finger foods at barbecues and other social events that encouraged standing and mingling with others.