TV

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Once upon a time, the news was only fifteen minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting the weekly showing of sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mom wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. The revelation that answers were fed to contestants on quiz shows was a national scandal, the Vietnam War, and JFK's assassination were unprecedented eruptions of real-time disaster into the placid televisual world. If this seems a distant past, that's a measure of just how much TV has changed-and changed us. Today we live in an empire of images and there are no protective borders.

Weaving together personal memoir and social history, reflecting on key moments in the history of TV programming, the evolution of the material object that once was a "set" and now dominates entire rooms, and how TV has been depicted in movies such as Avalon, Broadcast News and Network, Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV as it has shaped habits of consumption, ethical values, social relations, and our very ability to discriminate between the scripted and the spontaneous, the factual and the spun, image and reality.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.