Cognella Academic Publishing
Lee Marshall’s textbook The History of Prime Time Television is an informative and entertaining look at how history and television are melded together to enlighten our cultural experience. It presents an important view of how television has mirrored history and will guide students in today’s college courses of the past achievements of television and how it has shaped our personal experiences. It would be a great addition to any college class and will keep readers up to date and entertained along the way.—Mardell Nash, Adjunct Professor, California State University Long Beach
Lee Marshall’s new book The History of Prime Time Television is bound to become the standard textbook on the subject. While Erik Barnouw’s Tube of Plenty (first written in 1971) served that purpose for many years, the industry has been changing and morphing with lightning speed since the last edition of Tube was published over 20 years ago. Marshall leaves nothing of lasting significance from the earlier book out, but he’s shifted the focus to the milestones we find most important from our 21st Century perspective, and added vital material covering the past 20+ years of corporate consolidation, and cable and Internet market penetration, perhaps soon domination.—Bob Shayne, Adjunct Professor, Chapman University
A triumphant tribute to television, this book chronicles TVs inception and evolution and puts it into historical context. Discussion of each period is both substantive and entertaining. Marshall’s brilliant writing makes the reader want to celebrate having experienced this important medium of television and its place in history. A must-read.—Jana Echevarria, Professor Emerita of Education, California State University, Long Beach
I have taught the History of Television for the past eight years and students love the class…except for the text, which they find dense and dry. Now I finally have a solution—George Lee Marshall's excellent text . It's entertaining, comprehensive, and organized in small segments to fit almost any history of TV curriculum. If you're teaching in this field, do yourself and your students a favor and assign this accessible and user-friendly new book.—Ross Brown, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Arts Dodge College at Chapman University
Lee Marshall’s The History of Prime Time Television is a thorough and well-told account of one the most pervasive cultural influences of our time. Written by someone who is both a student of, and participant in, the world that television is, this book speaks with rare authority and insight. A lively and comprehensive work, The History of Prime Time Television should please both the serious student and the casual reader and be of enormous value in teaching television’s history.—Jerry Law, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, CA
