Critics often claim that prime-time television seemed immuneor even willfully blindto the landmark upheavals rocking American society during the 1960s. Groove Tube is Aniko Bodroghkozys rebuttal of this claim. Filled with entertaining and enlightening discussions of popular shows of the timesuch as The Monkees, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Mod Squadthis book challenges the assumption that TV programming failed to consider or engage with the decades 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 actionin 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 doesnt stop there: it also examines how the nations 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.