The 'Television History' Mystery. (Book Review).

While historians and the elderly might be able to state with utter conviction that their knowledge of all things past comes from something other than the big boxes of diodes that fill their living rooms, most folks are left to fend for themselves when it comes to historical enlightenment -- and are forced to turn to their TV screens for answers. Edited by Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins, Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (The University Press of Kentucky; pp. 383) is a collection of essays that picks apart this present era of historical laziness and explains why gaining a sense of the past from contemporary television might, in the long run, prove more pernicious than propitious. It's a well-organized text that tunnels deep down into the tube's tomb to expose where real history ends and scripted history begins. But while it is true that television may shape our collective view of history, the editors' underestimation of the viewing public -- their decision that the rank an d file are just too dull-witted to realize they are being spoon-fed drivel by puppet-masters in network exec suits -- is their ultimate undoing.

Television contends that today's TV has afflicted the populace with a raging and blistery bout of "cultural amnesia," rendering them unfit and ill-prepared to grasp any true sense of history. In lieu of real reality, the book declares, the telly gives us a perverted perception of the ghosts of our past, telling us what we should remember rather than what actually occurred. Probing a wide array of historical programming ranging from Prince of Darkness Ozzy Osbourne's eternal fave, The History Channel, to the sheer frivolity of the time-leaping battalion aboard the starship Enterprise in Star Trek, Television alleges that humanity is being equipped with a revisionist sense of history teeming with enough anachronisms and quasi-realism to fuel the incongruity and hinder genuine understanding for years to come.

The authors' claims that broadcasters typically adopt ethnocentric views of bygone times are nothing novel. But the treatise asserts that, like producers of fictional works, documentary filmmakers, who have long been hailed as the last bastion of truth-telling in TV-Land, are now looking to do nothing more than lure in the largest numbers possible by striving to beguile the widest spectrum of Nielsen family-types they can hook their claws into. This modern breed of documentary filmmakers, which has anointed The Civil War's Ken Burns as their regal eagle, aims to bring more than just truth to documentaries. They lust for new methods of story-telling that will animate tired old topics, and must often braid the factual with the barely conceivable to achieve a yesterday that marks the small screen with their own private brand of truth. American documentaries such as the much-lauded World War II epic Victory at Sea were quite transparent in their omission of foreign triumphs -- conquests in which the good 'ol U.S. of A played no part. Similar oversights presented themselves in the Netherlands' The Occupation, a documentary that became a monument to that region's participation in the war, with only brief allusions to the United States.

But it isn't all bad. In addition to enumerating the many ways television can distort our record of the past, Television also recounts some of the positive changes the idiot box helped bring about. One such glaring example is Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's red reign of terror, which drew a plethora of unsuspecting innocents into its gummy web. Savvy TV audiences eventually saw through the G-man's patriotic, let's-do-it-for-our-country facade, compelling them to take a long hard look at the homophobic, anti-Commie lunatic that subsisted beneath the surface, which in turn forced folks to come to grips with their own demons and take steps to extinguish the same maniacal sensibilities that lived inside so many in those days. Nevertheless, the book's examples of TV's 'mmm mmm goodness' are few and far between, leading to an anti-boob tube bent that'll leave TV devotees cold.

Television Histories is a wonderful text for parents and educators looking to barricade themselves behind a self-righteous wall built solely of proof of television's inherent heinousness. But while it is indeed true that many viewers are less than prudent in their TV-watching habits, welcoming both the rank and the sublime in a single embrace, the editors' utter lack of faith in the public's ability to recognize manure when they see it ultimately undermines their main points. They know it when they see it. And when they read it.