While it is relatively easy to make an intelligent person appear ignorant, it is impossible to feign intelligence.

These 57 short stories are an entertaining introduction to the history of Cleveland, Ohio, for natives or newcomers. They highlight exceptional people and notable events from log cabin days to the mighty industrial era, and cover subjects from sports to fashion to crime. For any Clevelander who wants to know a little more about the old hometown.

More behind-the-screen stories from the golden age of local television! Let’s warm up the old family TV set, step through the screen, and see what was going on behind the scenes with some of our favorite Cleveland television personalities of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. We’ll look back at the rise of glamorous news anchors (including more than one Miss America contestant) with perfect smiles, perky noses, and really big hair . . . Late-night horror-movie hosts battling to take over the legacy of the legendary Ghoulardi . . . The strange, sad saga of the former daytime host who shot himself after a bizarre sex scandal . . . A weatherman who was a lightning rod for coworkers’ endless practical jokes . . . The investigative reporters whose sting operations caught wrongdoers with their pants down—sometimes literally! . . . The gutsy reporter who interviewed Danny Greene hours before the mobster was blown up in his car . . . The Cleveland mayor who co-hosted a children’s show with a ventriloquist’s dummy . . . and many other true tales.

Remember when TV was just three channels and the biggest celebrities in Cleveland were an outrageous movie host named Ghoulardi, a gentle elf named Barnaby, and a tough-as-nails newswoman named Dorothy Fuldheim? These pioneering entertainers invented television programming before our very eyes while we watched from our living rooms. Revisit the early days of local TV in these fun and fact-filled stories featuring . . . Paige Palmer, the fitness host who smoked four packs a day . . . Smooth-voiced Captain Penny, who reminded us, “You can’t fool mom” . . . Volatile talk show host Alan Douglas, who pushed guests’ hot buttons—sometimes until they punched back . . . Gene Carroll, longtime king of the amateur hour . . . Woodrow, the Woodsman . . . Romper Room’s Miss Barbara . . . Jungle Larry . . . and many other local favorites.

The early years of television relied in part on successful narratives of another medium, as studios adapted radio programs like Boston Blackie and Defense Attorney to the small screen. Many shows were adapted more than once, like the radio program Blondie, which inspired six television adaptations and 28 theatrical films. These are but a few of the 1,164 programs covered in this volume. Each program entry contains a detailed story line, years of broadcast, performer and character casts and principal production credits where possible. Two appendices ("Almost a Transition" and "Television to Radio") and a performer's index conclude the book. This first-of-its-kind encyclopedia covers many little-known programs that have rarely been discussed in print (e.g., Real George, based on Me and Janie; Volume One, based on Quiet, Please; and Galaxy, based on X Minus One). Covered programs include The Great Gildersleeve, Howdy Doody, My Friend Irma, My Little Margie, Space Patrol and Vic and Sade.

Since its original publication in 1987, Channels of Discourse has provided the most comprehensive consideration of commercial television, drawing on insights provided by the major strands of contemporary criticism: semiotics, narrative theory, reception theory, genre theory, ideological analysis, psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, and British cultural studies. The second edition features a new introduction by Robert Allen that includes a discussion of the political economy of commercial television. Two new essays have been added--one an assessment of postmodernism and television, the other an analysis of convergence and divergence among the essays--and the original essays have been substantially revised and updated with an international audience in mind. Sixty-one new television stills illustrate the text. Each essay lays out the general tenets of its particular approach, discusses television as an object of analysis within that critical framework, and provides extended examples of the types of analysis produced by that critical approach. Case studies range from Rescue 911 and Twin Peaks to soap operas, music videos, game shows, talk shows, and commericals. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled suggests new ways of understanding relationships among television programs, between viewing pleasure and narrative structure, and between the world in front of the television set and that represented on the screen. The collection also addresses the qualities of popular television that traditional aesthetics and quantitative media research have failed to treat satisfactorily, including its seriality, mass production, and extraordinary popularity. The contributors are Robert C. Allen, Jim Collins, Jane Feuer, John Fiske, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, James Hay, E. Ann Kaplan, Sarah Kozloff, Ellen Seiter, and Mimi White.

On November 27, 1937, NBC presented TV's first pilot film, Sherlock Holmes (then called an "experiment"). Thousands of pilot films (both unaired and televised) have been produced since. This updated and restyled book contains 2,470 alphabetically arranged pilot films broadcast from 1937 to 2019. Entries contain the concept, cast and character information, credits (producer, writer, director), dates, genre and network or cable affiliation. In addition to a complete performer's index, two appendices have been included: one detailing the pilot films that led to a series and a second that lists the programs that were spun off from one series into another. Never telecast pilot films can be found in the companion volume, The Encyclopedia of Unaired Television Pilots, 1945-2018. Both volumes are the most complete and detailed sources for such information, a great deal of which is based on viewing the actual programs.

"This work traces specific topics from 1925 through the 2005-2006 season. Entries include such themes as adolescence, adult film actresses, bars, espionage, gays, immigrants, lawyers, transsexuals and truckers. Locations like Canada, Hawaii, New York and Los Angeles. Each entry displays how television's treatment of subjects has changed over years. Each entry contains series, pilot, special and experimental program information"--Provided by publisher.

This fully updated and expanded edition covers over 10,200 programs, making it the most comprehensive documentation of television programs ever published. In addition to covering the standard network and cable entertainment genres, the book also covers programs generally not covered elsewhere in print (or even online), including Internet series, aired and unaired pilot films, erotic series, gay and lesbian series, risque cartoons and experimental programs from 1925 through 1945.

More than 600 live-action series from the first 35 years of American television are alphabetically listed in this encyclopedic work.