Justice on Television: Way Before Good Wives and Even West Wings!

Movies stay with us; they’re great historic documents, but television is intimate, and when it’s good, television is us.

My own early understanding of injustice and race and poverty and social change came from television. For example:

The child of a black couple in Harlem in the early 60’s was bitten by a rat in the tenement where they lived and no cab driver would stop pick them up to take them to the hospital ( East Side, West Side (1963-64) ( George C. Scott (Patton, Dr. Strangelove) and Cicely Tyson (The Autobiography of Miss Jane PIttman, The Help) as a social worker and his secretary.) It was cancelled after one season because no Southern stations would carry a show featuring interracial colleagues.
A tragic battle over the insanity defense in a death penalty case: a two-episode story on The Defenders* (1961-65) , starring Robert Reed, later the dad in The Brady Bunch.

There are plenty of others but this is #microblogmonday so I’m about done: consider though the WWI episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Route 66.

* The Museum of Broadcast Communications called it “perhaps the most socially conscious series the medium has ever seen”, a show”singularly resonant with New Frontier liberalism.”

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons. View all posts by Cynthia Samuels

One thought on “Justice on Television: Way Before Good Wives and Even West Wings!”

You are watching much better television than I am 🙂 Mine only entertains. And occasionally blows my mind. But mostly just entertains. But I guess that’s what we get for only watching the Sci Fi channel.

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