Gold Dust on the Air by Molly A. Schneider
“The Twilight Zone” is easily the one most remembered, followed by “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” They were among the dozen or more “anthology dramas,” weekly network programs from the 1950s through the early ‘60s that bestowed the prestige of high-end theater on the nascent medium of television.
In Gold Dust on the Air, Columiba College Chicago’s Molly A. Schneider focuses on how those anthologies “negotiated ideas about America at midcentury.” During those years, cultural appreciation—at least a middle brow engagement with intellectual and aesthetic ideas—was encouraged in mainstream America. The anthology dramas often—if guardedly, given the chill of McCarthyism and white Southern intransigence—addressed “what one might think of as desirable, right, and possible in the context of American life,” she writes.
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