The Live Golden Age
Early television drama had no means of recording. So all of it went out live. Stage actors and stage directors opened a new show every night, on the air. A dropped line, a flat of scenery falling over — it all went out as it was.
That tension was the texture of early television. And for the same reason, much of the drama of this era does not survive. The broadcast happened, and it was gone.
What changed that is the next section (→ Filmed TV and the Rerun). The moment programmes became things that remained, television began moving from a play of the moment to a medium that accumulates.
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The myth, corrected
The dramas of this era are gone because they went out live
It is true that a great deal is missing. The reason, though, is not the one usually given. Live broadcasts of this period were routinely recorded by kinescope, a film camera pointed at a monitor. The purpose was not preservation but time zones: a live show out of New York had to be replayed later on the West Coast, and prints were bicycled from station to station. So the recordings were made. Most were lost because the picture was coarse, the reuse value was judged low, and nobody kept them. Not an absence of recording, but an abandonment of keeping. At the extreme, the kinescopes and two-inch videotape held by the DuMont network were, according to Edie Adams' testimony before the Library of Congress on 6 March 1996, dumped at night into Upper New York Bay in the early 1970s. And a good deal does survive. The kinescope of Marty was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in February 1963 and later released on disc; Twelve Angry Men survives on 16mm; and the Library of Congress holds many complete episodes of Kraft Television Theatre.