Television (Napoleon's World)

The following is some of the most important events of different decades in the television medium. It begins with the invention of TV by American Philo T. Farnsworth in 1923, to the present day.

1930's
The first commercially available TV's are sold in New York State, and the first show, President Herbert Hoover's New Year's Eve address, is seen by roughly 500 people on 100 TV sets.

1950's
The First Golden Age of TV, with such shows as American Bandstand, The Wonderful World of Walt Disney and games shows such as Beat the Clock and the first installment of Guess the Price. Westerns became increasingly popular, with shows like Gunsmoke and This Way, Pilgrim, staring John Wayne. Families throughout France and the United States rushed to get TV sets, and viewer ship first reach the ten million mark in 1964.

1960's
With the fall of Hollywood, many assumed that TV would simply take over the big screen, as actors who once worked in film made their way to TV. And soon the first "situation comedy's" began to be aired, such as I Love Lucy and Denderson's Acres, while the French film noir made its way from film to TV, with the popular L' Detective Revington being popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Another immensely popular show was the Alaskan hit North to Yukon, detailing the lives of several families immigrating to the Yukon Territory to search for gold, and their dangerous lives in the few settlements, staring Oleg Smarsov as the heroic Konstantine Nikalovich Hersov. The age was dominated by the "Big Three" TV networks; the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), American Broadcasting Consolidated (ABC) and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), as well as many dozens more regional broadcasting. In France, the Largest station is the state controlled French Imperial Television Service.

1970's
News programs began to become more important in the 70's, while the big staged shows such as This Way, Pilgrim and I Love Lucy eventually being cancelled due to high costs, and the difficulty in keeping audiences tuned to difficult to understand shows week after week. Color broadcasting, first started in 1968, effectivly sounded the death knell of the big black and white broadcasts of the old days. Game Shows, talk shows and soap operas, with their low cost and easy to build sets with little known actors, became much more popular with the networks.

1980's
The Talk show genre was defined by the 80's, with the success of such shows as The Ronald Reagan Show and