The Past Is Now Present Onscreen

This chapter delineates the broad parameters of made-for-television history, describing its stylistic preferences, and proposing a dozen general assumptions about the nature of this widespread phenomenon. It provides some time-tested observations concerning the enduring relationship between the proponents of popular and professional history, including the challenges and opportunities that this linkage affords television producers and scholars alike. Most surprisingly, America's preeminent examples of popular history currently originate on primetime television, encompassing the full gamut of actual and fictionalized presentations. Live “media events,” such as TV coverage of the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Desert Storm, the O.J. Simpson trial, the funeral of Princess Diana, and the 9/11 attacks “are in competition with the writing of history in defining the contents of collective memory”.