By Alan Sepinwall
"USA250: The Story of the World's Greatest Economy" is a yearlong WSJ series examining America's first 250 years. Read more about it from Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.
The first American television drama was "The Queen's Messenger," a filmed play broadcast to sets with 3-inch screens placed throughout the city of Schenectady, N.Y., in 1928. Visitors to the 1939 World's Fair were dazzled by RCA's TV broadcasts. The first continuing American TV sitcom was the DuMont network's "Mary Kay and Johnny" in 1947 -- the same year that also brought the earliest shows geared at children, in "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" and "Howdy Doody."
But only 9% of all American households had television sets by 1950, a number that would balloon to 65% within five years. So the history of commercial TV in this country really begins in the 1950s.
We've chosen one show from that decade and each one that followed to help tell the story of how the medium evolved from "The Queen's Messenger" to "The Queen's Gambit."
1950s: 'I Love Lucy' (CBS, 1951-57)
This domestic sitcom, starring Lucille Ball as a frustrated housewife and Ball's then-husband Desi Arnaz as her patient bandleader husband, is the most influential show in TV history, and it isn't close.
Almost everything we think of about television comedy -- and most of what we know about the medium in general -- came from Lucy and Ricky's New York apartment. "I Love Lucy" invented the idea of filming on stages in front of an enthusiastic studio audience. It was the first show to recognize that TV wasn't a disposable thing, so episodes were shot on film to be preserved for airing again weeks, months and eventually decades later. It featured stunt casting (Superman himself once saved Lucy from falling off a building ledge) and semi-serialized plotting (different seasons took the Ricardos out to Hollywood and to Europe).
And when Ball got pregnant midway through the run, "Lucy" turned the fictional birth of Little Ricky into the medium's first major piece of event programming.
1960s: 'The Twilight Zone' (CBS, 1959-64)
Rod Serling's sci-fi anthology was never a huge hit in its original run. But few shows have had a longer afterlife, nor left a deeper impact on viewers.
Half the showrunners and filmmakers in Hollywood point to Serling as a chief creative inspiration, and can still tell you exactly how old they were the first time they saw the episode with Burgess Meredith as a bookworm who survives a nuclear war and is about to enjoy some uninterrupted reading time -- when his eyeglasses break.
Viewers of multiple generations talk about how Serling's morality plays and political commentary -- disguised within stories about aliens, monsters and demons, so that the CBS censors couldn't easily object to controversial material -- helped shape their beliefs about the world. It remains, like Serling's narration says, as timeless as infinity.
1970s: 'All in the Family' (CBS, 1971-79)
To counteract viewer angst about all the dark topics covered in the news about Vietnam, assassinations and more, television leaned into pure escapism for most of the mid-late Sixties. With a new decade, though, America was ready for shows that better reflected the world they were living in, and/or ones that dealt with difficult aspects of our country's past and present. The best, and most popular, of these was Norman Lear's generation-gap sitcom "All in the Family," starring Carroll O'Connor as retrograde bigot Archie Bunker, and Rob Reiner as his liberal son-in-law, Mike.
It was TV as Rorschach test, where some viewers interpreted Archie as the hero and Mike as the fool, while others understood that Lear was on Mike's side of every argument. It became such a phenomenon that even President Nixon was recorded talking about it in the Oval Office.
And its success inspired other topical, complicated shows throughout the 1970s, from direct spinoffs like "The Jeffersons" to ABC's blockbuster miniseries "Roots" -- about multiple generations of a Black family enslaved in the pre-Civil War South -- which likely wouldn't have received approval if "All in the Family" wasn't drawing in big audiences while talking about hot-button issues.
1980s: 'The Cosby Show' (NBC, 1984-92)
No big TV hit has ever had a more complicated legacy than "The Cosby Show," thanks to its co-creator and star Bill Cosby later being accused of sexual assault by dozens of women (and convicted of several of those charges). But before Cosby's crimes came to light, his sitcom was a colossal hit, and its presentation of the Huxtable family as the American ideal -- well-to-do, wise, funny, enormously likable -- helped redefine both how television portrayed Black people and how white audiences viewed them.
TV during the President Reagan era offered plenty of portraits of extremely wealthy families (see also "Dallas" and "Dynasty"), but none was better or more charming than "The Cosby Show" was at the time -- even if it's much harder to sit through today because of the man at the center of it.
1990s: 'Seinfeld' (NBC, 1989-98)
Even with a brief war in the Persian Gulf and the impeachment of President Clinton, the 1990s were arguably the least eventful decade of our lifetimes. What better show to typify that era of relative calm than what the characters on "Seinfeld" described as a show about nothing?
Over nine seasons, the sitcom went from barely registering in the Nielsen ratings in its early years to the top-rated show on television by its final season. And it did that with seemingly simple stories -- the gang has to wait for their table at a Chinese restaurant, George gets into a fight over a parking space, Jerry has an overdue library fine -- that merged with astonishing comedic timing.
How many under-discussed societal constructs did "Seinfeld" shine a light on over the years? Double-dipping, regifting, yada-yada'ing...the show about nothing wound up giving a name to a whole lot of things.
And as for that Clinton impeachment, what show better typified the decade that gave us Monica Lewinsky's stained blue dress than the one that brilliantly used innuendo -- particularly in the famous episode where the gang competed to see who could remain "master of their domain" the longest -- to let television deal much more overtly with sex than it ever had before?
2000s: 'The Sopranos' (HBO, 1999-2007)
In the half-century before this drama about a Mob boss in suburban New Jersey, television had operated by a variety of unwritten rules, like, "Your main character can have rough edges but ultimately has to be a good guy" and "The audience doesn't want to be challenged."
"Sopranos" creator David Chase ran all those rules through the meat grinder at Satriale's, and in the process made the most imitated show since "I Love Lucy." Every dark, serialized drama of the past quarter-century -- and all of the comedies featuring disreputable protagonists -- owe a debt to Tony Soprano and his family.
2010s: 'RuPaul's Drag Race' (multiple channels, 2009-present)
Parallel to "The Sopranos" phenomenon of the 2000s was the explosion of "reality TV" -- series like "Survivor," "American Idol" and the "Real Housewives" franchise.
Much of it is only slightly less scripted than what's happening on "Grey's Anatomy," but these shows offer the kinds of characters and conflicts TV hadn't made room for before. Among the most enduring of these is the drag-queen competition show "RuPaul's Drag Race," whose early seasons were part of a decade that saw television becoming more inclusive with queer and/or nonwhite people. (See also "Orange Is the New Black," "Transparent" and more.) A lot of that movement has been rolled back in the past few years, but "Drag Race" itself seems indestructible.
2020s: 'Stranger Things' (Netflix, 2016-25)
You can't tell the story of 21st-century TV without talking about streaming in general, and Netflix in particular. The streaming giant reshaped the way we consumed television. In offering easy access to every episode of every season of many shows, it turned former also-rans like "Breaking Bad" into megahits. In releasing full seasons of its own shows all at once, it created a culture of binge-watching and put all viewers on their own schedules.
Because streaming viewership numbers are more opaque than traditional TV ratings, we don't know for sure what Netflix's biggest hit has been, but "Stranger Things," which represents a lot of different aspects of the streaming era, has to be near the top. A tribute to 1980s sci-fi and horror stories by Steven Spielberg, Stephen King and others, it's part of a larger TV push toward nostalgia in recent years, even if it isn't based on intellectual property like all the "Star Wars" shows and sitcom revivals are.
Like "Game of Thrones" and "Walking Dead" earlier in the 2010s, "Stranger Things" pushed the medium more in the direction of spectacle. And it typifies the way that so many TV shows now take multiyear breaks between seasons because they're so logistically complicated, and/or because they have actors like Millie Bobby Brown and David Harbour who are in such demand that they can't just rush back into production after a brief hiatus.
Alan Sepinwall is a TV reviewer and writer at "What's Alan Watching?" He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 04, 2026 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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