Defining Moments in TV History You’ve Probably Never Heard About
Many of the most-important events have slipped from our collective memories. But their impacts live on.
7 min
After roughly 85 years of television in American homes, viewers have collectively shared historical triumphs and unthinkable tragedies, from Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk in 1969 to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
But lesser-known events in the world of television have also reshaped America’s cultural landscape in lasting ways.
From redefining suppertime to digitising games to symbolising sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, here are six examples of TV’s impact on the American psyche.
1950: Birth of the couch potato
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, television sets marched into American living rooms.
But like the venerable radios they replaced, TVs were incredibly inconvenient. Many viewers had to actually stand up and walk across the room just to change the channel.
In 1950, Zenith Radio addressed this gross shortcoming with its release of a remote control, albeit one with a long cord and only two buttons—one to change channels and the other to power the TV on and off. Zenith aptly dubbed its remote Lazy Bones.
Taking lazy to the next level, Swanson & Sons in 1953 introduced TV dinners, convenient bake-and-eat frozen meals in aluminum trays.
Clearly, suppertime had moved to the sofa, because in 1954, the first full year of production, Swanson sold 10 million TV dinners. We were becoming a nation of “couch potatoes.”
Of course, nobody knew it at the time because the term couch potato didn’t exist yet.
In 1976, a man named Tom Iacino called his friend’s house and flippantly asked the person who answered the phone if he could speak to “the couch potato.”
Another friend, cartoonist Robert Armstrong, later heard about the mocking moniker and went on to trademark it (with Iacino’s permission).
Armstrong co-wrote “The Official Couch Potato Handbook: A Guide to Prolonged Television Viewing,” and the term couch potato entered the nation’s vocabulary.
Sept. 9, 1950: Forced laughter
The name Hank McCune may be lost to history, but his short-lived television sitcom will forever be remembered for its chuckles, chortles, giggles and guffaws. All of it canned.
Woven throughout the show’s jokes and sight gags was a laugh track—a first in American television—to “sweeten” the material and cue viewers at home when something was funny.
Countless other shows went on to use the technique, with Charlie Douglass soon becoming the undisputed “master of laughter.”
Douglass, formerly a technical director for various live shows, incorporated prerecorded laughter into shows that were filmed both with and without studio audiences.
To do this, Douglass built what he called the “Laff Box” and operated it somewhat like an organ. The upper keys were pressed to combine different types of laughter, from titters to belly laughs, and the foot pedals controlled the timing and duration of the laughter.
TV Guide published a two-part series on the Laff Box in 1966 in which industry executives explained why they went for the easy laffs: “Live audiences in from the street are tense and nervous and you don’t get their true reactions,” explained producer Don McGuire.
Arthur Julian, a writer on “F Troop,” noted that “real audiences sound phonier than the laugh track. Sometimes they freeze up and act unnatural.”
Today, television shows have mostly done away with laugh tracks. But Douglass still gets the last laugh—even though he died in 2003.
A recent study confirmed what previous research has already determined: Laugh tracks get people to laugh. In 2021, researchers concluded that a laugh track “may socially facilitate viewers’ responses and succeed in increasing the perceived humor and enjoyability of a television comedic sitcom.”
1959: Fired for being Black
At his first job in TV in 1959, Max Robinson was a voice without a face. As he delivered the latest headlines on WTOV in Portsmouth, Va., viewers at home merely saw a slide that read “News” on their TV screens.
Then one day before his broadcast, Robinson instructed the cameraman to remove the slide.
“I thought it would be good for all my folks and friends to see me rather than this dumb ‘News’ sign up there. Vanity got the better of me,” Robinson told the Washington Post in 1988.
When the slide was removed, viewers at home discovered that Robinson was Black.
The next day, the owner called him and apologetically fired him, Robinson told the Post. “He’d gotten these calls from some irate whites who’d found out that one of ‘those people’ was working there,” Robinson said.
Nonetheless, even though he lost his job, Robinson made history as the first African-American nightly news television anchor.
After his WTOV stint, Robinson went on to report the news and sit in the anchor’s chair at various stations until his big break came on July 10, 1978. ABC-TV premiered “World News Tonight” with three anchors: Frank Reynolds, Peter Jennings and Max Robinson.
Despite his success, Robinson continued to decry what he saw as racial inequities in both the media and in media coverage.
In a 1981 address at Smith College, he called the news media “a crooked mirror” through which “white America views itself,” the New York Times reported. “Only by talking about racism, by taking a professional risk, will I take myself out of the mean, racist trap all Black Americans find themselves in.”
Robinson was one of the founders of the National Association of Black Journalists and advocated for the cause until his death in 1988.
Oct. 18, 1979: A flood of BUDs
To encourage the expansion of satellite TV, the FCC voted to drop its costly and complicated licensing requirement for owning a satellite dish.
Now, cable and premium channels could more readily install giant satellite dishes to transmit and receive signals.
But the rule change also meant that Joe Schmo could install a behemoth satellite dish in his backyard and scoop up signals from cable and premium channels—all without having to pay monthly subscription fees.
Even so, Joe Schmo soon learned that saving money came at a price: All the neighbours hated him.
Some early models of the satellite dishes measured 16 feet in diameter, and hundreds of thousands of them sprouted up across the country. Technically, they were referred to as C-band satellite dishes after the range of wireless frequencies they received.
But they were better known throughout neighbourhoods as BUDs, or Big Ugly Dishes.
BUDs could capture premium programming at no cost because initially the analog-TV signals weren’t encrypted by broadcasters.
Still, even if homeowners got free programming, the upfront costs of buying and installing a satellite dish ran into hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.
The backyard BUDs shot up just as cable and satellite programming was just getting off the ground. Home Box Office was a pioneer on both fronts.
In 1972 it was the first pay-cable network, and in 1975, it became the first TV network to transmit programming via satellite.
Ted Turner in 1976 turned WTCG, a small, independent TV station into a national cable network and later rebranded it WTBS, for Turner Broadcasting System.
Other networks that were early to the cable game include the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) in 1979, and Music Television—MTV—in 1981.
In 1986, broadcasters began scrambling their signals in hopes of nipping their losses in the BUDs.
Some companies, including HBO, said homeowners could continue to use their backyard dishes, but in order for them to work, they would have to also buy a $395 descrambler and pay monthly subscription fee.
Needless to say, as more channels encrypted their signals, BUD sales withered.
1972: A whole new game in town
In September 1972, the world’s first home video game console made its debut, giving the words “What’s on TV?” a literal new meaning.
Named the Magnavox Odyssey, the console setup included translucent overlays that players stuck on the TV screen to create colourful game boards, such as table tennis, roulette and haunted house.
The underlying gaming technology itself was crude by today’s standards: Three white dots and a vertical line on a black background. Two of the dots were manipulated by players using hand-held controllers, the third by the system itself.
The console had dials that adjusted the placement of the vertical line and the speed of one of the dots.
With six game cartridges and plastic overlays, the Odyssey setup offered 12 different games when it first retailed for $100—or about $770 in today’s dollars.
While rudimentary, the Odyssey broke a barrier in the world of television. It changed the medium from a passive activity with a scripted outcome into an interactive pursuit controlled by users at home.
Today, the U.S. ranks No. 1 in the world videogame market, with revenue projected to exceed $140 billion in 2025, according to Statista Market Insights.
That figure includes the creation, publishing, distribution and monetization of PC, mobile and online games, as well as spending on related hardware and accessories. China holds the No. 2 spot, with a projected $137.8 billion in revenue in 2025.
1970s: Rock stars vs. TV sets
In the late 1960s, a peculiar new synergy emerged between rock ’n’ roll music and television: Put a rock star in a hotel room with a TV, and the TV wouldn’t come out alive.
Many in the music world trace the genesis of this phenomenon to Keith Moon, who was legendary both as a drummer for the Who and for trashing hotel rooms, including TVs.
A 1972 film recording documents Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and saxophonist Bobby Keys throwing a TV off the 10th-floor balcony of Continental Hyatt House Los Angeles.
In the recording, one of them is kindly heard saying, “Let’s make sure there ain’t nobody down there,” before dropping the TV.
Not to be outdone, members of Led Zeppelin threw televisions from the windows of Seattle’s Edgewater Hotel into the waters of Elliot Bay.
The Brits weren’t the only bad boys. While visiting Asheville, N.C., for a show in July 1975, Elvis Presley reportedly shot to death the TV set in his motel room because the vertical hold setting wasn’t working properly, according to local historian Jon Elliston.
It didn’t take long for trashing hotel property to become a hallmark of the rock ’n’ roll mythology, with television sets seemingly taking the brunt of the abuse.
Still, destroying them was an expensive thrill, since the band was expected to reimburse hotels for the ravaged TVs and other damage to the rooms when checking out.
It could also be dangerous. After a night of heavy drinking, Black Sabbath’s former frontman Ozzy Osbourne and guitarist Zakk Wylde hurled a TV out of a sixth-floor window at the Four Seasons in Prague
Wylde, who recalled the incident in a 2024 interview, said it happened after Osbourne mentioned that he had never done it before.
Describing the TV drop in a 2019 interview, which has been edited for TV, Osbourne said, “I ripped the window open, picked it up and threw it out of the BLEEP window. It landed on the floor and BLEEP exploded. It went like a bomb. Little did I know that there was a guy smoking a cigarette, and I shudder to think if that had hit him on the head. I would have killed him stone BLEEP dead.”
Osbourne, who famously bit the head off a bat that was tossed onto the stage at a concert in Iowa (he said later he thought it was fake), died in July of 2025 of a heart attack at age 76.
On the opposite end of the safety scale: Guitarist Kelley Deal of the Breeders and Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic.
On tour in the early 1990s, the two musicians decided to toss a TV out of a hotel window, Deal told the Guardian.
Novoselic “called down to the front desk, got permission, paid for the TV and asked security to make sure nobody was below. This is the kind of sweet band they were. Then we shoved it through the window. It was fun, but the funniest bit was all the planning and anticipation.”
Today, rock ’n’ roll is past its heyday, and many icons of the genre are fading as well. But legends still have a soft spot for the old days.
Asked about artificial intelligence creeping into music, rocker Joe Walsh dismissed concerns in a 2023 video clip, saying: AI “can’t destroy a hotel room.
It can’t throw a TV off the fifth floor into the pool and get it right in the middle. When AI knows how to destroy a hotel room, then I’ll pay attention to it.”
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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