In just a few years, that immobile piece of living room furniture, in front of which viewers had to sit at appointed times in order to watch sponsored programming on a finite number of channels, has morphed into a glowing cloud of screens with access to a near endless supply of content available when and how we want it. The effect of this revolutionary transformation—lately pondered by so many of the culterati—makes a writer of David Thomson’s stature delivering a history of the screen which got us here an event which could not be more timely.

In his introduction to TELEVISION: A BIOGRAPHY, Thomson notes that “if you wanted to play everything that has been on all the channels of American television all the hours of every day, that playing would take 5,000 years, give or take a century or so. The stuff is growing at a demented pace, as if the ‘wasteland,’ which was once a lofty put-down of television is actually a rampant jungle.” So instead of a strict chronology, Thomson has built twenty-one thematically organized chapters in which he turns his provocatively insightful and observant gaze to the sixty-five-year-long television era.

In “Part One: The Medium” Thomson explores what he terms “the things that are always there:” the social and political climate of the television age; the move from novel craze to complacent habit; the rise of formulaic TV shows; the relationship of the new medium to film; the creation of television personas; commercials and the structure of calculated interruption; authoritative figureheads; “good” and “bad” television; and the role of public television. In “Part Two: The Messages,” individual chapters consider the evolution over the decades of hit procedurals (Law & Order, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, NYPD Blue), comedies (I Love Lucy, Newhart, Fawlty Towers, Seinfeld), and network news; the relationships of presidents to Americans via the small screen; the creation and experience of role models who brought minorities to TV; sports and live TV events; and shows that seem to always be on.

Throughout TELEVISION: A BIOGRAPHY, Thomson surveys a Boschian landscape, illuminated by that singular glow and peopled by everyone from Donna Reed to Dennis Potter to Donald Trump, and offers a rip-roaring, unexpected, and perhaps most of all, deeply thought-provoking history of the medium that has defined us.