When Women Invented Television | NY Times Bestselling author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

80s TV Ladies

Welcome to Season 3!
Sharon and Susan kick off a new season with Jennifer Keishan Armstrong, the New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia: How a Show about Nothing Changed Everything, When Women Invented Television, Sex and the City and Us, and Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted.
Jennifer writes about entertainment and pop culture for the New York Times Book Review, Fast Company, Vulture, BBC Culture, and Entertainment Weekly. Her latest book So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We're Still So Obsessed with It) was published this year.
In this fascinating interview, Jennifer takes us behind the scenes with four different women who, in their own ways, invented television: Irma Phillips, Hazel Scott, Gertrude Berg -- and Betty White. Each of them faced sexism -- and racism -- but triumphed during a time when opportunities for women in television were limited -- but strangely also more open than you may think….
THE CONVERSATION

• How The Mary Tyler Moore Show gave a voice to women everywhere when they gave a voice to a host of female TV writers.
• The Oprah of the 1950’s was… Gertrude Berg?
• The Beyoncé of the 1940s was... reknowned Black jazz pianist, Hazel Scott.
• Find out how Scott became the first Black person to host a national primetime television show -- in 1950.
• The character of Suanne Nivens that Betty White played on The Mary Tyler Moore Show was based on a woman who did a LIVE Homemaking Show played by… Betty White!
• Irma Phillips was asked to make something that would appeal to women -- so she invented the Soap Opera.
• Phillips created As The World Turns -- AND the longest running show of all time, The Guiding Light.
• Gertrude Berg’s ground-breaking sitcom about a Jewish family -- The Goldbergs -- was so successful that it was considered to be the lead-in for a new, untested show that might need some help -- I Love Lucy.
• Why was 1955 the death knell of women working in television -- both in front of AND behind the camera?
• According to network executives in 1969, what were the THREE THINGS Americans didn’t want to see on television?
• How The Mary Tyler Moore Show made Ed Asner a feminist.

So join Susan and Sharon -- and Jennifer -- as they talk “fat farms”, Mean Girls, the Black List, Seinfeld, Tina Fey, Shonda Rhimes, Father Knows Best -- and “On Wednesdays we wear pink”!
AUDIO-OGRAPHY
Find Jennifer Keishan Armstrong at her website, jenniferkarmstrong.com.
Buy The Women Who Invented Television (and all Jennifer’s books) at Bookshop.org.
Find Jennifer on Instagram.
Find Women Who Invented Television at YouTube:
Watch The Betty White Show (1954)
Watch Betty White in her sitcom, Life with Elizabeth.
Learn more about Hazel Scott.
The Goldbergs with Gertrude Berg, Episode: “A Sad Day”
Check out an Irma Phillips episode of The Guiding Light (1952).
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