Katie King

“There are also generational knowledges in play, accessed and skilled within a history of televisual experiments in educational entertainment. For US academics schooled in the fifties, sixties, and seventies some old TV shows haunt this vignette as well. Two are Walter Cronkite’s You Are There (CBS, 1953–57) and Steve Allen’s Meeting of Minds (PBS, 1977–81). During the mid-century decades either or both could be found on the TV screen and in US secondary school classrooms. Even now the thoughtfully presentist You are There reenactments can be viewed on DVDs from Netflix; you can be personally addressed and included as Cronkite interviews Socrates about his choice to poison himself with hemlock rather than submit to exile after ostracism in ancient Athens. Cronkite’s interviews, scripted by blacklisted Hollywood writers, were specifically charged with messages against McCarthy-style witch hunts that were “felt” rather than spoken out.”

“In television the democratization of knowledge and its pedagogical commercial exuberance have become one. Consider from the end of the nineties such BBC history shows as Surviving the Iron Age or The Ship: Retracing Cook’s Endeavor Voyage—each shown 2001.... All these shows recruit volunteers who are put into environments conspicuously uncomfortable.... An emphasis on participants’ surprise at the difficulties of daily life and a previously unexamined and thus taken for granted assumption of physical comfort is the formula for melodrama in these kinds of shows.... All of them are one part soap opera, one part period recreation—and with folks from our time who invite audience identification as “us,” viewers mentally enacting too, playing at, reenacting, shadowing, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for, various understandings of varying pasts.... “Science” and all it stands for—knowledges broadly understood or our everyday knowledge-managed technologies—are especially lively players in the action....”

“It is spring 2007, and the block-long security lines into the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) are missing now while it is closed for renovation. The once controversial and “technically superb” exhibition Science in American Life is due to be phased out. The hot new museum exhibit is at the National Museum of Natural History’s (NMNH) Kenneth E. Behring Hall of Mammals. There, entering this multimedia, multisensory immersive installation, we are invited to a “Mammal Family Reunion—Come meet your relatives!”—in a savvy response to antievolution religious activism.”

“The year 1992 was the countdown year for the formation of the European single market, the regional economic entity—utopian for some, dystopian for others—now intended to recenter Europe in a global politics fragmented in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union....The year 1992 was also when the action adventure TV series Highlander first premiered—“the first European co-produced weekly hour to be sold into the US syndication market.” ...My own pleasure in Highlander began with the principal actor Adrian Paul’s eroticized image. I immediately (and somewhat idiosyncratically) “recognized” it as gay (the image, not necessarily the main story character Duncan MacLeod, or the actor Adrian Paul). It was in this “recognition” that I discovered my pleasure in the show. As a lesbian I was surprised: this was really the first TV show since my adolescence in which an eroticized male image seemed so powerfully attractive to me. Perhaps that is why I assumed it was somehow gay....”