Daytime Television Programming (1991) provides a practical understanding of daytime television formats, viewer demographics, and programming strategy. It compares daytime genres to their evening counterparts, discusses the effects of demographics on daytime programming, analyses investment yields, and highlights audience expectations. Discussions of specific daytime shows teach techniques necessary to overcome the enormous creative challenges in building a successful daytime lineup.

Beyond Prime Time brings together established television scholars writing new chapters in their areas of expertise that reconsider how programming forms other than prime-time series have been affected by the wide-ranging industrial changes instituted over the past twenty years. The chapters explore the relationship between textual and industrial changes in particular forms such as news, talk, sports, soap operas, syndication, children’s programming, made-for-television movies, public broadcasting, and local programming.

"Five-decade chronicle of television history [covering] ... all daytime programs that aired for three or more weeks on a commercial network between 1947 and 1996, plus 100 nationally syndicated shows from the same period ... . [Includes] cartoons, children's programs, game shows, news shows, soap operas, sports programs, [and] talk shows ... . Provides the dates each show aired, a synosis of its plot, its principal cast members, and other pertinent information"--Back cover.

From the late 1950s until the early 1970s, NBC's Concentration was one of American television's most popular programs. In his new book, producer Norm Blumenthal takes viewers and readers backstage for an exciting look at an era when daytime television was dominated by prizes, contestants, models, quick wits, clever turns of phrase, and the authentic excitement associated with playing alongside celebrities, solving the puzzle, winning the money, and simply appearing on television with tens of millions of people watching every moment.

In this pathfinding book, based on original archival research, Marsha F. Cassidy offers the first thorough analysis of daytime television's earliest and most significant women's genres, appraising from a feminist perspective what women watched before soap opera rose to prominence. After providing a comprehensive history of the early days of women's programming across the nation, Cassidy offers a critical discussion of the formats, programs, and celebrities that launched daytime TV in America—Kate Smith's variety show and the famed singer's unsuccessful transition from patriotic radio star to 1950s TV idol; the "charm boys" Garry Moore, Arthur Godfrey, and Art Linkletter, whose programs honored women's participation but in the process established the dominance of male hosts on TV; and the "misery shows" Strike It Rich and Glamour Girl and the controversy, both critical and legal, they stirred up. Cassidy then turns to NBC's Home show, starring the urbane Arlene Francis, who infused the homemaking format with Manhattan sophistication, and the ambitious daily anthology drama Matinee Theater, which strove to differentiate itself from soap opera and become a national theater of the air. She concludes with an analysis of four popular audience participation shows of the era—the runaway hit Queen for a Day; Ralph Edwards's daytime show of surprises, It Could Be You; Who Do You Trust?, starring a youthful Johnny Carson; and The Big Payoff, featuring Bess Myerson, the country's first Jewish Miss America. Cassidy's close feminist reading of these shows clearly demonstrates how daytime TV mirrored the cultural pressures, inconsistencies, and ambiguities of the postwar era.

Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen.