Susan Bordo is Professor Emerita at the University of Kentucky, USA, where she held the Otis A. Singletary Chair in Humanities. She has published many influential books, on subjects that range from femininity, masculinity, and the body (Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body and The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private) to Anne Boleyn (The Creation of Anne Boleyn) and, most recently, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, a play-by-play account of the gendered double-standards and stereotypes, political forces and media culture that contributed to Clinton's loss in the 2016 election (2017), and Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman and Other Writing on Politics and the Media 2016-2019 (2020.) Her widely cited books and articles are considered paradigms of accessible, interdisciplinary scholarship.

Susan Bordo is old enough to remember when television was a thing—a set, a box, an electric window on a made-up world—and she pays wise, charming, and personal tribute to its meaning for a generation and a culture raised in its blue light. And that's the way it was.

• Preface 1. Waiting for Joseph Welch 2. We Have Six Televisions 3. Growing Up with TV in the Fifties and Sixties 4. The Erosion of the Fact-Based Universe 5. If George Orwell Could Critique Broadcast News 6. Intersections of TV, “Reality,” and Reality 7. TV Deconstructs Gender 8. Epilogue: July 4, 2020AcknowledgmentsNotes