Rethinking a Golden Age

Like many fans of old-time radio, I always tended to think of the golden age of radio as a single era. As I've been researching a film project about the end of that period, an intriguing book by radio historian Jim Cox entitled Say Goodnight Gracie: The Last Years of Network Radio has made me realize how important seeing radio's heyday as a series of eras within the larger era is to understanding the development of old-time radio. More specifically, it helped me appreciate how various external factors impacted the development of some of its best loved programs, especially in the 1950s.

Though radio was still the dominant medium at the start of the decade,  television was starting to erode the mass audience for whom radio had been the primary form of entertainment. As the 1950s went on, many long-running radio shows ended, including icons like The Shadow. Some programs found second lives on television. Some programs, like the soap opera The Guiding Light, co-existed in both TV and radio for a time. The majority of shows simply vanished. Much of this was driven by the sponsors, who once supported the lion's share of radio programming, deciding that television was where they wanted to put their resources. And though many classic shows suffered as a result, there was also a curious, and in some ways beneficial, flip-side to that shift.

Though both audience sizes and sponsor support for radio programming were declining, there was still a substantial audience for the networks to serve. More to the point, there was airtime that these networks needed to fill and, as much as possible, fill cheaply. Those factors turned out to be a genuine boon for radio drama. Unlike the star-driven music and variety programs which required large (i.e. expensive) casts and orchestras, dramas could be made for a fraction of the cost. Cox cites the average weekly production cost of a variety program as $40,000, whereas a detective series might only cost $4000-$7000. In contrast to the reality/competition driven network line-ups of today, the economics of broadcasting in the 1950s actually favored scripted drama.

It wasn't just economics, though, that benefited radio drama. By the middle of the decade, the audience that was still loyal to radio drama was also a more discerning audience that desired more substantive story-telling of the kind offered by writer-driven programs like Gunsmoke and X Minus One. This was the environment into which actor Bob Bailey and writer/director/producer Jack Johnstone stepped in 1955 when the mystery series Yours Truly Johnny Dollar began its year-long run of character-driven long-form narratives that ultimately led to it becoming the very last continuing drama of radio's golden age. That the same factors that ultimately doomed radio-drama in America were also a factor in some of its greatest shows is the sort of irony that would have been very much appreciated by Matt Dillon, Johnny Dollar and the other well-drawn characters that made old-time radio's final decade in many ways its finest decade.