Fifty years ago on CBS, the revolution was televised, if only for a minute at a time.
From July 4, 1974, through the end of 1976, “Bicentennial Minutes” took 60 seconds in prime time between some of TV’s most popular shows to have celebrities, artists and politicians tell viewers what had happened 200 years ago that day, in the early years of the American Revolution.
Charlton Heston kicked off the series, backed by a giant American flag, telling of George Washington’s worries after the Boston Tea Party. Representative Bella Abzug, in her trademark hat and thick New York accent, related a British man-o-war attack on the city’s waterfront. Lucille Ball described “corn-shucking parties” in colonial New England. (Not every day in history can be equally action-packed.) In a twist on the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off, each one concluded, “That’s the way it was.”
The series was a simple act of civic education — earnest, unflashy, a little corny and mockable. It was not big on geopolitics, gray areas or the moral failings of the home-team rebels. Writing in The New York Times, the TV critic John J. O’Connor called its early episodes “so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless.” (The series nonetheless won an Emmy in 1976.)
But a half-century later, as America prepares to celebrate a bigger mouthful of a birthday, the Semiquincentennial, the “Bicentennial Minutes” series is educational in a different way. It’s a time capsule of 20th-century mass civics, a reminder of how — for good, bad or mediocre — TV once formed a kind of public square that is probably irretrievable.
“Bicentennial Minutes,” like many American inventions, was a creation of commerce. Shell Oil bought each minute of airtime for two years, its logo ending each star-spangled broadcast. (Other sponsors took over after July 4, 1976.) It was a crossover ad for gasoline and America.
Bob Markell, who took over producing the series from its creator, Lewis Freedman, early in its run, said in an interview with the Television Academy that he had decided to construct the episodes like “a show.” There was a sizable research staff. The episodes were dramatically scored and — before Ken Burns — would pan over illustrations to create a dynamic sense of movement. The episodes were scripted like minuscule dramas following a three-act structure.
The Aug. 31, 1975, installment, with the actress Jessica Tandy, is a good example. Tandy tells how Boston’s “liberty tree” was cut down by the British. (You can watch the episode on YouTube, along with a handful of other “Bicentennial Minutes,” but most of the series is nowhere to be found on streaming platforms.)
Tandy’s introduction sets the scene, with work gangs piling up firewood for the coming winter. The background music turns dark as she describes the glee with which the occupiers hacked at the symbol of rebellion. Then, a twist: “One redcoat, hacking away at a high branch, slipped and fell to his death. The liberty tree died, but not without a struggle.” Premise, conflict and comeuppance — all delivered with plenty of time left in the program break for more ads.
The commercials at the time were likely as not to be Bicentennial-flavored as well. Budweiser saluted Paul Revere; Burger King, its royalist name notwithstanding, adorned its logo with an Uncle Sam cap. Store shelves were packed with Bicentennial kitsch; Saturday-morning cartoons were interspersed with episodes of “America Rock.” To grow up then was to be immersed in Bicentennial media, a star-spangled overwash of commercial culture, a yearslong fife-and-drum parade.
There was something audaciously American about the “Bicentennial Minutes” fast-food approach to history: Give us 60 seconds and we’ll give you the nation! But it became a pop-culture phenomenon, its name dropped on sitcoms, its civics-lecture tone spoofed. On “The Carol Burnett Show,” Tim Conway played a hapless colonist in a Revolutionary War painting come to life. On “Saturday Night Live,” Garrett Morris, in a yellow-and-black insect suit, hosted the “Bee Centennial Minute.”
Even the mockery was a sign that “Bicentennial Minutes” had entered the cultural lingua franca. It was part of a shared moment that everyone could participate in, whether hipster or square, sarcastic or sincere.
This kind of mass experience of nonpartisan celebration feels alien today. But the difference is not entirely a matter of “It was a simpler time then.” There was not much simple about the mid-1970s! A month after the segments began airing, President Nixon resigned. The next year, Saigon fell, marking the failure of America’s disastrous war in Vietnam.
The America of the 1970s was deeply divided — that was, in fact, the very theme of CBS’s most popular show, “All in the Family.” But that show had a viewership of around 60 million Americans, which it, like CBS’s other tent-pole shows, delivered to the “Bicentennial Minute.” There was still a mass culture, and in its bland way, it was telling audiences that even if they were as fractious as Archie Bunker’s household, they were all invited to the party.
It is hard to imagine anything like that repeating next year, at a time when even popular representations of history, like “Hamilton,” become culture-war battlefields. Political division is not necessarily bad; sometimes the events and stakes of a time can’t be smoothed over. But it makes a chill, unifying Independence Day next year seem unlikely — certainly if recent events are any preview.
President Trump’s speech at a July 4 kickoff event for America250, the organization overseeing official Semiquincentennial celebrations, was a rally-like partisan event in which he lambasted his political enemies; the June parade for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, hosted by America250, was a gaudy, Trumpian display, sponsored in part by Trump supporters. It’s hard to imagine the polarizing president not making himself the main character of America’s birthday. (In 1976, network equal-time rules kept President Ford from appearing on “Bicentennial Minutes” until the final episode, after he lost re-election.)
Even if the political environment were different, could you re-create something like “Bicentennial Minutes” today? Format-wise, of course: We do not exactly lack for short-form video. You can explore African American history on TikTok or watch a reel of a man re-creating Martha Washington’s diet.
What you can’t revive, with broadcast TV superseded by streaming and the internet, is the communal. Social-media videos are created mainly outside mass-media institutions and served to niche audiences by algorithms that subdivide audiences into psychographic cohorts with robotic precision.
To the extent that the Semiquincentennial has any mass-culture reach, we will likely have countless individual renditions of it. There will be a version of America’s 250th for the winners of history and for the vanquished, for the ascendant and the opposition, and everyone, however powerful, will identify with the scrappy rebels. (As if in a form of counterprogramming, Barack and Michelle Obama are producing an American history-themed sketch comedy series for HBO with Larry David, timed around the anniversary.)
Maybe this is fitting. After all, history is not just one story. A homogeneous, thumbnail version of a country’s founding that is meant to upset nobody, surface no divisive issues, is likely leaving something, or someone, out.
But the version of America in which an enormous, geographically and politically diverse audience took 60 seconds between sitcoms to absorb a story of common birthright — that’s ancient history.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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