<Table> <Tr> <Td> "</Td> <Td> The critics will always look down their noses, but you can't have The Bell Telephone Hour on and still stay in competition . They can sit around and talk about the great wasteland and everything else . If you want to read books, read books . </Td> <Td>" </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> "</Td> <Td> The critics will always look down their noses, but you can't have The Bell Telephone Hour on and still stay in competition . They can sit around and talk about the great wasteland and everything else . If you want to read books, read books . </Td> <Td>" </Td> </Tr> <P> In November 1960 former NBC head Sylvester "Pat" Weaver commented on the end of the Golden Age of Television in The Denver Post, saying: "Television has gone from about a dozen forms to just two - news shows and the Hollywood stories . The blame lies in the management of NBC, CBS and ABC . Management doesn't give the people what they deserve . I don't see any hope in the system as it is ." </P> <P> Many programs of this era evolved from successful radio shows that brought polished concepts, casts and writing staffs to TV . This is one reason that quality was so consistently high during this period . Even an original show like I Love Lucy drew heavily from radio, since many of those scripts were rewrites from Lucille Ball's late - 1940s radio show My Favorite Husband . Shows like Our Miss Brooks, Gunsmoke, Amos and Andy and The Jack Benny Program ran concurrently on both radio and TV until television reception reached beyond the major metropolitan areas in the mid-1950s . Others, such as Father Knows Best and Fibber McGee and Molly, attempted to "flash - cut" from radio to television, to varying degrees of success . By the early 1960s, about 90% of American households had a television set, and the roles of television and radio (which was largely saved from obsolescence by the invention of the far more portable transistor radio in the 1950s and the concurrent rise of higher - fidelity FM radio) had changed, so that radio was primarily a medium for music, and scripted programming became wholly the domain of television . </P>

When was television’s golden age and why was it golden