SOURCE: "The Art of Television Drama," in The Boston Review, Vol. IX, No. 4, July/August, 1984, pp. 12-14.

In the following essay, Esslin discusses the abandonment of literary drama by American commercial and public television programmers.

There is an immense amount of "drama" on American television—situation comedy, police and detective series, soap operas. Yet "television drama"—in the sense, that is, of serious drama specially conceived for the medium—is to all intents and purposes extinct in the United States. There was, once upon a time, a golden age of it in the 1950s, when writers like Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky produced a series of near-masterpieces in the genre, plays like Chayefsky's Marty (1953) or Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957). But that time has long since gone, (Serling, for example, gave up writing serious television drama in 1959, when he denounced censorship by sponsors and declared that "It's a...