Dissenting Newman Chapter Burlesque with an Antenna Lowbrow Comedy on Television

This chapter was mostly factual, describing various television shows from the 1950s and classifying them as either lowbrow or middlebrow. The fact based nature of the work coupled with my lack of experience with the vast majority of the shows discussed makes dissenting quite difficult. However there were two points that I felt needed to be discussed with while reading.
First, I wish that the audience’s perspective would have been more prominent throughout the chapter. Aside from small references such as the discussion of the Honeymooners where Newman writes, “Ralph was not alone. His audience laughed at his failures, but they also felt his pain,” (Newman 53). I feel that although the facts are important to present, the reader also needs personal perspective. It is tough for someone of my generation to read so much information on unfamiliar television shows without getting a sense of how the viewers saw it. For example, Newman discusses how the possibility of a celebrity being Communist resulted in sponsors pulling their money out of shows, causing some to be cancelled. How did the average viewer feel about the implication that a celebrity might be Communist? Was this an issue at all; were they extremely concerned? It would be helpful to have the public perspective so that the reader can develop a stronger sense of the climate in which these shows were being produced. In other words, Newman presents an almost insiders look on the television industry in the 1950s (as we are privileged to have interviews and retrospective looks on the subject from those who lived it) while a cultural review would be interesting as well.
Another reason that a look at the general population would be helpful, as well as another issue I had with the chapter is the insinuation that the honeymooners had a political agenda. Gleason denied that these plots had any political significance. "Gleason professed to see no political agenda in his depiction of the poverty and thwarted materialism of the working classes." He insisted that Ralph was ‘no symbol, no metaphor…’ (Newman 50). Could this be true? It seems very possible to me that Gleason did not see any political commentary behind his character, Ralph. Instead, he may have seen a typical man of the era. It seems slightly confusing to assume that Gleason was making his show to convey an agenda when it seems like the show was just mirroring the times. Life during this era did seem hard (this would be another good time to get a viewer’s perspective on how they related to the characters they watched) and perhaps Gleason was just attempting to make the viewer feel comfortable watching someone with problems just like theirs.
I understand that the direction of this chapter is meant to be informational, leaving little room for anecdotal accounts. However, the use of interviews or statistics on viewership from the 1950s might give the reader a better understanding of the climate these shows were premiering during.