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8.0 9 Seasons • 221 Episodes

The Twentieth Century

The Twentieth Century is a long-running CBS documentary television series that aired from 1957 to 1966, sponsored throughout its run by the Prudential Insurance Company and narrated by Walter Cronkite. Drawing on the resources of CBS News, the series produced both historical compilation documentaries and originally photographed contemporary reports, presenting major political, cultural, scientific, and social developments that shaped the modern world. Episodes combined newsreel footage, eyewitness testimony, and on-location reporting, covering subjects ranging from global conflicts and political change to arts, science, and international social transformation. Popular with audiences and critically respected, the series functioned as a formative model for later American television documentary programming and helped establish the compilation-documentary format as a central mode of broadcast nonfiction.

Seasons

Top Cast

  • Walter Cronkite

    Walter Cronkite

    Self - Narrator

Overview

The Twentieth Century is a long-running CBS documentary television series that aired from 1957 to 1966, sponsored throughout its run by the Prudential Insurance Company and narrated by Walter Cronkite. Drawing on the resources of CBS News, the series produced both historical compilation documentaries and originally photographed contemporary reports, presenting major political, cultural, scientific, and social developments that shaped the modern world. Episodes combined newsreel footage, eyewitness testimony, and on-location reporting, covering subjects ranging from global conflicts and political change to arts, science, and international social transformation. Popular with audiences and critically respected, the series functioned as a formative model for later American television documentary programming and helped establish the compilation-documentary format as a central mode of broadcast nonfiction.

Recommendations

20/20

20/20 is an American television newsmagazine that has been broadcast on ABC since June 6, 1978. Created by ABC News executive Roone Arledge, the show was designed similarly to CBS's 60 Minutes but focuses more on human interest stories than international and political subjects. The program's name derives from the "20/20" measurement of visual acuity. The hour-long program has been a staple on Friday evenings for much of the time since it moved to that timeslot from Thursdays in September 1987, though special editions of the program occasionally air on other nights.

20/20

6.3 1978
Biography

Biography is a documentary television series. It was originally a half-hour filmed series produced for CBS by David Wolper from 1961 to 1964 and hosted by Mike Wallace. The A&E Network later re-ran it and has produced new episodes since 1987. The older version featured historical figures such as Helen Keller and Mark Twain, or long-dead entertainment figures such as Will Rogers or John Barrymore. The A&E series has placed the emphasis on such people as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Plácido Domingo, Freddie Mercury, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Eric Clapton, Pope John Paul II, Gene Tierney, Selena, Diego Rivera, Mao Zedong and Queen Elizabeth II, and fictional characters like The Phantom, Superman, Hamlet, Betty Boop, and Santa Claus. The program ended up profiling enough figures that in 1999, A&E spun it off into an entire network, The Biography Channel.

Biography

6.7 1987