Television of the 1950s was built around charismatic personalities rather than plot

Evidence

What attracted audiences—sometimes over 50 million—to the show was, as everyone agrees, Lucille Ball herself. The show revolved around serial failure: Lucy’s desperate wish for a career in show business; she would do anything, no matter how ridiculous, to get her foot in the door. Invariably, for one reason or another, her plots would fall apart. But if her schemes failed, Ball’s performance succeeded brilliantly as spectacle. The medium was made for personalities. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 449

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the modern attention economy’s reliance on influencers and celebrity personalities over content — the same logic resurfaced in social media. — connects to: Regular television presence yields a peculiar spatial selfhood unavailable to any other fame — Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 511