The TV Zone

Now here’s a TV flashback to the time when New York was the center of the video universe, tiny as it was back then. In the late 1940s, as television was replacing radio in a smattering of American homes, nearly all network shows were produced in the city, and reflected the city’s sensibility and ethnicity.

The latter was the point in “The Goldbergs,” a rarely seen early tube familycom that makes its way to DVD April 15 from Timeless Media Group. Gertrude Berg wrote the show, which had originated on radio in the late ’20s, and also starred as Molly Goldberg, leaning out the window of her New York tenement to call her signature line “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloom!”

“The Goldbergs” may have seemed familiar to New Yorkers, or maybe even stereotypical, but to the overwhelmingly Christian center of the country, this radio/TV family provided a rare early glimpse/earful of Jewish life and Yiddish language. The characters of Molly and husband Jake had started in Berg’s Catskills hotel skits as immigrants assimilating into American life, while still proudly retaining their own unique ethnic culture. The show’s radio run (1929-46) even included topical references to Krystallnacht and the Holocaust.

The TV version (run sporadically on four networks 1949-56) was more typically a warm family saga about parents and teens, with an ethnic slant, and its potential success was dampened when costar Philip Loeb was blacklisted in the anti-Communist frenzy. Because the shows were performed live from New York (except a final suburban season filmed for syndication; those episodes are coming to DVD), few have survived to be seen as the historical landmark for which they might be recognized.

You can see clips from the show at the bottom of this tribute page at the ever-tube-lovin’ site TV Party.

If you’ve ever attended a New York or Hollywood TV taping -- or wish you had -- there’s cool nostalgia to be found at the Old TV Tickets website.

Did you know that David Letterman appeared on a 1978 game/talk show called “The Love Experts”? (With “Laugh-In” loudmouth JoAnne Worley?) Or that ’70s sportscaster Howard Cosell hosted a completely different ABC prime-time variety showcase called “Saturday Night Live”?

The site shows you a scan of the stub, then fleshes out info on the show it represents, from sitcom faves like “I Love Lucy” and “All in the Family” to talkfests like “The Dick Cavett Show” to song-and-dance hours like “Tony Orlando & Dawn.” (That last ticket advises Television City guests, “Audience will be seen on camera. Please dress accordingly.”) Also detailed are such cult-fave obscurities as Jackie Mason’s 1989 sitcom “Chicken Soup.”

For New Yorkers who attended early-days-of-TV programs like “Mister Peepers” or “Beat the Clock” when the industry was city-based in the 1950s, it’s also a time trip back through local theater history -- revisiting shows staged at the Ziegfeld, Colonial, Hudson and Ritz Theatres, in addition to CBS’ west side studios and NBC’s Radio City tower, plus NBC’s Brooklyn facility (1960s rockfest “Hullabaloo”).

The site also reveals that tube assistants don’t necessarily know how to spell celebs’ names -- not with “Jimmie” Durante and “Cindy” Lauper among the stars hyped in ticket printings.