As the decade began, tellingly, American TV invented a curious new form of fiction-passing-as-reality: comedies were now mostly filmed without audiences, but recordings of laughing crowds were layered into almost every sitcom soundtrack. And what we watched suddenly changed as well. For its first dozen years, prime-time network TV was more or less committed to realism—Topper, a sitcom about ghosts, was the memorable exception. But that unwritten law was repealed at the beginning of the 1960s—The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Flintstones, The Jetsons—followed by an immediate glut of the
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