The Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964 remains one of the most watched television events in history. Those who saw it remember it almost as clearly as they remember the near-continuous coverage of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath the previous November. It was a watershed moment for millions of baby boomers, who, like television itself, were coming of age in 1964. Prophecies about the medium’s potential were fulfilled. Unexpected powers were revealed.

Maybe we hadn’t said we wanted a revolution, but we were getting one. By the beginning of 1964, all talk of a network that could rival the top three—NBC, CBS, and ABC—had stopped, and few communities in the country were beyond their reach. By the end of the year, television looked the way it would look well into the 1990s.

The year saw the triumph of spot advertising, whereby sponsors purchase minutes or less within a program rather than under-writing an entire show. The profits were huge because networks could make more money by selling many short time blocks.

Another development with vast long-term consequences was the introduction of pay TV. In July, Subscription Television began supplying programming via coaxial cables to 6000 charter subscribers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Despite skeptics (wondering who would pay for what was already free), pay TV would eventually catch on and evolve into the cable programming of today. “Those opposed to pay TV will be disturbed,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “to read that color fidelity is vastly superior to normal reception because it is transmitted by cable, instead of from Mt. Wilson by air waves.”

For many critics, these technological innovations served a dubious purpose; in 1964, they still saw the same “vast wasteland” that the Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow had surveyed in 1961. What looked like junk then, of course, today looks like classic television, and 1964 was particularly rich in it. Five of the 10 most highly rated shows were situation comedies: “Bewitched,” “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” “The Munsters,” and “The Lucy Show.” Three shows introduced that year were “Gilligan’s Island,” which retains a weirdly vigorous afterlife in reruns and popular memory; “Peyton Place,” which set a standard for the nighttime soap not realized again until the 1980s; and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” Sassy and stylish, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” found an audience that saw itself too hip for such shows as “Petticoat Junction.”

Throughout 1964, live coverage of major events in the civil rights movement was immediate and constant, and the search for the missing activists Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman instigated a type of “crisis television” coverage that continues to characterize TV news. The cool, crisp way in which news stories got told is on a continuum with the style of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and the satirical review that followed it on Tuesday nights, “That Was the Week That