The Museum of Broadcast Communications returns

The Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC) opened its doors in 1987 and remained so until circumstances related to real estate caused operations to be suspended in 2023. This year, under the leadership of its newly appointed interim president and CEO, David Plier, the MBC has reestablished itself at 440 W. Randolph, where its grand reopening was feted with a red-carpet gala hosted by NBC 5 Chicago news anchor Allison Rosati.

“Johnny Carson: The Centennial”
Through 1/1/27: Sun noon–6 PM, Wed, Fri–Sat 10 AM–6 PM, Thu noon–8 PM, Museum of Broadcast Communications, 440 W. Randolph, museum.tv/exhibits, adults $19, seniors, military, and veterans $17, students $16, children 6 and under free

Television and radio are not media that lend themselves comfortably to conventional exhibition formats. The MBC ultimately does a fine (if riskless) job of executing its shows, relying on wall-wrap didactics, monitor-based video and audio installations, and related ephemera. 

Its permanent collection galleries encompass the Radio Hall of Fame, a small but delightful exhibition devoted to the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, and a comprehensive retrospective of WLUP “the Loop” 97.9 FM, among others. 

In one gallery focused on children’s shows, the objects on view come across as something akin to taxidermy. The faceless mannequin dressed in Bozo the Clown’s costume, wig, and nose, and the veritable storehouse of puppets from a host of midcentury programs turn uncanny in their inertia. Rather than being off-putting, this is an added thrill. Seeing the genuine article, one is left with the sense of having peered behind the curtain. It is this approach to installations by the MBC that best captures the dynamic quality of production-based media. 

The museum’s headline exhibition, “Johnny Carson: The Centennial,” is thorough, encompassing everything from an interactive scale model of the famous desk and chairs to show-worn suits and original artwork that graced the program’s bumpers. It strikes a thoughtful balance, satisfying in its depth to those of the generation for whom Carson is the embodiment of television entertainment, while still serving as a cogent entry point for those who are young enough to have never heard of him at all. 

“The Evolution of Late Night Television” is somewhat slipperier. The objects on view are less archival and more set dressing—in some instances, literally. A wall panel from the Ed Sullivan Theater doesn’t tell us anything about Ed Sullivan, or about David Letterman, from whose Late Show set the panel was excised. Ticket stubs and TV Guides don’t give us much more, besides a time stamp. This intangibility is the nature of the genre, which at its most successful affects a cult-of-personality-driven viewership; the host as nervous system in an otherwise generic body. (Note: I am firmly in the Letterman camp, and in full disclosure, presently have on view an exhibition I’ve curated to which he is both lender and subject.) 

For little has endured in American culture as strongly as late-night TV. Since its advent, the formula has been and, for the most part, remains: a man in a suit behind a desk, to put you to bed. Someone to soften the blow of the nightly newscast he follows. With a comforting formulaicness, he will deliver some combination of lighthearted commentary, softball interviews, and music. Within those confines, all manner of convention-breaking has taken place. Jack Paar quit live on the air midprogram; Steve Allen submerged himself in a vat of Jell-O; Letterman produced a program in which the image of the broadcast appeared in stereo, rotating a full 360 degrees over the course of an hour; Seth Meyers took to reading viewers’ corrections of his previous night’s programs and enacting changes in accordance. 

“Evolution” fails to acknowledge the richness and strangeness of its subject, choosing to serve instead as a primer—albeit one that nods to oft-overlooked but culturally significant programs like Friday Night Videos, The Tomorrow Show, and Chicago’s beloved Svengoolie. 

The city is fortunate the MBC has endured. More than a museum, it is a vital repository for over 85,000 hours of radio and television broadcasts going back nearly a century. It is a rarified archive that contains within its scope the full backdrop of our collective culture. It holds for us the content of that which we treat as a thoroughly disposable medium, which in fact contains our news and entertainment, the triumphs and failures of our political machines, our civic achievements and shared grand tragedies, and our traffic and weather on the 8s.