For TV professor David Bianculli, the screen is always on

The year David Bianculli began his print journalism career as a TV critic, “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” and “M.A.S.H.” were among the pillars of prime time.

Bianculli, who since 1975 has continually produced lively, informative, nuanced and entertaining reviews, has long since left his first professional love – newspapers – to produce criticism for National Public Radio, television and online sources, and to teach about good TV.

A full professor in Rowan University’s Department of Radio, Television & Film, Bianculli is writing his fifth book about television and has brought to Rowan, on at least three occasions, Ken Burns, a longtime friend who also may be the greatest living documentarian. In fact, while teaching a special projects course in 2019 about Burns’ work, the auteur himself Skyped in to speak with students.

Bianculli, who was a TV critic for the Ft. Lauderdale News/Sun Sentinel, the Akron Beacon Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Post and the New York Daily News, has been the TV critic for “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” on NPR since the program debuted nationally in 1987.

In 2007, Bianculli jumped headlong into online criticism with the launch of TV Worth Watching.Com, a site that, at its peak, drew as many as 150,000 unique readers each month.

Bianculli brings all that history, research and passion for television into the classroom, where he’s been known to pay students for having the right answers to pop questions.

“Sometimes I give out dollars, but I’m still in the black in terms of my paycheck,” he joked recently. “If a student says something really interesting, something I didn’t think of, they might even get five dollars.”

A collector of all things television, Bianculli in 2014 curated a show, Bianculli’s Personal Theory of TV Evolution, at apexart gallery in New York City.

Often tapped by documentarians to speak about television, he’s been a key feature of CNN’s long running series that chronicled the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

“I began reviewing in 1975 and I haven’t stopped,” he said. “Nobody else has been watching TV professionally as long as I have.”

In addition to teaching courses on the history of TV, Bianculli developed a graduate program in television, the Diana King Master of Arts in Television Studies, from which the first cohort graduated this spring.

Bianculli, who once had a home screening room with a dozen sets connected to four satellite feeds, said today’s explosion in streaming services supports an international hunger for programming that is not going away. (His son, Mark, is a television writer who, among other projects, worked on the Amazon Prime series “Hunters.”)

All of which makes great fodder for classroom lessons, which Bianculli often finds most interesting of all.

“I want to know what my students think,” he said. “Not just if they liked something, but why. What worked and what didn’t?”

Bianculli has authored four books: “Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously”; “Dictionary of Teleliteracy: Television’s 500 Biggest Hits, Misses, and Events”; “Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour', a history of the Smothers Brothers television variety show”; and “The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific.”