
TVTV (Top Value Television) was a band of merry video makers who, from 1972 to 1977, took the then brand-new portable video camera and went out to document the world. In those days, there were only three TV networks, using giant studio cameras, and no one had ever seen a portable camera stuck in their face, let alone one held by what “Newsweek” called at the time “braless, blue-jeaned video freaks.”
Because the technology was so new, there were no rules about how to use it or what to make. TVTV used it to make format-bending satirical shows about whatever interested them – from the 1972 Republican Convention to an award-winning expose of a 15-year-old jet-set guru named Guru Maharaj Ji, called “Lord of the Universe.”
“TVTV is part League of Justice, part television’s answer to the New Journalism, part guerrilla style Front Page and part Samuel Beckett. Television of the Absurd. Through a lens, starkly. Witty, irreverent, deadpan – but never quite able to conceal the cold eye of the reformer...”
— Ron Powers, Pulitzer Prize winning TV critic, Chicago Sun-Times
“Forty years ago, the video collective TVTV (short for Top Value Television) began to shoot free-form nonfiction TV with just-invented portable video equipment. Today their classic coverage of political conventions, pop gurus, and sixties icons like Abbie Hoffman and Hunter Thompson remain fresh and startling. Incisive and irreverent, TVTV helped define the independent video of the seventies, changing TV documentaries from “white papers” to visceral, humorous, and often alarming documents of their time.”
— Paley Center for Media, honoring TVTV's 40th anniversary, 2012
“What TVTV is doing looks and feels very much like the television of the future. The prospects are exhilarating...”
— Tom Shales, Washington Post, 1974