20th Century Fox Television is the television production division of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, and a production arm of the Fox Broadcasting Company (both are subsidiaries of the Fox Entertainment Group, in turn part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation). 20th Television is a separate distribution arm overseen by News Corporation's Fox Television Stations, although it uses a variant of the film studio logo.
20th Century Fox Television was founded in 1949 as other studios were branching out into television production as well. At that time, the company was known as TCF Television Productions, Inc. until 1955. TCFTV folded the operations of TV production companies they've acquired: Metromedia Producers Corporation in 1986, New World Entertainment in 1997, and MTM Enterprises in 1998, and is the current distributor for most of the shows originally produced by these companies.
Since 1986, 20th Century Fox Television has served as the Fox television network's unofficial production arm (with Fox Television Studios being viewed as the network's official television production division), producing the bulk of television series airing on the television network. 20CFT produced the first two series that aired on Fox's sister network, MyNetworkTV: Desire and Fashion House. During the same year, Metromedia Video Productions was merge 20th Century Fox Television into 20th Century Fox Television Video Productions before reverting back to the 20th Century Fox Television name in 1994.
In 1986, Metromedia Producers was renamed to Twentieth Television Corporation, a separate entity from 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. Both companies were subsidiaries of News Corporation unit Fox Inc.; the move was made to separate the television productions from the movie studio in order to increase the latter's output. Following a 1994 restructuring of Fox's television production companies, 20th Television was refocused on syndication and "non-traditional programs," while network television programming once more came under the 20th Century Fox Television banner and returned to being a division of the movie studio.
Notable shows produced by 20th Century Fox Television include: Glee, How I Met Your Mother, Bones, Family Guy, 24, Modern Family, American Dad!, Futurama and most notably The Simpsons.
Famous quotes containing the words century, fox and/or television:
“So the people will pay the penalty for their kings’ presumption, who, by devising evil, turn justice from her path with tortuous speech.”
—Hesiod (c. 8th century B.C.)
“Commit a crime and the world is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)