Before Television City, the site held Gilmore Stadium and Gilmore Field — a football stadium and a baseball park that had served the Los Angeles area since the 1930s. The Gilmore family had developed the land as part of a larger entertainment complex, and when CBS needed room to build at scale, the location offered exactly what the network required: a large flat footprint in a central part of the city, accessible to the talent and production infrastructure that had been building in Hollywood since the silent film era.

The stadium crowds that had once watched the Hollywood Stars minor league baseball team play on that ground were replaced by television audiences watching from home. The geometry of stadium and soundstage share something — both are spaces designed to create an event that can be witnessed — but the television audience is invisible, distributed across the country, and the relationship between performer and watcher is one-directional in a way that baseball never was.

Of the eight soundstages CBS built at Television City, Studio 33 became the most famous. Known informally as the Bob Barker Studio — renamed formally in his honor — it housed The Price Is Right from 1972 through 2023, a run of 51 consecutive seasons that made it one of the longest-running game shows in television history. The format is simple enough that it requires no expertise to understand: contestants guess the prices of consumer goods. Its longevity rests on something more fundamental than format, which is that it makes ordinary people briefly visible, briefly chosen, briefly at the center of national attention.

Bob Barker hosted for 35 of those years. Drew Carey took over in 2007 and continued at the helm through the show's final seasons at Television City. When the show relocated after CBS sold the complex, it ended a half-century relationship between a specific piece of real estate and the daily rhythm of American daytime television.

The list of programs made at Television City across its seven decades of CBS operation is a partial catalogue of American broadcast culture. The Carol Burnett Show was produced there. All in the Family rehearsed on those stages. The Grammy Awards ceremony originated from Television City. Late night talk shows, soap operas, game shows, specials — the facility handled whatever the network required, its eight stages reconfigurable to accommodate the specific demands of any given production.

This versatility was architectural as well as operational. Pereira and Luckman designed the facility with larger soundstages than any previous television production complex, anticipating that the medium would require more space as its ambitions grew. They were right. The stages that seemed oversized in 1952 were filled within years.

In December 2018, CBS sold Television City to Hackman Capital Partners for $750 million — a valuation that reflected both the real estate and the production infrastructure accumulated over six decades. The sale was followed by plans for a $1.25 billion redevelopment that would preserve some production capacity while adding residential and commercial uses to the site.

The prospect of redevelopment prompted concerns from the production community about the loss of production space in a city where studio capacity is a competitive resource. Film and television production has been migrating to other cities and states, drawn by tax incentives and lower costs, and Los Angeles has had to work to retain the industry that defined it. Television City, reborn in whatever form the redevelopment produces, represents a negotiation between the economic pressures of real estate and the city's interest in remaining the place where television is made.