Soul! premiered on 12 September 1968 and ran for five seasons until its final episode on 7 March 1973. Debuting on Channel 13 in New York – a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) member station – Soul! would eventually go on to achieve nationwide distribution. With guests who included Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder, Louis Farrakhan, B.B. King, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, The Last Poets and King Curtis, Soul! was a one-hour, weekly platform for artists, performers, intellectuals and political leaders whose guest appearances challenged notions of black entertainment and political thought typically featured on commercial television at the time. Aimed at the ‘black community’, Soul! is a PBS milestone. Launched during one of the most volatile periods in the history of the United States – only five months after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King – Soul! unapologetically pursued its mission to create a programme that eschewed any consideration of appealing to white audiences. Nevertheless, its existence was tied to funding provided by mostly white decision-makers and patrons (in particular, the Ford Foundation) – a situation that would ultimately contribute to its demise.

It's Been Beautiful by Gayle Wald – Professor of English and American Studies at George Washington University – rewards readers with a comprehensive history of Soul! and the discursive space in which the programme emerged. In addition to the ruptures in society laid bare by the struggle for civil rights, this discursive space was also framed by the politics and funding of public television in the United States, and Wald shows how public television itself was fraught with political pressures that became increasingly difficult during Richard Nixon's presidency. Most importantly, however, Wald offers a fascinating look at Ellis Haizlip – the programme's producer, host (beginning with the fourth episode) and champion – and examines his role in realising a vision of entertainment driven not by corporate values (i.e. broad-based appeal), but by what was ‘meaningful’ to the black community. Well-researched and enhanced by several photographs from Chester Higgins, who was a photographer for the show, It's Been Beautiful makes an important contribution to scholarship on African-Americans and television, and perhaps inadvertently leaves readers with their own questions about today's production and consumption of ‘black entertainment’.

In the ‘Introduction’, Wald addresses Soul!’s absence in scholarly work, writing that the programme is ‘glaringly absent from the vast majority of histories of African-Americans and television’ (p. 4). Moreover, she maintains that as a television archive, Soul!

Wald identifies two keywords – ‘affective compact’ and ‘vibrations’ – that she uses to frame her examination. In explaining her use of affective compact, Wald uses the term ‘intimacy’. She makes clear that key to understanding Soul!’s impact is in its ‘pursuit of intimacy and connection to viewers despite the distancing, cold mediation of television’ (p. 20), and goes on to make clear that her interest is in how Soul! created and maintained the concept of a ‘black experience that bound its viewers’ to the programme (p. 20). ‘Vibrations’ is a term she attributes to Haizlip, writing that he ‘used it to describe the affective atmosphere conjured by notable Soul! conversations or performances’ (p. 21).

Chapter 1, ‘Soul! and the 1960s’, examines the programme's origins. The quote that opens the chapter comes from an interview with Novella Nelson, who was a frequent guest on the programme, and most notably the first episode:

In this chapter, Wald outlines the ‘condition of possibility’ (p. 36) created by the struggle for civil rights. Television was instrumental not only in bringing the Civil Rights Movement into American living rooms, but also in turning the struggle into ‘compelling political drama and compelling television’ (p. 39). Wald traces the impact that the report issued by the Kerner Commission – set up by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the devastating race riots of 1967 – had on public television. One of the conclusions reached by the report was that black TV audiences were ‘the victims of emotionally hurtful representations’ (p. 47). Despite not being the focus of the report, public television nevertheless took notice of the conclusions it had reached. Yet to address the problems the report brought to light, public television relied on the private sector, above all the Ford Foundation. Indeed, the Ford Foundation allocated funds ‘to support TV audiences neglected by commercial television’ (p. 54). An early grant proposal for a show targeted to black audiences, entitled ‘Where it's at …’ would eventually become Soul!

In the chapters that follow, Wald offers a closer look of the show itself. In Chapter 2, ‘The Black Community and the Affective Compact’, Wald selects moments from different episodes to illustrate how Soul! ‘was not only acutely mindful of its imagined audience but also acutely attuned to inviting viewers into its affective field’ (p. 72–73). It is important to note here that this ‘imagined audience’ included ‘Puerto Ricans and other Latino populations’ (p. 71). A close examination of three episodes follows in Chapter 3, ‘“More Meaningful Than a Three-Hour Lecture”: Music on Soul!’ These episodes – which aired in October and November 1972 – featured Rahsaan Roland Kirk & the Vibration Society, Tito Puente and Willie Colon with their orchestras, and Labelle and Mongo Santamaría. Here Wald conducts a thorough analysis of these episodes and what they revealed about contemporary representations of jazz, Latin music and artists, as well as non-stereotypical performances by black women singers (citing here Labelle's rendition of The Who's ‘Won't Get Fooled Again’). In Chapter 4, ‘Freaks Like Us: Black Misfit Performance on Soul!’, the most compelling – and sometimes frustrating – sections concern Wald's readings of the two-episode discussion between the poet Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin, and an episode in which Haizlip interviewed Minister Louis Farrakhan. Haizlip, who was gay, was given a breathtakingly homophobic answer by Minister Farrakhan in response to a question about homosexuality in the black community. Wald uses a text by Baldwin, written in response to meeting Elijah Muhammad, to read (somewhat unconvincingly in this reader's case) Haizlip's impassive response to Farrakhan:

Chapter 5, ‘The Racial State and the “Disappearance” of Soul!’ situates the show's cancellation within the context of structural changes to public television, which were not unrelated to President Nixon. Wald maintains that ‘the presidential attacks against liberal or leftist critique on television were also highly effective, particularly where financially dependent public broadcasting stations were concerned’ (p. 185). However, Soul! did not disappear without a fight, and Haizlip would go on to dedicate the final episode to acknowledging the support the show had received – above all from the community he had worked so hard to address.

Soul! wasn't the only ‘minority’ programme cancelled during this period, and in the ‘Conclusion’, Wald highlights a paradox:

Yet she also makes clear with her moving assessment of the show's legacy – highlighting, for instance, the careers that Soul! launched – how important the show was. The book's title is taken from an episode shortly before Soul!’s cancellation, in which Haizlip reveals to his guest, activist Stokely Carmichael, that the show's run is coming to an end, but adds that ‘it's been beautiful, the people out there responded well’ (p. 32). Fortunately, Channel 13 is in the process of expanding the Soul! archive on their website, which already features the 1968 show announcement, the complete episode list, letters written in support of the show during its run, and videos of several episodes. Thus, in a sense Soul! lives on – which can certainly also be attributed to Gayle Wald's engrossing book.