TV's (Post?)-Countercultural Participants

I was struck in Gitlin's essay by the quick attribution he made in passing of the progressive "slants" that appear in network programming to "media practitioners who have some roots in the rebellions of the Sixties" (262). I am familiar, for example, with the extent to which figures central to the video-driven media counterculture(s) of the late 60s and early 70s represented in the pages of Radical Software or the Raindance Corporation's Guerrilla Television project eventually came to be involved in mainstream film production. This history is explicated at length in David Joselit's 2007 text Feedback: Television against Democracy, which focuses in particular on Michael Shamberg's movement from quasi-leader of the Guerrilla TV movement to big-time Hollywood producer responsible for the likes of The Big Chill and Pulp Fiction. In such films, Joselit locates something of Shamberg's countercultural spirit and utopian media ethic – their slant, we might say – in spite of their popular appeal and mass distribution modeling. First acknowledging Shamberg's "rather startling nomination of the television character Archie Bunker as a working-class here" (101, a rather fortuitous mention in light of our course today), Joselit goes on to state the following on the shift from Shamberg's grassroots to mainstream media participation:

"The once democratizing potential of inexpensive video equipment has evaporated, like the student radicalism of the characters [in The Big Chill], leaving in its place the parlor games of the middle class. And the advice Shamberg had once offered to suburban commuters – to videotape and play back their own alienation – is here realized as a feature of Hollywood entertainment" (101).

Such histories around the incorporation of the critical avant-garde into mainstream media ecologies through the professionalization of historical participants fascinate me. I am wondering if anyone is aware of any concrete examples similar to the likes of Shamberg who made the jump from late 60s/early 70s counterculture to the major sites of TV production later in the decade, as Gitlin gestures towards?