The TV dinner is an American invention developed by Gerry Thomas in 1954. Gerry Thomas worked for Swanson foods and wanted to develop a way to use leftover frozen turkeys from Thanksgiving. Using the idea of the aluminum serving dishes, used at that time to serve dinners on aircraft, he packaged his leftover turkey with frozen peas and potatoes, each in its own compartment. The trays were useful, as the entire dinner could be removed out of the box and then directly heated in the oven.
The original TV Dinner sold for 98 cents in 1954 and had a first production estimate 5,000 dinners for the first year. Swanson ended up selling more than 10 million of the dinners the first year they were in production.
In 1962, Swanson stopped calling these frozen dinners "TV Dinners," and several other companies had entered the market. The name, however, has stuck. Modern day TV dinners tend to come in microwave-safe containers, and also tend to have a larger selection of dinner types. These dinners can be purchased at almost every supermarket, and several companies still sell them for about $1.
TV Dinners were later celebrated in a song of the same name by ZZ Top on their album Eliminator.
