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I feel like I'm writing a response to sanjaraili, but here goes.
Really any electronic device new or old can smoke if enough is wrong with it. There have been many instances of people on here getting say a 50 year old Zenith from an estate sale and discovering it still works and all its capacitors and tubes are original.
Electrolytic capacitors go bad with age. Electrolytic capacitors in new gear suck just as bad as 50 year old ones. Around 2002 they hit an all time low in quality,...google "capacitor plague" to read about it. In the late 50s to early 60s paper capacitors were abandoned by manufacturers which improved reliably greatly.
Actual reliability and problems depended on the manufacturer and the year. Some designs were good enough to hold up for decades without maintenance, others wouldn't work well from new. Tubes rarely cause smoke, but paper caps and lytics can.
Monochrome TVs averaged more reliable than color. They were 1.5-3x less complex so there was less to go wrong in a monochrome set.
The easiest thing to do if you don't want to mess with old electronics is find a modern piece of furniture to install your flat screen TV in that makes it look vintage. There are retro TV console flatscreen cabinets made today if you search.
Most people on these forums are engineering and or tinkering types and we prefer to take an original TV replace just the lytic and paper capacitors (and a few other parts on an as needed basis) and make a vintage set work with it's original tube circuits. There's a lot of challenge and fun in that for those who like technical puzzles. Reading this forum and the antique radio forums TV section and books on TV repair from the time period are ways to learn how to repair... Starting with repairing tube radios is also good.
If you are familiar with the movie The Matrix the last 2 paragraphs are basically a red pill /blue pill on wanting a working vintage TV.
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