Another Saturday night

A note on a chilly Saturday morning....

Saturday night has become a dumping ground for television. Many networks are airing re-runs of shows that ran earlier in the week. HBO used to make a big deal out of Saturday as premiere night, with a different movie every week. Nope, not anymore. Their focus is on series programming on Sunday night. Same with Showtime (who, by the way, is up 10% in 2008, compared to POINT ONE percent for HBO) - it's all about Sunday night. I could go on with a bunch of other examples, but you already know what I mean.

This wasn't always true. In 1973-74, here was CBS's Saturday night lineup:

All in the Family (#1 for the year)
M*A*S*H (4)
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (9)
The Bob Newhart Show (12)
The Carol Burnett Comedy Hour (27)

I picked that year kind of arbitrarily - okay, I was looking up what else was happening the year that Brain Salad Surgery was released. Hey, Mike Cohen, do you have that one? :-)

Poking around a little further, it turns out that those 5 shows remained in the Top 30 from the 71-72 season until 75-76. And the fact is that the scale of those shows was much, much bigger than those numbers indicate. And on a Saturday!!

There have been other big nights, like Thursday on NBC in the 80s -- Cosby, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court, Hill St. Blues. -- but can you think of even a single big Saturday show since 1977? Even one?

For your trivia notebook: the 4 half-hour sitcom/1-hour drama between 8 and 11 configuration was developed by NBC exec Pat Weaver, the father of actress Sigourney Weaver. Pat was also the inventor of the morning news show (Today) and evening talk show (Tonight). Perhaps most notably, he originated the idea of networks creating their own programs and selling ads! A true genius. No, really - graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth with a Philosophy degree.

Also for your trivia notebook, although you might have this one: Cheers finished its first season in DEAD LAST place. Seriously, not a single other series had lower ratings. Can you imagine? There are shows with higher ratings today being canceled after a few episodes. The days of smart executives relying on their instincts is long gone. They were far from infallible, but guys like Pat Weaver, Fred Silverman, Roone Arledge and Brandon Tartikoff were as well known in the general public as executives at any big company in their days...as well they should have been. Smart guys. Good instincts. Loooong gone.

Saturday, in the 70's, consisted of:

Morning cartoons - Superfriends, Flintstones, Scooby Doo. Then the Wide World of Sports came on mid-morning - remember the Battle of the Network Stars?

However before Superfriends came on at 8:00am, the big event were back to back episodes of Batman reruns at 7am. My friend and I were convinced that Alfred was the same actor who played C3-PO - not so. But seriously, in order to secure the tv at that time of the morning, I would wake up at 6am and watch whatever happened to be on tv at that hour. In those days channels actually played the Star Spangled Banner when they went on the air in the morning. It was at this time that I discovered the early days of This Old House, on my local PBS station at 6am. I have seen every episode since.

I think what has changed is that families don't seem to do anything together anymore. Today, we have video games, the internet and a tv in every room - my dad has a tv in the bathroom. If I could watch Campbell Brown in the bathroom I might never leave...Anyway, back in 1979, we had one color tv in the basement, so we all had to watch the same program. And the Intellivision was on the same tv, so that could only be used during the day.