1973-1974 the CBS Saturday Line up was
All in the Family (1/31.2)
MAS*H (4/25.7)
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (9/23.1)
The Bob Newhart Show (12/22.3)
The Carol Burnett Show(27/20.1)
This is insane. It is the 1927 Yankees of American Broadcast TV.
Where the fuck do you find information like that? That’s an insane lineup, and I’d love to browse through decades of stuff like that.
(Apologies for the f-bomb, but I felt it necessary in the moment.)
The NBC 1984-85 Thursday night line up of
The Cosby Show
Family Ties
Cheers
Night Court
Hill Street Blues
has entered the chat.
That sort of thing is available on Wikipedia, for just about any year.
And it’s a little bit amazing to me that that list of great shows was on a Saturday evening, in the years before DVRs and VCRs, meaning people stayed in to watch those shows.
I’m watching the Mary Tyler Moore Bio on Max and they rattled off the lineup so quick I had to Google to see if it was for real.
It turns out Wikipedia has it year by year
4 of the shows are considered huge game changers.
All in the Family the biggest but MASH & Mary Tyler Moore Show right behind it. Carol Burnett trail blazed in her own way and of course it considered one of the greatest shows of all time. And that 5th show, wasn’t bad, was it.
That is a really good lineup. But I don’t think it quite compares.
It does. Sorry.
Sorry but only Cosby, Cheers and Hill Street Blues would rise to the level of the shows in the OP in terms of writing and performances. Family Ties is a solid meh for me and I don’t really feel it holds up all that well no matter how much we all may love Michael J. Fox. Night Court had its moments and I would easily put it above Family Ties but not at the same level as the 72-73 Saturday CBS lineup. All 5 of those are classic television shows.
You’re wrong. Good shows but not the best ever.
The Carol Burnett Show is a solid meh for me and I don’t really feel it holds up all that well no matter how much we all may love Carol Burnett.
That sounds like a snarky response, but it’s not, because it’s exactly how I feel.
Good summary. I was a big fan of Family Ties at the time, but it hasn’t held up at all sadly.
Hill Street was another game changer.
Cheers is an all time classic.
Cosby obviously has some issues and is it even shown any more? I always thought it was over-rated anyway.
I’m a big enough fan of Night Court, I have all seasons on DVD. I love it, but it is not remembered as one of the all time great shows.
That is completely fair, but if you look at TV reviews, the Carol Burnett Show is always near the top. Family Ties does not get those reviews.
You’re wrong because the were all great shows, not just good.
Interestingly, the website linked to below lists the 1974-1975 CBS lineup as being the best ever. Note that in that year it had The Jeffersons rather than MASH) Furthermore note, that this was not long after the “rural purge” in CBS’s prime-time lineups. In the 1960s, CBS lead the networks in viewership. However, the advertisers discovered that the programs that CBS showed were not as popular among younger and urban viewers. The advertisers wanted audiences that were ready to change what products they bought and the old CBS programs didn’t do that. CBS’s 1960’s shows tended to be aimed toward rural audiences and toward older audiences. It didn’t matter to the advertisers how large those audiences were. They wanted audiences that would buy their products. CBS decided to cancel a lot of those shows and bring in new ones that the advertisers thought would be more likely to buy their products:
Age must matter here. I was born in 1969, and MASH and Mary Tyler Moore were never anything I tuned in.
- All in the Family
- The Mary Tyler Moore Show
- MAS*H
- Cheers
- The Carol Burnett Show
- The Dick Van Dyke Show (Threw this in for Mary’s sake)
- Hill Street Blues
- The Cosby Show
- The Bob Newhart Show Wow even the weaker link made the top 60.
No Night Court or Family Ties of course. No Jeffersons either, I think that would place ahead of the Family Ties though, especially as again Ground Breaking.
That takes me back - I remember when hit shows were programmed on Saturday - but it’s been a while
And if you look at the ratings and the top ten placings, FT beats out TCBS.
There is more than one way to measure what makes something “best.” There are reviews, ratings, cultural impact and so on.
The point of all this to show that there isn’t any way to quantify art like you all seem to want to do.
So if TV Guide jumped off a bridge, so would you. Good to know.
Why are Bruce Fretts and Matt Roush, writers of a ten year old TV Guide clickbait article, the arbiters of what makes a TV show best? Especially since you point out the flaw of not including The Jeffersons.
I think you might be taking this too seriously. It was a fun little observation. But if TV Guide isn’t one of the best arbiters of best TV shows of all time, who?