“Battle of the Network Stars” was sort of a spinoff of an earlier ABC Sports show “Superstars”. Although a lot of print media writers denounced it as “trashsport”, it was partially an attempt to answer the question of which sport produces the best athlete. Dick Button, Olympic ice skating analyst and tv analyst, played a role in this.
The first one in 1972 was a success so naturally ABC expanded the number of athletes and hours, especially when they lost the NBA to CBS. Very popular, especially with young males but faded in popularity. Looking it up, I was surprised it lasted as long as it did.
In retrospect, one of the most alert-grabbing remarks was in “Battle of the Super Teams” when ABC sportscaster O J Simpson asks Dodger outfielder some tough questions and Monday responds in mock anger “You always go for the throat, don’t you O J?”
Doug was notable enough that it was picked up by Disney and shown on ABC. It was extremely early-90s-flavored, so I think it aged worse than the other “Nicktoons,” but I know plenty of people still have very fond memories of that show.
*Room 222 *had a rep for being unafraid to tackle controversial subjects for its day (early 1970s), but has since disappeared into the ether. Its breakout star, Karen Valentine, has also not left much of a trail.
Marcus Welby, M.D. is still sort of remembered, but that whole medical drama genre (Welby, Medical Center, Emergency!) became moribund in the late '70s, and those shows are little discussed today.
I think that’s a show that people will look back on and scratch their heads over. Even today it seems pretty weird. A few decades from now some young person will stumble upon it and break into fits of nervous laughter that such a show could exist. It would be like discovering that there was a show in the civil rights era called “Black Groove for the White Dude” based on the notion that black people are hip and musical and white people are not. It would be simultaneously offensive and hilarious.
And yet it’s a perfect example of the zeitgeist of the time. Gay people were still “other” enough that there could be a (popular!) show that was based entirely on the fact that gay gays were different from straight guys. It was fundamentally based on stereotypes. On the other hand, acceptance of homosexuality had reached a point where many people would watch the show and think it was entertaining and possibly even informative - as opposed to “disgusting”. I’m sure there were many who did think that, but it wouldn’t have been as popular as it (briefly) was if a majority thought that.
In Speedos. The filmy, nylon ones that, when wet, clung to everything you wanted them to cling to. Lynda Carter! Cheryl Ladd! Sarah Purcell from Real People! Heart be still, Jan Smithers!
The diving board was better. Got breezy and chilly up there for a young lady in a wet Speedo.
The Love Boat - (huge in the 70’s because of the depiction of extreme luxury on the Pacific Princess). I challenge anyone to find a cruise ship shittier than that these days outside of Somalia. I actually watched a few episodes a few months ago. I almost went out to buy some bell bottoms and a disco ball before people stopped me. Runner Up - CHIPS.
Gunsmoke - This one started out as a radio drama in 1952 and went on to TV fame. It is still the longest running series in history at 20 years and 635 episodes. That crap ran constantly in syndication even when I was a child and I have still never made it through more than a few minutes of any episode. It may be a great show for all I know but The Rifleman and Bonanza were always much more entertaining.
All of the long-running daytime soap operas - General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, All My Children - all the same worthless shit. I cannot believe they managed to stay on the air for decades and even had magazines devoted to their finer plot points. They were barely even TV shows because they couldn’t afford proper sets or lighting (that is my theory on why they were so dimly lit all the time anyway). They aren’t all gone yet but they will be soon enough. Even the most useless info-mercial has more value than they do. If middle-class housewives need additional entertainment away from the drudgery of the bon-bons and shopping, that is what the Lifetime channel is for.
Good one. In spite of its surface similarities to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, it never had quite the same impact and I always wondered why. MTM had a gallery of very memorable characters and seldom made timely cultural references (as though they had an eye on being in syndication for decades to come), whereas Murphy Brown went very much in the other direction.
Cagney & Lacey is on Hulu, and badly dated-- I can’t stress how badly. Lou Grant, about eight years older, is not as badly dated. But it is still possible to appreciate how good the performances of Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless were, and how good the supporting cast was, which was what made it a great show. Also, it was, as far as I know, the first show to deal openly with child incest as a psychological factor in motivation of a later crime, and even though it danced around the terminology a little, it was quite clear. The ep. was called “Fathers and Daughters,” and guest starred Dinah Manoff and Gail Strickland, pretty big names for one-off roles (maybe it was sweeps week). S4e5. It’s a great episode that seems tame and pulling its punches after 15 years of L&O: SVU, but the acting is superb, and it plays better than many of the other episodes. So does the ep. with the suspect who is Deaf (s6e18). Sometimes a show is dated because some of the things it did first have now been done to death.
They are anthology series, with in-show framing devices, instead of using an out-of-story narrator to frame the show, like Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone, or Alfred Hitchcock for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. When you think about it, Ricardo Montalban’s character did exactly the same thing in introducing the characters on Fantasy Island that Rod Serling did for the characters in The Twilight Zone, Montalban was just in-universe. The Love Boat characters occasionally had their own storylines, but their purpose was to give the anthology show a texture that was consistent from one episode to the other and “branded” it.
These shows don’t exist anymore for the same reason variety shows don’t exist: they were “family” viewing. Back when even people with cable got fewer than 15 channels, and people without cable, who were a much bigger part of the population, got about 7 or 8, and many households had only one TV, networks tried to produce shows that a whole family would watch together. A three-story 1-hr anthology show could have one heavy romance, maybe with a little twist that might go over the youngest kids’ heads, or with more than the usual pathos, one plotline with either intrigue, or more physical comedy than usual, and one plotline involving children. You watched the bits that interested you.
RE: Ellen. A few of the episodes after “The Puppy Show” (what the coming out ep. is called) hold up well. The one where she is planning on sleeping with her girlfriend for the first time, and has to decide whether or not to tell her it’s her first time with a woman, is really excellent.
I remember watching *The Waltons *back in the 70s, but until recently couldn’t remember anything about it except “Good night, John-Boy.” So last year I checked it out, and discovered that there was a lot more than what I remembered. The show dealt with subjects such as racism, sexism, poverty, teenage pregnancy, miscarriage, birth, death, infertility, polio, adultery, juvenile deliquency, ageism, native Americans, anti-semitism, the Holocaust, and a unique perspective on the Depression and World War II . . . even the Hindenburg disaster. And the characters were anything but the “goody-two-shoes” that I had remembered. The show was a huge hit, deservedly so.
But the only thing people remember is “Goodnight, John-Boy.”
In a similar vein, Wide World of Sports; it ran for almost four decades, had segments from all over the world, and was the only chance to see sports apart from foot-/base-/basket-ball. Once upon a time, if you said “the agony of defeat” everybody knew exactly what you meant.
The talk of Twin Peaks reminds me of another one, Northern Exposure. I was in Roslyn, Washington, a while ago, and a few places from the show are still preserved. I haven’t heard anyone mention it for ages, though.
The question is a toiugh one, because it’s not clear what people have forgotten – an issue that itself varies with age. There are several influential shows from the 1950s that were Big Things at the time, but have fallen off the cultural radar because they were never syndicated, or in many cases even preserved:
The Ernie Kovacs Show – widely credited with inventing a lot of now-standard devices and convcentions for TV shows, wildly inventive and at the time hilarious. Most people today have probably never even heard of Kovaks.
Queen for a Day and This is Your Life – incredibly popular TV shows about people’s lives. I suspect any knowledge people have of these today results from citations of these in cartoons or other pop media
Studio One and other drama anthology series – this is what a lot of people cite as the best of TV in the 1950s one-off dramas by people like Gore Vidal and Paddy Chayevsky and Rod Serling that appeared on the small screen and sometimes got made into movies (like Twelve Angyry Men, Requien for a Heavyweight, and Visit to a Small Planet)
One Step Beyond – the Twilight Zone before Twilight Zone. Similarly, if it weren’t for the reference to it in Back to the Future, would Millennials even know about Science Fiction Theater?