None of you whippersnappers know ,nor could you imagine, how big Monday Night Football was.
some negative tv events
political conventions easily weren’t understandable to kids and hated for preempting all programming all day long, gavel to gavel. these were regular expected events.
assassinations could be understandable to a kid, depending on age of course. these were singular events. disliked for preemption.
another singular event that had tremendous impact was the Cuban missile crisis. we were on the brink of nuclear war and that got a lot of worried news coverage.
Those were the big’uns, of course. Thanksgiving parades were also somewhat big, for some reason.
The 1978 SUPER AWESOME NOT-TO-BE-MISSED TELEVISION EVENT OF THE YEAR was the Star Wars Holiday Special. Until it was actually being broadcast, anyway. It turned out to be a little bit of a let-down.
The Next Big Thing was Star Wars coming to The Muppet Show, right at the crack of 1980, which made up for the disappointment of the holiday special by not only not sucking but actually being awesome to the point of overshadowing everything else on TV in 1980 right up until the end of the year, when John Lennon was murdered.
One that was big for me was the annual Saturday morning preview shows on the Friday night before the beginning of the new Saturday morning season. Without the preview how would you know whether to follow Sigmund and the Sea Monsters or “Big John, Little John”?
The annual Jerry Lewis telethon used to preempt just about every worthwhile channel we could get when I was a kid, too.
I remember both the screenings of It and I know My First Name Is Steven were a big deal when we were kids. It seemed like every kid I knew watched both and we discussed them ad nauseum the next day.
The Super Bowl
The Olympics and the Tournment of Roses Parade, all through the '60’s and '70’s, along with many of those already mentioned - Wizard of Oz, Ten Commandments, Rudolph, and theJerry Lewis Telethon.
Oh yeah, “North and South.” With the dreamy Patrick Swayze.
And the VCRs we used to have - the lights in the house would dim when those monsters would start up!
Another tv event - when MTV (MuchMusic in Canada) came online, and all of a sudden YOU COULD WATCH MUSIC VIDEOS ANY TIME! Before that, we had Friday Night Videos with Terry David Mulligan, and that was it.
Roots, without a doubt but for all my pre-teen girlfriends the big event of our youth had to do with Luke and Laura and the ice princess thing. General Hospital was HUGE and our school let out in time to catch the last part. Many of us skipped to see Luke and Laura get married. I think I was in fifth grade at the time.
Roots
V
The Day After*
Premiere of the Cosby Show
Thriller
North and South**
Premiere of MTV
*I missed it.but everyone was talking about it at school the next day.
**Whatever happened to the TV Miniseries?
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The Super Bowl
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The Olympics
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Even as kid, there were a number of sporting events that were “TV Events”. Along with those already mentioned, there was the World Series and MLB All-Star Game.
Also, aside from the Tournament of Roses Parade, New Year’s Day was wall-to-wall college bowl games on all three networks with the biggest being the Rose Bowl (especially if you lived in the Midwest and the West Coast), Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Cotton Bowl. Since this was before the BCS mucked things up, there were years where the determination of who was national champion depended upon the outcome of all four bowls.
As for news event, I remember the Watergate Hearings being a big part of TV programming in 1973.
I came in here to post that. Being only seven when it aired, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I did think the songs and the camp were a bit weird, but it was “Star Wars” so I loved it anyway.
I also came in here to post about the pilot of “Battlestar Galactica” being interrupted by the signing of the Camp David Accords. Wikipedia lists the interruption, but not for how long it was. To my seven-year old self it was an eternity. By the time the “Battlestar Galactica” pilot resumed, it was well past my bedtime. My parents let me stay up anyway, but I was very tired and cranky.
And finally, I came in here to echo the Christmas Specials, especially the stop-motion Rankin and Bass shows. I still get the “Heat Miser” song stuck in my head every now and then…
…oh! and while we’re talking about Rankin and Bass, there was also the time the “Hobbit” and “Return of the King” were broadcast. Those were also two pretty big TV events. And then there was… OK, nevermind, I’ll stop now. I guess I watched too much TV as a kid!
I was born in '67, my “Big Events” were watching Evel Knievel specials and “Battle of the Network Stars” shows. Also, getting the Fall TV guide was great because you’d see which feature-length movies would finally be coming on that year.
In my case, Superman II was ruined because my sickly little sister threw up on me halfway through the movie, and to top the indignity of that, as soon as I got cleaned up I had to head to the drugstore for her to get her some meds.
Yeah, I was pretty selfish at the time.
When I was a kid (the 1960s)
“The Wizard Of Oz”
“Peter Pan” with Mary Martin
My elementary school would call an assembly and have all the kids watch the Mercury space launches on a TV in the cafeteria/auditorium.
My mother moved her sewing machine into the family room to watch the TV for the weekend of the JFK funeral.
A little later “Monday Night Football” with Howard Cosell was a big thing.
Network premiere of movies that were a couple years old (e.g. “Patton” which came out early in 1970, was on network TV in December 1972 with most of the swear words intact).
I didn’t time the interruption of the Cap David accords but it was an eternity…something like 30 minutes at least. And it happened near the end just as the Galactica was about to fight the Cylons.
Political conventions in the early 1960s were quite the farce before they were streamlined for television. You would get things like a nominating speech by a long winded blowhard like Everett Dirksen at the 1964 GOP convention. He would go for 45 minutes before he mentioned the candidate’s name . The delegates would go into a “spontaneous” 30 minutes of dancing in
aisles upon hearing Goldwater’s name with balloons falling from the ceiling. Once Dirksen resumed speaking, it was another 30 minutes before he said “Goldwater” a second time and another “spontaneous” demonstration resulted, this time for 20 minutes.
In the early 1970s the Watergate hearings were in daytime with a blowhard Democrat senator named Sam Ervin who voted against every civil rights bill becoming a folk hero. Right along with Judge John Sirica who sentenced a group of mostly Latino with no criminal records to provisional 35 year prison terms for burglary.
The Wizard of Oz, and The Ten Commandments (known in our house, as “Moses”). Since this was the late 80s, and 90s, we could have recorded them, but never did; it made them more special.
I remember both Roots and The Holocaust miniseries as being must see TV. In the days before VCRs you had to wait a long, long time for something big to come to the screen. I remember waiting for weeks with great anticipation for Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea only to have 75% of it preempted for a football game! I was crushed and moped around for days.
3d movies on the telly. The glasses came with our newspapers a couple of days before hand.
The Wizard of Oz
Charlie Brown Christmas
Frosty the Snowman
1972 Olympics
Any World Series (at one set of grandparents, any MLB game at all 
)
Notre Dame home games
The Watergate hearings
Political conventions
Growing up in basketball crazy Indiana during the cold war, the '72 Olympics stand out in a big way. The refusal of the silver medals by the US team was coffee shop/hardware store/feedstore talk for weeks.