In January of 1977 when the epic miniseries Roots came out, I was only 8. But I remember the time well. It seems at the time, one of the competing networks was running something else, to draw viewers away from Roots–and that is what my parents and I watched.
But I soon realized it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. The next day in school, no one watched “not Roots” (for lack of a better term)–everyone was watching Roots!
My first question, I think, I already know the answer to, but I will ask it. Did anyone else here have the misfortune to be watching “not Roots” too? That having been asked, I have to also ask, Does anyone remember what “not Roots” was? I have since forgotten. Lastly, does anyone know how I could look up past television archives of shows so I can answer questions like this on my own. I did a Google search for past archives of shows. But I can’t seem to turn up what I am looking for.
I looked up the TV listings for that date in the New York Times, which unfortunately isn’t a free resource. Wikipedia has pages for each TV season’s regular schedule, but it doesn’t reflect special events like Roots.
The listings only provide the titles of the shows aired by the other networks, so I’m not sure how helpful they’ll be. All times are Eastern.
CBS:
9:00-10:00 Switch
10:00-11:00 Delvecchio
NBC:
8:00-9:30 McMillan: Shirley Jones, Nina Foch, guests (I guess this was McMillan and Wife?)
9:30-11:00 McCloud: Hoyt Axton, L.Q. Jones, Nehemiah Pursoff, guests
I have no idea what Switch was, but the other programming looks like the networks’ standard shows for those time slots. I’m guessing this doesn’t do much to help solve the mystery of “not Roots”.
I can’t answer your question, however I did find this archive from Time Feb 1979. They state
Apparently, even though Roots was amazingly popular, nobody thought it would be beforehand, and the competing networks didn’t schedule anything special opposite it.
There are a lot of example of this, where no one realized that something was going to be huge before it happened.
Just to pick one subject: The Beatles. My kids are astounded at the other guests on the Ed Sullivan show before the Beatles. And the run-of-the-mill acts.
Heck, if Pete Best or Stu Sutcliffe knew how big things would get, wouldn’t they have stuck around*?
*(ok, in Pete’s case “taken some drum lessons and showed up for gigs”)
I didn’t watch Roots. I refuse to be caught up in a week-long miniseries. I have too much to do to invest the time. I doubt I watched anything that week, anyway; I was probably reading.
And a young Sharon Gless(who looks remarkably like the current Sharon Gless- she’s aged really well for somebody who has aged realistically).
I was just reading, completely unrelated to this, something by Stan Lee talking about his failures, one of which was the TV movie (intended to be a pilot) of Dr. Strange, of which he said
The movie premiered in September 1978. Roots ran the first time in January 1977. I wonder if Lee had his dates wrong or if the rerun of Roots was still big enough to sink the competition. (Either way I don’t buy it; in the first place I doubt there was a huge overlap between the core audiences Roots v. a superhero show and in the second I’m guessing network execs would take into account the Roots juggernaut when considering the ratings of a TV movie.)
Since Roots had so many then current TV stars and frequent episodic guest stars, I’m guessing at least a few were probably competing against themselves at least one of its nights.
I haven’t done this yet, but Google News lets you search a newspaper archive. You might be able to just find a paper on the dates Roots was running and find out what was running against it.
