It was 41 years ago on Monday - September 19, 1970 - That "The Mary Tyler Moore" show debuted on TV. It featured Mary wearing a brown & white outfit with winter-white vinyl boots seeking employment at the TV station.
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41 Years Ago on Monday (Sept. 19, 1970)
- Thread starter Cincinnati Kid
- Start date
You may have some people believing Sept. 19, 1970
was a Monday (as it was this year), but for the record it
was a Saturday, and Mary's show always aired on Saturdays.
BTW, two nights later "Monday Night Football" debuted on
ABC and changed the nation's viewing habits in a big way
for years.
was a Monday (as it was this year), but for the record it
was a Saturday, and Mary's show always aired on Saturdays.
BTW, two nights later "Monday Night Football" debuted on
ABC and changed the nation's viewing habits in a big way
for years.
I don't think he was implying that September 19, 1970, fell on a Monday, only that it was 41 years ago this past Monday (September 19, 2011) that Laura Petrie showed up seeking a job at that TV station. ;D
At any rate, it's amazing what a wasteland that Saturday night TV has become since then.
At any rate, it's amazing what a wasteland that Saturday night TV has become since then.
I remember...Browns 31, Jets 21 at Cleveland (with Joe Namath throwing for almost 400 yards in the loss).
Firepoint525 is correct, I only meant to note that it was 41 years ago on Monday in 2011 that it had been 41 years. Interesting how the clip from Mary being in Mr. Grant's office in that first episode is shown in historical references to the show.
F
FreddyE1977
Guest
firepoint525 said:
I was way too young to have any serious plans for Saturday night at that time, but you raise an interesting topic.
That Saturday night CBS lineup was dynamite (MTM, All in the Family, MASH, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett)
The ABC Friday Night lineup was pretty strong also. I know the economy was pretty bad in the 70's which
would have caused a lot of people to stay home on those nights. But it's not good now. What changed to
the point that Fox would opt not to renew a show with minimal production costs (America's Most Wanted) in favor of
reruns of programming from earlier in the week? If you add up all the viewers from all the cable networks and home video
does that account for where viewers have gone on those nights, or are people simply choosing to do something else?
There was a little irony to that debut of the Mary Tyler Moore show. In that Saturday night timeslot, it had replaced the cancelled "rural" sitcom Petticoat Junction, one of whose co-stars in its last two seasons was June Lockhart (ex-Lassie and Lost in Space). Ms. Moore's then-new sitcom had among its co-stars the lady who, back in the late '50's, had been replaced by Ms. Lockhart on Lassie - Cloris Leachman. So in that sense there was an unintentional karma or something.
Cross-referencing another thread, I mentioned seeing Jim Croce and Maury Muehleisen (sp?) in a Time-Life infomercial. I didn't mention it in that other thread, but I happened to see that infomercial at 7:00 p.m. (CDT) on a Saturday evening on the NBC affiliate station here in Nashville. Wonder what they bumped to show that? ;DFreddyE1977 said:
And this Saturday night at 8pm PDT marks the 87th birthday of the radio station at 610 KHZ in San Francisco that was once upon a time KFRC.....So what else is new? What's there now is not worth mentioning these day's...and how she did make it on her own too, way to go MTM.
firepoint525 said:
It seems that Saturday nights are not only generally reserved for repeats, movies and burn-offs, they have also become disposable, where stations could pre-empt them for their own programming -- mainly infomercials, apparently sold to the brokers at a very low rate, as few people are watching.
The oft-quoted reason is that people go out on Saturday night (restaurants, movies, bars, music) , though I doubt they go out in any greater numbers than in the 70s - and the population has grown since then, so the potential prime-time audience is probably much larger on Saturday nights these days than in the 70s.FreddyE1977 said:
But what has changed are the viewing options open to viewers who are home. In the early 70s, the only choices were perhaps a dozen TV channels to choose from, and that's if you were lucky and either had cable or lived in one of the large TV markets. Now, there are hundreds of channels to choose from on cable or satellite, streaming content from the internet, popular websites, blogs, and social networking sites like Facebook, video-games, DVD rentals, stuff you've recorded on DVR, etc.
Simply stated, the available audience is much more fractured than 41 years ago. The traditional networks are being financially squeezed, so they've chosen to save some money by not spending on new Saturday night content.
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