Indeed we have. I have only ever resided in the central time zone for my entire life. Not sure if I could ever adjust to eastern.
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Network Television
- Thread starter TVCOOL
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That continued well into the '60s. I think the first real success ABC had was "Batman" and that was a fad rather than something it could build a schedule around. Other than "Monday Night Football," I don't think ABC truly became one of the "big boys" until it struck gold with "Happy Days" and other sitcoms in the mid-'70s. IIRC, ABC topped the weekly Nielsens for the first time during those years.
Leonard Goldenson's autobiography is a fantastic read if you can find it. ABC was the last network to go all-color. They had to take out a huge loan to make the conversion. The main profit center at the time was radio. Still, they managed to put four hours of programming on the air every night.
I would guess that ABC's first real success was The Flintstones, which finished 18th in the Nielsens for the 1960-61 season. IIRC, it was also ABC's first show to air in color. Bewitched was also successful before Batman started.
But it is true that, despite a few successful shows beforehand, ABC really didn't become a big-league network until the 1970s.
ABC was also the first of the major nets to be sold. In 1985, they were bought by Capital Cities, a much smaller broadcasting company, for $3.5 billion.
The next year, Laurence Tisch and his Loews company bought CBS. Then in 1988 RCA, owner of NBC, was sold to GE.
Wasn't ABC a spin off from RCA when it was forced to sell one of the networks?
In 1943.
The Blue network.
In 1966, ABC created its four demographic radio networks, but put them all on the same network line specifically because of that 1943 decision.
“ABC Information Network” news at the top of the hour
“ABC FM Radio Network” news at :15 past
“ABC Entertainment Network” news at the bottom of the hour
“ABC Contemporary Network” news at :55
“Information” skewed the oldest and most serious, “Contemporary” the youngest.
Yes, all were fed on the same line. I recall a few occasions where the DJ would forget to pot down the network line following the “Contemporary” feed at :55 and you would hear the beginning of the “Information” newscast mixed with whatever song was playing moments later.
Thanks for filling in the gaps of my knowledge. When I said ABC was a "big" network, I meant more from a financial backing (they were able to survive because they had a second revenue stream in Radio). I knew that CBS and NBC were the dominant players for decades (even ABC radio has an interesting history).
Dumont is a complicated story. I know many of their affiliates were secondary affiliates, and it looks like they split that secondary affiliation with several stations, which had to make it very confusing to find out where a Dumont show was on. Had Dumont started in the 60's instead of the 40's, when UHF was a bit more common, that also could have helped. And if Dumont were owned by a larger company that could afford to run it at a loss for 5 or 10 more years, that also could have made a huge difference. All of that said though, even Fox struggled in the 80s, and it wasn't until they made a big bet on Football that they became one of the now "big 4" networks. The other thing that is interesting to me is that we, at one point, had 7 networks trying to compete, all with large corporate backing except for Pax. Even still, that field shrunk to 5 first-run networks, and that 5th network is operating at a loss on paper (for benefit of revenue on the back end.)
Actually it was The Jetsons that was ABC’s first color show, and that was in a roundabout way. ABC still didn’t have color capacity so The Jetsons and The Flintstones were transmitted to ABC from NBC, then ABC sent those out to affiliates.
Fox actually did program Sundays at 10 ET every season from 1987-88 to 1992-93. Some years, they also had a 10:30 ET show. Many affiliates just carried their 10 o'clock news as usual; some delayed the network program, but by the early '90s, many stations weren't clearing the shows at all.
I stand corrected, again. In 1988, I wasn't allowed to watch anything on Fox. They were on a weaker station, and had a reputation for "edgier" programming that my parents didn't approve of (I was 8 at the time, so I guess I can't blame them?). By the time that "ban" was lifted, a lot had changed about Fox. It was still on a poor signal, but we had moved to a house with a rooftop antenna, and things had matured at Fox.
Looking back at the historical schedule of Fox, they sure had an interesting launch strategy. Programming Saturday and Sunday to launch? And networks used to program on Saturdays?! I wonder why that changed? Certainly not a strategy that a network would use today, but even back in the mid 90's both The WB and UPN didn't program on Saturdays (and The CW still doesn't.)
I had also forgotten that The Simpsons spent their first 5 seasons on Thursdays before moving to the Sunday spot.
So yeah, thanks for pointing that out, sent me down an interesting rabbit hole!
One exception I can remember is during the Prime Time Access Rule days (as many of you recall, networks had to give up usually the 7:30pm ET/PT half hour so local stations could run high-minded public affairs programming---ahem---syndicated game shows). For a year or two, the half hour was on Sunday, with the networks signing off at 10:30pm. This gave WHIO-TV, the CBS affiliate in Dayton, OH, a Sunday night 10:30pm newscast. WDTN (or was it still WLW-D?) may have followed.
Married With Children I believe went from Thursday to Sunday with the Simpsons.
It was replayed twice on that first night. And Married with children was on Saturday Nights briefly, went back to Sundays and finished their run on Mondays in the 1996-97 TV season
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