![]() NBC's "Saturday Night Live" staked out fresh territory in TV demographics, luring back to TV members of a generation that had largely abandoned it. But it is very unlikely the networks will retain as much of the pie as they have profitably enjoyed during TV's first three gold-mine decades.Īt the same time, the networks showed during the '70s the ability to expand their audiences to take in new, converted constituencies. No one knows exactly which kind of television will dominate the '80s. There could be 30 million by 1984 and in addition to the viewers siphoned off by cable, network audiences will be offered such other diversions as the video disc, video cassette recorders, home computer terminals and over-the-air pay TV. By the end of the decade, the number of systems had risen to 4,150 and the number of subscribers to 15.5 million. In 1970, there were only 2,490 cable TV systems in the United States, serving 4.5 million subscribers. ![]() Technological break-throughts involving cable TV, pay TV, and national cable networks linked by satellite became so clearly a threat to the networks that ABC started advertising its prime-time movies with the legend, "Another Outstanding Movie on Free Television." Soon a new TV form, the mini-series, was being hailed as the medium's salvation, a respite from Humdrum weekly shows.īeyond the usual mercurial trends in programming, the '70s may represent a much larger cycle nearing its end - the era of network domination of television. As it began, public TV's imported serial, "The Forsyte Sage," was just making its impact. ![]() In some senses, the decade was full-circular. At the beginning of the 1979 season, there was none. At the beginning of the 1970 prime-time network TV season, there were 15 hours of musical-variety programming in the schedule each week. Jiggle girly shows bounced their way into America's lap. Cop shows came in a wave and left in a hail of bullets. It was a time of video synthesizers, video beams, video discs and video games - all in the vanguard, we were persistently told, of a video revolution that will liberate us from the grips of "Happy Days," Sheriff Lobo, Geraldo Rivera and the Incredible Hulk. It was the second-best of times, it was th second-worst of times. Cholesterol, Pope John Paul II, Mike Wallace, Kunta Kinte, Mary Hartman, Richard Nixon, Ayatollah Khomeini and red Silverman. On television, the 1970s were the decade of sex and violence, t & a, Mork and Mindy, Laverne and Shirley, Archie and Edith, Begin and Sadat, Farrah Fawcett, Deng Xiaoping, Kermit the Frog, Mr.
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