A Television Mystery

Consider the following line-up of shows, perhaps the greatest night of prime time television programming ever from a single network.

• (8:00) All in the Family (1)
• (8:30) M*A*S*H* (4)
• (9:00) The Mary Tyler Moore Show (9)
• (9:30) The Bob Newhart Show (12)
• (10:00) The Carol Burnett Show (27)

This was CBS slate of prime time shows for Saturday night for the 1973-1974 season, my senior year in high school.

At least four of these five shows are considered bona fide classics. Two of them, All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, are in the the running for the title of the best situation comedy of all time. Let's be clear, these are not just highly regarded shows by critics and historians, they were also huge hits in their day. Three of them were top ten hits, and All in the Family was the number one show on television, a achievement that it maintained for an astonishing five consecutive years from 1971-72 through the 1975-76 season. Among scripted network programs, only The Cosby Show has equaled that record and none have surpassed it.

The only competition to this amazing line-up of shows that I can think of is NBC's Thursday night schedule of must-see-TV during the 1994-1998 seasons, which included Seinfeld, ER, and Friends.

What's truly amazing about the Saturday line-up from 1973-74 is that it was on Saturday! Today, and for a long time, Saturday has been a television wasteland, not Newton Minow's "vast wasteland", but an actual entertainment wasteland of reruns, cancelled shows, and about to be cancelled shows. No one much watches network television on Saturday nights anymore. In fact, not many people watch network television on Friday nights either, which also used to be a great night* for television.

This is a complete mystery to me. What has changed since the 1970s that stopped the American public from watching network TV on Friday and Saturday nights? I am tempted to lay the blame for this at the feet of media diversification. There are so many sources of entertainment today beyond the major television networks--home video, the Internet, and pay cable TV to name the obvious candidates. This is a fairly well-understood phenomenon, and goes a long way towards explaining the general drop in network television viewership over the last three decades.

What is not clear is why this general loss of viewers would apply specifically to Saturday night. For example, Sunday night is still the most-watched night of the week. 60 Minutes is regularly one of the top 10 shows. Why would people stop watching network TV on Saturday night, but continue watching on Sunday night? How does the existence of HBO explain that?

There are only two possibilities. Either we are not watching television at all (of any kind) nearly as much as we used to on Saturday nights; or, we still watch television on Saturday, just not network television. The problem is that neither of these explanations seems clearly plausible. The public was every bit as mobile in the 1970s as they are now. I don't recall watching that great night of television in 1973-1974 much, because Saturday night I was generally out with friends doing something other than watching TV. I see no reason to think that this has changed much in the last 40 years. The problem with the second explanation is the one I have already mentioned. Why would media diversification disproportionally affect Saturday night as opposed to, say, Thursday night?

The best explanation I can think of is the following: media diversification is primarily in the realm of entertainment. Friday and Saturday nights are when most of us seek entertainment the most aggressively as we long for a respite from the stresses of the work week. It makes sense that entertainment diversification would have its largest effect during those times we are most focused on being entertained. Sunday night is a time of relaxation while we prepare to return to the regular work schedule, and we are less distracted by the sheer variety of entertainment sources. As explanations go, this is fairly lame, but it is the best I can do.

* One of my fond memories as a child in the late 1960s was staying up late on Friday nights to watch the Johnny Carson Show. Carson routinely saved his best line-up of guests (Don Rickles, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, etc.) for Friday night. Friday was the crown jewel of the Tonight Show's programming.