1970s American television series

This article, Television Beyond the Networks, offers case studies on first-run scripted syndicated programs that expresses a national audience through syndication in the United States during the 1970s. Even though certain programs, Rosen’s Story Theatre and Mary Hartman for example, despised the efforts to operate outside the networks distribution circuits, these series faced challenges that a range factors in the dominance of the network era. The body of television programming created and…

Norman Lear played an important role in the development of scripted television in the 1970’s. Lear created the hit show All In The Family, which was a sitcom that featured an African American family. The show was watched all throughout the country, giving Lear a platform to discuss controversial issues. The series began by making jokes while addressing various racial themes, but later evolved into talking about other topics such as menopause, impotency, homosexuality, and the ongoing Vietnam War…

Mary Tyler Moore Show and Scandal are both television shows that have independent and professional women as their main characters. The Mary Tyler Moore show was revolutionary in its inclusion of a career focused and single woman while Scandal is also revolutionary for its featuring of an African-American professional woman as its main character. Both of these television shows left a mark on history for their inclusion of controversial topics into the series. Even though The Mary Tyler Moore…

Throughout the past 70 years, black actors have endured numerous standards of type-casting in network television. Nowadays African Americans have a better opportunity than ever before to star in roles that formerly were exclusively reserved for whites. Even though network television does a much better job depicting blacks in a variety situations, blacks continue to be, in many ways, similarly typecast. During the 1950s, black characters were portrayed in demeaning and stereotypical ways by…

What is superhero fiction? Superhero fiction is a genre mainly originating in and most common to American comic books, though it has expanded into other media through adaptations and original works. The form is a type of speculative fiction examining the adventures of costumed crime fighters known as superheroes, who often possess superhuman powers and battle similarly powered criminals that we like to call villains. Occasionally, this type of fiction is referred to as superhuman or…

Bogle, Donald. Prime Time Blues: African Americans on Network Television, Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Donald Bogle outlines the roles of African Americans in television from the 1950s through the 1990s. Bogle acknowledged the shows that were most influential of African American media. I thought Bogle gave a good insight on television shows that I used to watch reflecting on the social implications of the shows I watch today. Each decade of television was given an inscription. The…

The late 1970s and early 1980s brought the audience out of the studio to capture people in real-life settings. TV newsgathering paved the path with the introduction of Sony’s videocassette format by making portable TV affordable for every television station. Westinghouse Broadcast’s Evening Magazine ultimately adapted free-ranging news style of 60 minutes into the video-based magazine show form. Entertainment Tonight, Primetime Live, and Dateline NBC are amongst a few in which the format still…

The manifest destiny of television technology is real-time viewing of all the places the audience is not. It is the ideal glance into the neighbor’s kitchen window, or through the bedroom door. The entertainment corporations found a way to make televised life commerce, so now it rules the airwaves. Reality-based television is not novel, of course. Allen Funt, with his 1948 TV series Candid Camera is often recognized as reality TV’s first specialist. He actually started a year earlier with Candid…

cringeworthy, 1979 comedy film based on a 1970 novella of the same title. The plot is centered on a mentally challenged gardener named Chance (Peter Sellers), or Chauncey Gardiner as he is later known, who is evicted from his home and is mistaken for a brilliant visionary after meeting a powerful business mogul who helps him become a famous public figure. While the script often stretches the suspension of disbelief to its breaking point it does lead to a series of funny moments once the film…

Nashville every Saturday night. With his third release, “I Walk the Line” and “Get Rhythm” (1956), Cash established himself as a rising star. At the end of 1957, Cash was the third-best-selling country artist in America and began appearing on national television programs…