TVSquad

During the early Seventies, CBS had a Murderer's Row of comedies that were on back-to-back during a particular night of the week.  It started with All in the Family, then segued into M*A*S*H, followed by the unstoppable combo of Mary Tyler Moore and The Bob Newhart Show.  Finally, the night wrapped up with The Carol Burnett Show. Sounds like it was a pretty funny night, right?  One that you wouldn't want to miss (remember, we're talking about the era before VCRs, much les TiVOs)? Take a quick guess what day of the week it was. Thursday, right? Thursday's usually a big TV night. Maybe it was Tuesday or Sunday.


 Wrong on all counts.  That knockout schedule, my friends, was on CBS each and every Saturday night during the 1973-74 season.  There was a time when Saturdays were the biggest night of the week, TV-wise. People were having kids at a younger age. More families stayed home. HBO was barely a year old, and not many people had cable. The networks took advantage of that and programmed their best shows on Saturdays. If it wasn't the CBS combo in the early Seventies, then it was the ABC combo of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island in the late Seventies, or NBC's Golden Girls in the Eighties. But Saturday was the big day.

Now? You're lucky if you see a rerun of CSI. Or a bad TV movie. At some point over the last couple of years, the networks completely gave up on providing original programming on Saturday nights. Maybe it's because people go out more now than they did then (people between the ages 18-34 have a lot more money these days), or it could be because even those who don't go out rent DVDs or play video games. But the audience isn't completely to blame. The original shows that the networks have put on Saturdays have been lame at best. So did the audience leave because the shows were bad, or did the shows go bad because the audience left? Hard to say.