What TV Shows Are You Looking Forward To This Fall?

Are there any shows YOU are looking forward to?


I’ve been rereading the extensive list of shows that will be on ABC and CBS and NBC and FOX and the CW. I came to the conclusion that there probably isn’t a single new show that I’ll start watching. I’ve ODed on police procedurals, the comedies don’t sound particularly funny, and the few shows I might have given a chance to (ABC’s Pan Am, about the hassles of being an airline stewardess in the 1960s, for one) won’t last more than a month.

This is not such a bad thing, mind you. Every year for the last couple at least, I say I’m not going to add any more new shows to my DVR recording. two years ago, I lapsed and started to watch The Good Wife, but last year, nada. (I don’t think so, anyway.)

Are there any new shows YOU are looking forward to? I feel that I should be into FOX’s Terra Nova, especially with Steven Spielberg’s name attached, but I’m just not.

Color TV’s 60th anniversary

The pace quickened when ABC and CBS went to full color for its 1966 fall schedule.

Looking for something else, I discovered that TODAY is the 60th anniversary of the first U.S. color telecast. “On June 25, 1951, with 12 million TV sets in existence, of which only two dozen could receive CBS color, CBS made history by presenting an hour-long color TV program hosted by Ed Sullivan and Arthur Godfrey with 16 stars that performed song, dance and comedy routines.”

As this article notes, “Earlier attempts to create marketable color broadcasts had been hampered by the FCC’s insistence that any color signal be readable by existing black and white sets as well. Even though the CBS color transmission system was not compatible with most existing televisions, the FCC approved it as the U.S. standard in 1950…

“Unfortunately, the color television sets that were required to view the programs did not sell very well. In 1953, the FCC reversed their decision to use CBS’s design as the national standard in favor of an RCA design that was compatible with existing TV sets.”

Like most software/hardware problems of today, there weren’t more color TVs sold in part because there wasn’t enough color programming and vice versa. But when NBC took the lead in color broadcasting, due in no small part to its relationship with RCA, which could build color TVs, color became inevitable, slowly at first.

Jan 1964 – 1,620,000
Jan 1965 – 2,860,000
Jan 1966 – 5,220,000
Jan 1967 – 9,510,000
Jan 1968 -14,130,000 Roughly 25% of US households
Jan 1969 -19,200,000 Roughly 33%
Apr 1969 -20,560,000
Oct 1970 -26,200,000
Jul 1971 -29,700,000 Roughly 48%

 

The pace quickened when ABC and CBS went to full color for its 1966 fall schedule. I remember well the teases:

ABC in color,
The Avengers,
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,

CBS in color,
CBS logo.

Of course, early on, I saw those “color” logos in black and white.

Now (Don’t) Cut That Out!

I was ALSO watching Heidi Bowl.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the classic last episode of the TV series Newhart, which the local CBS in the Albany-Schenectady, NY area cut off 30 seconds too soon. Watch Bob Newhart talk about The Last Newhart.

It got me thinking about TV events that were interrupted. Surely, one of the most significant is the so-called Heidi Bowl, which I was ALSO watching.

It was an American Football League regular-season game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, played on November 17, 1968. the Jets were leading 32-29 with only 65 seconds left, and NBC-TV ended the football coverage at 7 pm in favor of broadcasting the premiere of Heidi, a made-for-TV version of the classic children’s story. Meanwhile, the Raiders came back and scored 14 points, winning 43-32. Ultimately, the NFL’s television policies were amended, requiring games to be broadcast in their entirety in the markets of the teams involved.

Lately, I’ve been having difficulty for more prosaic reasons. I hardly ever get a chance to watch a TV show live. I record almost everything to the DVR to watch later. And I’m usually an episode or two behind. So it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that the results show of American Idol on FOX has been running two to four minutes long, the effect of which being my recording of Glee cuts off early. I DO have the ability to extend the recording of the later show and have. But it seems weird that a RESULTS show can’t end on time.

Any shows cutting off for you?

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