Looking Back At Fall TV Of The 1970s
When it comes to TV shows, you’ve heard it (and probably said it) more times than you can count: They don’t make them like they used to.
Times and tastes have changed, it’s true, but even more to the point is that they don’t schedule TV shows the way they used to. In an age when year-round programming is a reality, and the formerly “Big Three” broadcast networks are seemingly dwarfed by the relentless churn of streaming platforms, it’s almost hard to remember what a big deal it was to anticipate a new fall TV season — and the annual Fall Preview issue of TV Guide Magazine. (A friend of mine, who like me grew up to be a professional TV critic, recalls passing out as a child waiting for the issue to arrive at his post office in Missouri, having skipped breakfast.)
TV Guide/courtesy Everett Collection
My own obsession with TV hit an early peak in the 1970s, and I remember those fall TV lineups like they were yesterday. The medium had enjoyed an early “golden age” in its infancy in the 1950s and grew into adolescence in the 1960s with broad and fantastical sitcoms and a plethora of escapist Westerns. But TV in the 1970s reached a new level of maturity, embodied in the bold, socially aware comedies created by Norman Lear and the adult sophistication of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its many offshoots.
Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
Sure, Archie and Edith Bunker (the sublime Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton) were pining for a simpler time when “our old LaSalle ran great” as they warbled, or screeched, “Those Were the Days” at the top of every episode of the CBS landmark All in the Family. A few years later, ABC’s own breakout hit comedy Happy Days trafficked in a more idealized form of nostalgia in its re-creation of the 1950s — though Ozzie and Harriet never met a leather-jacketed disruptor like Henry Winkler’s Fonzie.
There Was Something Special About Mary
Courtesy Everett Collection
Our nostalgia for 1970s TV — and those iconic Fall Preview issues — lies in the fascination with watching shows break new ground while also honoring and updating old traditions, in many cases welcoming back favorites who had already become stars on TV.
This was especially true with Mary Tyler Moore, who had become an instant style icon as the sweetly neurotic Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s. The fall of 1970 heralded her comeback as a single career woman — the initial concept of her being divorced didn’t fly, because execs worried the audience would think she’d divorced Dick! Moving to Minneapolis, Mary Richards joined the WJM local-TV newsroom, inspiring generations of liberated women to consider making it on their own.
Everett Collection
TV Guide Magazine’s Fall Preview entry skeptically wondered, “This is Middle America?” when describing the wacky characters in Mary’s new orbit, but all of America took her to heart. So much so that successive seasons would see spinoffs revolving around her scene-stealing sidekicks: first for Valerie Harper’s Rhoda in 1974, then Cloris Leachman’s Phyllis in 1975 — and after The Mary Tyler Moore Show signed off, Ed Asner’s Lou Grant in a more dramatic format in 1977.
And Then There Was Archie
There is no Fall Preview blurb for All in the Family, because like so many shows that try something new, this risky showcase for generational conflict and political incorrectness premiered at midseason in January 1971, defying expectations (ABC had passed on an earlier version) by becoming an instant, if controversial, smash and introducing us to the forever remembered Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor). Like MTM, All in the Family would also spawn spinoffs that brought much-needed diversity to primetime: the loudly feminist Maude (September 1972), which begat Good Times (February 1974), and the “moving on up” shenanigans of the Bunkers’ former neighbors, The Jeffersons (January 1975). The success of late ’70s comedy breakthroughs including ABC’s Soap and Taxi (later on NBC) is unimaginable without Family laying the path.
And What About Bob?
In the fall of 1972, Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show were joined on Saturdays by the urban wit of The Bob Newhart Show, starring the comic as an unassuming Chicago psychologist married to the chic Suzanne Pleshette. What a night of TV that was — and when The Carol Burnett Show moved to Saturday a year later, it created an iconic comedy block that kept people home on many a weekend night. (I should point out that TV nerds like me studied each year’s Fall Preview programming grid as if it were the periodic table, learning when and on what night each new and returning show was being placed, setting up some awfully tough choices in an era before recording was an option.)
> Bob Newhart’s 10 Most Memorable TV & Film Roles
Westerns Are Replaced With M*A*S*H And The Waltons
That same year (1972), a show that would eventually make a lot more noise arrived on CBS’ Sunday lineup — opposite The Wonderful World of Disney on NBC and ABC’s long-running The FBI — with the debut of M*A*S*H and its madcap Army surgeons. (CBS helped make this irreverent series a hit by moving it to Saturday a year later, then to several other nights before becoming a Monday staple in its final glory years.)
With Westerns fading in popularity (with the notable exceptions of Gunsmoke and Bonanza), the dominant dramatic genre of the 1970s was the private eye/detective caper, closely followed by the emotional family drama. The unexpected trendsetter among the latter was The Waltons, the heartwarming saga of a large and loving Depression-era family, which TV Guide Magazine’s Fall Preview saw as a risk, “attempting warm, homespun family drama in a medium that generally likes its families to be wacky and its dramas to be action-packed.”
Premiering on Thursdays in 1972 opposite the popular The Flip Wilson Show on NBC and ABC’s trendy The Mod Squad, those rural Waltons shocked everyone by not being shocking. Families took comfort in their decency and resilience — and would become just as attached to the pioneering Ingalls family when Michael Landon’s Little House on the Prairie showed up on NBC two years later.
NBC/Courtesy: Everett Collection
Those ’70s Sleuths
Supplanting TV’s cowboys was a gallery of private eyes, detectives and cops who are almost too numerous to mention. Many were quick fades — who remembers Jack Palance as Bronk? — but some had staying power, including Peter Falk as the rumpled, uncanny Columbo, Telly Savalas as the imposing lollipop-prone Kojak, James Garner in the wry The Rockford Files, Angie Dickinson as a slinky Police Woman, William Conrad as the heavyweight Cannon, and David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser as the hot-rodding Starsky and Hutch.
And who can forget the immortal pairing of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith as the original Charlie’s Angels in 1976 — described in that year’s Fall Preview as “the only detectives who have police training and look sensational in bikinis.”
I can’t be the only person who had Farrah’s iconic poster on the wall, in the same room as my Fall Preview TV bible. Those really were the days.
Remind 
1970s Fall TV
September 2023
Take a trip back to the ’70s by looking at the TV Guide Magazine Fall Preview primetime lineups.
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