What Was ‘Jiggle TV’? Looking Back at ABC’s Scandalous Era, 50 Years Later

CHARLIE'S ANGELS, Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith, 1976-1981, corpse — Everett Collection

In June 1975, when Fred Silverman became president of ABC Entertainment, ABC had routinely ranked in third place among broadcast networks. But Frederick S. Pierce, ABC Television’s president, said at the time of Silverman’s hiring that the young upstart would “give us the shot in the arm we need,” per The New York Times.

Pierce’s prediction proved true. Though Silverman would became president and CEO of NBC just three years later, he did take ABC to No. 1 during his time there, per The Hollywood Reporter, largely thanks to shows like Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman, Three’s Company, and other examples of so-called “jiggle television.”

Paul Klein, an executive at NBC, defined jiggle TV as “when you have a young, attractive television personality running at top speed wearing a limited amount of underwear,” as Josh Ozersky reported in Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change.

Silverman’s Museum of Broadcast Communications bio also notes his jiggly legacy at ABC: “Silverman made the ‘third’ network a ratings power and … is credited with creating what critics called ‘jiggle TV,’ the type of television that features beautiful, scantily clad, frolicking women.”

Other jiggle TV shows during this era on ABC included The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, as Silverman noted in a 2001 interview with the Television Academy. “Television critics across the country, they hated these shows,” he said. “It was like ABC had smallpox on Saturday night. They just couldn’t understand how we could pander to the public like this, with ‘jiggle’ and, I don’t know, just every nasty word they could think of.”

The stars of jiggle TV shows noticed the trend, including Charlie’s Angels’ Farrah Fawcett. “When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting,” Fawcett once said, per The Independent. “When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”

Silverman, however, contended that Charlie’s Angels was “a positive statement for the women’s movement,” per THR. “This was the first show where there were three women who were running things and doing things on their own. They didn’t have time to check with Charlie or Bosley.”

Terry Lawler, former executive director of New York Women in Film & Television, told Fast Company in 2016 that Charlie’s Angels was “both sexist and empowering,” with characters “doing things that you’d expect men to do in normal cop shows, but they’re doing them in these impossible outfits, and they have Charlie, like they’re not smart enough as detectives to do it on their own.”

The jiggle TV trend — sometimes referred, more crudely, as T&A television — wasn’t just an ABC thing either. By the time NBC’s Police Woman ended in 1978, star Angie Dickinson had grown tired of scenes “where the phone rings while I’m taking a bath,” she told People. “I always want to look as sexy, beautiful and luscious as I can, but I’d prefer scripts where the sensuality is pouring out naturally for the whole 60 minutes.”

And jiggle TV continued long past Silverman’s ABC tenure. In 1979, after Silverman had already moved to NBC, his old network broadcast the TV special The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, which, Variety noted, “aired on ABC to huge ratings at the height of its T&A phase.”

On its “Jiggle Show” listing, TV Tropes says that the 1990s hit Baywatch became iconic for “slow-motion shots of running women in bikinis” and that even a turn-of-the-millennium, feminist-skewing show like Charmed had its lead characters showing “a noticeable preference for wearing very low-cut and/or form-fitting tops.”

Silverman’s tenure at NBC ended in 1981 after the worst season in the network’s history, per THR, though the exec found success again with his self-named production company, which developed shows like Matlock and Diagnosis Murder.

Despite his many successes, Silverman, who died in 2020 at age 82, might be forever associated with jiggle TV, as his Museum of Broadcast Communications bio notes: “Television programming has been criticized for appealing to the lowest common denominator in its quest for raw numbers of viewers, and more than once Silverman has been targeted as the chief instrument of that appeal. Indeed, columnist Richard Reeves observed in 1978 that Silverman had probably done more to lower the standards of the viewing audience than any other individual.”