The era of the miniseries

By the 1978–79 season, M*A*S*H and All in the Family were still in the top 10, but The Mary Tyler Moore Show had left the air the previous season, and All in the Family was in its final season. In large part on the basis of its nostalgia and “jiggle” programming, ABC became the top-rated network for the first time in its history. Two producers—Garry Marshall (Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley) and Aaron Spelling (Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island)—were principally responsible for ABC’s success during this period. ABC’s most memorable success of the late ’70s, however, was not a “jiggle” series. Roots, an ambitious 12-hour adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel, aired on 8 consecutive nights in January 1977. It was based on Haley’s reconstructed family history from the capture of his ancestors in West Africa in the 18th century through slavery and emancipation in the United States. All eight installments made the list of the then 50 highest-rated programs of all time, including the top position. The response of the critics and the industry was just as strong, and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave the show an unprecedented 37 Emmy Award nominations. Roots could never have aired before the relevance movement, and even in 1977 it was attended by some controversy. Some viewers and organizations took issue with the show’s scenes of partial nudity (a first for fiction programming on network TV), its rape scene, and its frank presentation of the horrors of slavery. Others complained of historical inaccuracies.

Roots also helped establish the miniseries—a multipart series with a preplanned limited run—as a new television form. Unlike the usual series, the miniseries has a traditional narrative beginning, middle, and end rather than an extended middle. This form was and is common in the United Kingdom, but the economics of commercially supported TV in the United States had always favoured the ongoing series and its potential for mass production, audience loyalty, and syndication potential. Roots was not the first American miniseries, or even the longest; ABC had aired a 12-hour adaptation of Irwin Shaw’s novel Rich Man, Poor Man the previous season to a large and enthusiastic audience. Nonetheless, it was the phenomenal commercial success of Roots that guaranteed the immediate future of the historical miniseries as a viable new programming genre. During the next decade, many historical novels would be developed as limited series, including Shogun (NBC, 1980), The Thorn Birds (ABC, 1983), The Winds of War (ABC, 1983), and the 25-hour-long Centennial (NBC, 1978). Escalating production budgets and increasingly lower ratings threatened the miniseries by the end of the 1980s, however. War and Remembrance (ABC, 1988–89), at 30 hours the longest miniseries to date, signaled a significant waning of the genre when it failed to generate ratings to justify its expense.

The growth of cable TV

Up to the 1980s, the three original networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—enjoyed a virtual oligopoly in the American television industry. In the 1980s, however, cable television began to experience unprecedented growth. Whereas broadcast TV allowed a viewer to receive the signals of nearby stations over the air with the help of an antenna, cable technology brought a much wider array of channels directly into the home by way of a coaxial cable. For a monthly fee, cable TV subscribers could receive traditional local broadcast stations, broadcast “superstations” delivered to cable systems by satellite from distant cities, premium movie services, and a wide and growing array of specialized cable-only channels. Originally called “community antenna television,” cable TV had been around almost as long as television itself. In its early days, it had been available almost exclusively in communities in which geographic conditions made television reception difficult. In these cases, a company erected an antenna tower at a high point in the area and then delivered the quality signals of broadcast stations to individual households by wire for a fee. Developers had attempted to take cable to a wider public in the 1960s, but viewers were resistant to the notion of paying for something they could get for free. By the 1970s, however, cable was able to deliver new programming services that were unavailable from network TV. In 1972, for example, Home Box Office (HBO) began offering its subscribers recently released movies, uncut and commercial-free, months or years before the broadcast stations would air those same films edited for time and content restraints and interrupted by advertisements.

Only 8 percent of American households received basic cable in 1970; by 1980 that number had climbed to 23 percent, and it would double within the next four years. By the end of the decade, nearly 60 percent of American homes were wired for basic cable, and almost half of those were receiving some premium channels. In the late 1970s, more than 90 percent of the prime-time viewing audience was tuned to ABC, CBS, or NBC; by 1989 that number was down to 67 percent, and it fell steadily throughout the remaining years of the century. During this same period, independent stations—channels not affiliated with one of the networks—also became stronger competitors of the networks than they had ever been before. One result of the growth of cable was the fragmenting of the television audience. The proliferating number of channels allowed cable to offer special channels for children (Nickelodeon), sports fans (ESPN), movie enthusiasts (HBO and Showtime), women (Lifetime), news watchers (CNN), and a host of other targeted audiences. People in some cities went from 3 to 50 choices on the day their cable was installed. The installation of cable also provided an opportunity to add remote-control devices to old TV sets. With so many new choices, and the ability to move from channel to channel without leaving one’s chair, viewers began to watch TV in a more participatory fashion. Furthermore, videocassette recorder (VCR) ownership grew from 1 to 68 percent during the 1980s, allowing viewers to tape one or several shows while watching others. Households also had more TV sets. The old image of entire families gathered around a single set had given way to the more common practice of individual members of the family watching a personal TV.