The ABC Movie of the Week by Michael McKenna

Author:Michael McKenna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

Diminishing Returns

Entering the 1973–1974 television season, ABC programmers decided to address a conspicuous weakness in the Saturday night primetime schedule by trying to squeeze a little more ratings success out of the TV movie format, with the production a new ninety-minute anthology film series. The result was the ABC Saturday Suspense Movie. It was a safe, if not lazy, way to address a glaring—some would say insurmountable—programming gap, particularly given the strength of the Saturday night competition from both networks. All that was required was contracting with the regular MOW production companies to turn out a few additional films for the season. Consequently, the Suspense movies had a very similar feel and format to the Tuesday and Wednesday MOWs. In fact, several Suspense movies ran in the MOW timeslot during the summer rerun season. Included in the slate of eighteen Suspense movies were two Six Million Dollar Man sequels and several other well-remembered films such as Killdozer, a film about a demonically possessed bulldozer; Death Race, a World War II–era plot about a German tank chasing a downed American plane through the North African desert; Mousey, a tense revenge thriller starring Kirk Douglas; and several other jeopardy and disaster films. The Suspense Movie ran for only one season, never fully accomplishing its ratings goal, due in large part to the power of the CBS lineup (All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show), arguably the most respected and powerful evening of regular programming in television history.[36]

In addition to producing more TV films than the other networks in 1973–1974, ABC was on the leading edge of the evolution of the TV movie. It is in the 1973–1974 period that the docudrama, a film theoretically steeped in true events and factual representations, begins to dot the TV landscape. Although not explicitly a made-for-TV film, ABC presaged the rise of the historical docudrama with its 1973 presentation of Pueblo, a drama about the seizure and treatment of American sailors captured by North Korea in 1968. In season five the MOW delved into this subgenre with films such as Melvin Purvis G-Man (April 9, 1974) and The Story of Pretty Boy Floyd (May 7, 1974), two films set in the 1930s depicting the lives and events of the legendary law enforcement officers and criminals who shot to fame in that troubled decade. However, the most well-known and acclaimed docudrama of the season was an NBC production, The Execution of Private Slovik (March 13, 1974), a story about a World War II soldier executed for desertion. The docudrama became a staple of TV schedules for the next decade.[37] The other nascent trend in TV film pioneered by ABC in 1973–1974 is the long-form adaptation of popular literary works, what the network called “Novels for Television,” or the miniseries. Of course the MOW had been using novels as source material since the inception of the series, but the new trend was for longer movies aired over multiple nights.

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