My Journey Through 1970s TV: Tuesday Nights, 1975

If you’ve been keeping track on our journey through the 1970s, or if like me you’re old enough to remember when these shows were new, you’ve noticed that the first half of the decade largely belonged to CBS. The Norman Lear shows (All in the Family, Maude, Good Times), and some iconic Saturday night lineups featuring such classics as M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show all became mainstays among the 20 top-rated series each year.

But as we approach the latter half of the decade, and look at Tuesday night in 1975, we begin to see a shifting of audience tastes and preferences toward perennial underdog ABC. The network that led the medium in one-season-and-out losers finally started homing in on a successful formula, one that relied heavily on youth, titillation, fantasy and escapism. Critics hated it, of course, but viewers welcomed a chance to forget their troubles – and the nation’s - for a little while. 

ABC

Happy Days

Welcome Back Kotter

The Rookies

Marcus Welby, MD

In its first season, Happy Days introduced the Cunningham family of Milwaukee – dad ran a hardware store, mom was a housewife, Richie went to high school, Joanie to junior high. A third sibling named Chuck was introduced and subsequently forgotten even by his closest relatives.

And then a supporting character named Arthur, unbilled in the opening credits, became the most popular television character in America. Soon The Fonz would be the focal point of nearly every episode. Some (like me) may prefer the gentler tone and quieter stories of season one, when the series was not filmed before a studio audience. But it was episodes like “R.O.T.C.” (Fonzie takes on the army) and “A Star is Bored” (Fonzie plays Hamlet) that catapulted Happy Days into one of the decade’s biggest successes. 

And if that show didn’t add enough expressions to be parroted on junior high school playgrounds, it was followed by a new catchphrase generator in Welcome Back Kotter, featuring such additions to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations as “Up your nose with a rubber hose.”

Kotter soared into the top 20, and was then moved to Thursday nights in January so Happy Days could be followed by its spinoff, Laverne & Shirley, a series that, for a time, would surpass its predecessor in popularity. 

This would be the final season for both The Rookies and Marcus Welby, MD. Kate Jackson would not be absent from TV long, as her next project would be the pilot movie for Charlie’s Angels, which drew an extraordinary 54 share in the ratings. 

CBS

Good Times

Joe and Sons

Switch

Beacon Hill

As Fonzie began his rise to pop culture prominence, the same ascent was happening to Jimmie Walker on Good Times. J.J. and his “Dy-no-Mite!” catchphrase expanded the show’s audience but were not as welcomed by top-billed stars Esther Rolle and John Amos. 

Joe and Sons seemed like a natural pairing with Good Times, being a show about another working-class family struggling to get by. It lasted just 14 episodes, none of which I’ve seen, and I’d be tempted to dismiss it as just another short-lived failure if it were not for one name in the cast – Barry Miller, who played Joe’s oldest son. 

He's certainly not a household name, but Miller is an actor I’ve liked and remembered in everything I’ve seen him in. He made a dull Wonder Woman episode almost interesting and played a troubled (for Saturday morning) teenager in episodes of both Shazam and Isis, and outperformed everyone else in every scene. If you know him from anything it’s probably a supporting role in Saturday Night Fever. Ten years after Joe and Sons, he won the Tony Award for his performance in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues, proving what I already knew at 12 years old – this guy’s really good. 

I’ve been hoping for a Switch DVD release for 20 years and am still hoping, though I’ve been told it’s stuck in some legal limbo over a profit-sharing issue and may never see the light of day again. That would be a shame – the partnership between Robert Wagner as a reformed con man and Eddie Albert as a former cop had great chemistry, and they were ably assisted by an ex-con played by comedian Charlie Callas and Sharon Gless as the team’s secretary. 

The early stories were the best, in which the team set out to foil the schemes of con artists with elaborate cons of their own. It was part Mission: Impossible, part Rockford Files, and even when the plots were simplified in the latter seasons the cast made it worth watching. 

As for Beacon Hill, it was CBS’s attempt to emulate the success of the PBS series Upstairs, Downstairs, a 55-part(!) serial drama about the Bellamys, a well-to-do family in Edwardian England. While it had the sophisticated look and style of a precursor to Downton Abbey, the show was pure soap opera in its stories, a formula that could have adapted well to Boston in the 1920s, where viewers met Beacon Hill’s Lassiter family. But after a promising debut in September, the series was gone by November. 

NBC

Movin’ On

Police Story

Joe Forrester

I’m tempted to just say “Oh, and NBC put out some shows this year too,” but that would be unfair. The third season of Police Story delivered another batch of widely varied stories exploring different facets of law enforcement. One episode from the previous season, “The Return of Joe Forrester,” starred Lloyd Bridges, and was picked up as a series the following season. It didn’t last, but it provided an accurate depiction of community policing the way it ought to be. 

Shows Missed:

The Don Knotts Show (1970)

San Francisco International Airport (1970)

Nancy (1970)

The Headmaster (1970)

The Man and the City (1971)

Search (1972)

Assignment: Vienna (1972)

The Delphi Bureau (1972)

Jigsaw (1972)

The Little People (1972)

The Sixth Sense (1972)

Tenafly (1973)

Faraday & Company (1973)

Kodiak (1974)

The New Land (1974)

McCoy (1975)

Joe and Sons (1975)

Beacon Hill (1975)