My Journey Through 1970s TV: Friday Nights, 1975

The prime-time network schedules from Friday in 1975 offer something we haven’t seen for a while in these reviews – a winning night for NBC. 

With the first half of the decade dominated by CBS, and ABC warming up for ratings dominance moving forward, NBC had managed to serve up only a few successful series, usually surrounded by short-lived misfires. But tonight, they delivered a lineup of four shows still fondly recalled 50 years later.

NBC
Sanford and Son
Chico And the Man
The Rockford Files
Police Woman

Sanford and Son was the evening’s highest-rated series at #7, and that delivered a strong enough lead-in audience to boost Chico And the Man to #25. Its star, Freddie Prinze, would sadly be dead less than two years later. 

Police Woman finished the season at #30, leaving The Rockford Files as NBC’s lowest-rated Friday night show. What’s ironic is that 50 years later it’s the show that arguably holds up best. From the opening messages on Jim’s answering machine to Mike Post’s harmonica and synthesizer theme, to James Garner’s charismatic performance as an ex-con turned private eye, I’d put in the top five detective shows of the decade. And if you remember the ‘70s that was a very crowded field. 

ABC
Mobile One
The ABC Friday Night Movie

I don’t know very much about Mobile One, except that Jack Webb is listed as executive producer. If it was anything like his other shows – Dragnet, Adam-12, Emergency!, O’Hara, U.S. Treasury, it would have been a procedural about professionals at work – this time, in the field of broadcast journalism. Jackie Cooper played a veteran TV reporter, who works with a producer (Julie Gregg) and a cameraman (Mark Wheeler) out of a mobile unit chasing down stories for station KONE.

TV news has always been a ripe topic ripe for mockery, whether it was SNL’s Weekend Update, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Goodnight Beantown or Murphy Brown. I’d have been curious to watch a show about that profession played straight. Maybe it would have done for broadcast news what Lou Grant did for newspapers – show viewers a day in the life in that job, leaving you with more admiration for those in the trade than you might have had before. 

But thanks in part to Chico and Fred Sanford, Mobile One was gone after 13 episodes, and now gets added to my “missed shows” list below, along with one more bomb as we turn to CBS. 

CBS
Big Eddie
M*A*S*H
Hawaii Five-O
Barnaby Jones

CBS competed well with NBC on Fridays, with M*A*S*H at #14, Hawaii Five-O in the middle of a successful 12-year run, and Barnaby Jones still entertaining its fans as well. 

Which brings us to Big Eddie, a series I can’t judge because I’ve never seen it (onto the list it goes), but I can’t figure out why it exists. 

Sheldon Leonard was one of television’s most successful producers (Make Room for Daddy, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show) – did he play the title role as a favor to series creators Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, who wrote so many classic episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show? Or did he just enjoy reviving the gangster character he had played so often on other shows? Either way, Big Eddie was rubbed out after just ten episodes. 

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)
Mobile One (1975)
Big Eddie (1975)