My Journey Through 1970s TV: Friday Nights, 1978

For what I believe is only the second time since I’ve started these reviews of the 1970s prime time schedules, we come to an evening with not a single series ranked in the top 30. But that doesn’t mean some of the offerings weren’t good or are not worth remembering.


CBS
The New Adventures of Wonder Woman
The Incredible Hulk
Flying High

It’s the third and final season for Wonder Woman, a valiant but flawed attempt to bring one of our most iconic superheroes to life. As I’ve said in previous posts, Lynda Carter was perfect casting, but nothing else measured up to her standard.

Pairing Wonder Woman with another comic book superhero probably seemed like a good idea, though this version of the Hulk bore little resemblance to the character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby a decade earlier.

Series creator Kenneth Johnson made several changes, believing it would make the show more believable, and because he disliked the comics. So here it’s David Banner, not Bruce, and the Hulk as played by bodybuilding champion Lou Ferrigno had only a fraction of the original character’s strength. But if he wasn’t as powerful at least, as played by Bill Bixby, he also wasn’t as antisemitic (seriously, Mark Ruffalo, read a history book before opening your yap).

Devaluing the source material was still standard for most comic book adaptations in the 1970s. Stan Lee went along because those compromises were the only way to bring his characters to a wider audience. In this case the series still worked on its own terms, thanks to the gravitas it gained from Bixby, its Fugitive-like premise of a hunted man unable to settle in one place, and haunting music (“The Lonely Man”) written by Joe Harnell.

As for Flying High, it didn't, despite a trio of beautiful women in the leads, attempting to recreate Charlie's Angels with stewardesses instead of detectives. 

ABC
Donny & Marie
ABC Friday Night Movie

This was the same Friday lineup ABC offered in the previous year, though it would change in 1979 as this was the final season for the Osmond siblings.

NBC
The Waverly Wonders
Who’s Watching the Kids?
The Rockford Files
The Eddie Capra Mysteries

“I was out of work and got two scripts,” Larry Hagman told me when I interviewed him several years ago; “One was for a sitcom called The Waverly Wonders, which Joe Namath ended up doing, and the other was Dallas.” Hagman called his agent and said, “Let’s go with Dallas,” and his agent replied, “You’re crazy! That thing is never going to go.”

Fascinating how one moment changed TV history, isn’t it?

The Waverly Wonders was canceled after four episodes. Other football stars made a successful transition to acting - Jim Brown, Alex Karras, Merlin Olson – and Namath had more natural charisma than any of them, but it never translated to the parts he played.

Who’s Watching the Kids? had one of the most convoluted histories of any series. After the failure of Blansky’s Beauties, a Las Vegas-set sitcom from Garry Marshall about showgirls, Marshall revisited the concept, retained Blansky’s cast members Caren Kaye, Lynda Goodfriend and Scott Baio, and tried again. This time, the stories featured Baio and Tammy Lauren as the showgirl’s younger siblings. Only nine episodes aired before it too was pulled from the schedule.

The Rockford Files, about midway through its run, saved NBC from yet another quality shutout, though The Eddie Capra Mysteries had potential. Vince Baggetta played Capra, a lawyer who exonerated his clients by investigating their cases and uncovering the real culprit. In the final scene he’d gather all the suspects together and identify the guilty party.

There were stylistic similarities to Ellery Queen, and according to some sources that show’s unused scripts were retooled into Capra episodes. But Baggetta didn’t have Jim Hutton’s quirky charm, so despite some clever scripts it became yet another Friday night failure for NBC, lasting just 13 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)
The Delphi Bureau (1972)
Jigsaw (1972)
The Little People (1972)
The Sixth Sense (1972)
Faraday & Company (1973)
Kodiak (1974)
The New Land (1974)
McCoy (1975)
Joe and Sons (1975)
Beacon Hill (1975)
Mobile One (1975)
Big Eddie (1975)
Executive Suite (1976)
Ball Four (1976)
Young Dan’l Boone (1977)
Rafferty (1977)
Mulligan’s Stew (1977)
Big Hawaii (1977)
We’ve Got Each Other (1977)
Lifeline (1978)
W.E.B. (1978)
The Waverly Wonders (1978)