Archie Bunker seeks sexual fulfillment with a waitress. Rhoda and Joe bust up. Charlie Haggars undergoes television's first testicle transplant. Maude's Arthur goes bankrupt. Ted Baxter has a heart attack in mid-newscast. Lionel Jefferson marries Jennie. Florida loses her husband. McMillan loses his wife, his sidekick and his housekeeper. And . . .
These are a few of the momentous developments that will engross the Great American Electronic Family with the start of the new television season this Sunday. In addition to the familiar programs, the networks will introduce 21 new shows in prime time. Never have producers of TV fare worked harder to catch the viewer's fancy; never have the financial stakes been so high for the industry.
From Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas, where the fortress headquarters of the three national television networks are clustered within five blocks, to Los Angeles, the studio assembly line of TV entertainment, the past few weeks have been the most grueling in the industry's history. The competition between CBS, NBC and ABC is more intense than ever. ABC, until recently the perennial underdog, is suddenly the top network since CBS's brilliant programmer, Fred Silverman, moved to it and found Laverne, Shirley and the Fonz ready for picking from Happy Days.
All three networks are riding high on record incomes: $6.6 billion in advertising revenue, up a full 25% over 1975. Moreover, TV rates can only rise farther. Prime-time commercial time is sold out through mid-1977 at prices up to 50% higher than last year's rates. "This season," boasts an NBC executive, "we could sell a test pattern." It is the prime of the Boom Tube.
The success or failure of the new schedules will immediately affect the financial well-being of the networks. The bigger the audience for any show, the fatter the advertising revenues that flow into the network: a winner can charge up to $140,000 a minute for commercials, enough to pay the entire cost of a 30-minute show; a loser may get only $90,000. The difference of one Nielsen rating point for a season, reflected in advertising rates, can mean the loss or gain of $15 million in one year.
Such risks make the networks conservative. Though they can —and do—turn obscure actors like Henry Winkler into certified stars in four or five weeks, they are as reluctant to gamble on the untried as Nick the Greek would be to bet on a frog-jumping contest.
Thus the familiar faces—and many cast-in-concrete formats —keep coming back. Dick Van Dyke, Carol Burnett, Sonny and Cher, Tony Orlando and Dawn, among others, all have weekly variety shows again this season. Hawaii Five-O enters its ninth year; Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family their seventh.
In the biggest departure from old formats and formulas, the networks are turning to expensively produced dramatic serials and adaptations of bestselling novels; the emphasis is on high drama and convoluted story lines that lather on from week to week. This strongly resembles what soap opera has been doing for decades. Some of the soaps' Homeric techniques have already sudsed off on the evening shows, partly through the smash spoof opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman!