It was a month of Sundays as the networks claw and kick for audiences Feb. 11, 1979, was not a date that most people remembered much past Feb. 11, 1979. But to the hundred or so top people in the television industry, it was Black Sunday, the costliest night in TV history. In their desperation to knock out one another during the February sweeps—those weeks when Nielsen and Arbitron take an elaborate TV census—the networks spent a reported $13 million on that Sunday night to throw their heaviest punches at one another. CBS led off with Gone With the Wind; NBC followed with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; ABC, hoping to profit from the Presley boom, countered with its own special, Elvis! For millions of TV viewers, who had spent most of the season slogging through Sitcom Sahara, suddenly the tube runneth over.
Sitting in his Fifth Avenue apartment, even William Paley, 77, the venerable head of CBS, felt the frustration. "I wanted to see Cuckoo's Nest," he confesses, "but I was also curious to see how Gone With the Wind looked today. A lot of people who wanted to see it again were robbed of Cuckoo's Nest, and vice versa. The public is getting an uneven break during these sweeps weeks. Everybody is sick and tired of them."
Perhaps the sickest and most tired was Fred Silverman, 41, the president of NBC, who threw two of his biggest movies into that black hole called the sweeps. "It's tragic," he says. "We had two blockbusters, Cuckoo's Nest and American Graffiti, on the air in this February period, and yet we reached only 32% of the audience. That is absolutely crazy. But the alternative would have been to put ordinary movies in there, and the only people who would have looked at them would have been the people in my family."
In the February sweeps, nearly every night was a blockbusting Sunday, a succession of multimillion-dollar explosions from the networks. Viewers were both delighted and frustrated, but what the TV schedule really showed was an industry in chaos, with each network going all out to knock off the other two. The pyrotechnics from CBS included Rocky, the Grammy Awards show and Marathon Man. NBC fired off James Michener's Centennial, Backstairs at the White House, a six-hour remake of From Here to Eternity, American Graffiti and The Sound of Music. ABC, which now rules the ratings charts, disdained such vulgar showmanship, but, in fact, it threw in the heaviest salvo of all: the $16 million sequel to Roots, which two years ago drew the biggest audience of all time.
The results were not always predictable; some of the blockbusters failed to go off. On the other hand, the figures were rarely very surprising. On that famous night of Feb. 11, all the networks did well. ABC's Elvis! was on top with 39% of the audience, CBS and Gone With the Wind had 36%, and NBC with Cuckoo's Nest had 32%. (If that adds up to more than 100%, and it does, it means that some of the families polled had more than one set on.)