Hey gang,


Going through my movie paper items this weekend, I came across this flyer that I picked up at a flea market in the 80s. Looks to be a BOSTON GLOBE insert announcing the new NBC and WBZ TV season for 1970. I thought fellow Boston TV fans might find this an interesting look.

Click on the images to make them HUGE.




Mark

That's really cool Mark! Thanks for sharing. While I would have only been a year old when this season started, it's still very interesting to see stuff like this. I always enjoy looking at old Fall Previews from years ago and seeing what the new shows would be for that season. It's intersting to think that there was a certain amount of excitement about each show's prospects (otherwise why put it on the schedule if you know it won't fly). With the clarity of hindsight we can see how two shows could be put on a schedule--one which would become an all-time classic and another that failed miserably and has since been long forgotten. I wonder if the stars of the forgotten shows ever think: "If only I had tried out for the other show I could have been a real star and had a show that lasted for ten years rather than three weeks"?

For every "McCloud" and "Flip Wilson Show" there must be dozens of "Nancy"s and "Bracken's World"s that have been lost in the passage of time.

Very intersting that channel (and I'm assuming NBC as a whole ran that "Four-In-One" format on Wednesday nights. That's a pretty unconventional programming scheme there. I wonder if they had too many shows they felt were good for the available slots, or if they simply didn't have enough episodes of each of the four shows to make a whole season out of them, or if they felt that none of them (including "Night Gallery") were strong enough to stay afloat by themselves.

A great little piece of Boston TV history. Thanks again!

ABC resurrected the notion of "wheel shows" in the late 80s, when they ran a Sunday night rotation of new COLUMBO / B.L. STRYKER / and another show starring Louis Gossett, Jr.

There was also a syndicated attempt at the same kind of programming in the early 90s done by Universal, called the "Action Pack". I believe these were longer (90min?) stand-alone episodes of shows, and the selling point at the time was that big-name Hollywood directors were behind them. John Woo had RISING SON, Hal Needham had BANDIT (a TV version of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT), and Sam Raimi had HERCULES, which wound up becoming its own long-running series.

I used to love the Fall Preview TV GUIDEs as well, and it was always amusing to look back at them a few years later and see the ratio of long-forgotten shows to ones that you remember.

Heh, the only thing I remember about Julia was my sister's Julia lunchbox

I used to like the Fall Priview Guide too. I haven't looked at the TV Guide since their format change a few years ago. I used to have a steady subscription for years, but the actual guide part got worse and worse. The last straw was when they put "various programs" for a description in those grids they started using. I canceled soon after that.