Must See TV

I can remember watching television in the 70s. There was one big block, Saturday nights on CBS. MASH, All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart. If you were home on Saturday night, you watched these. You'd be crazy not to. And keep in mind, there were no VCRs then, much less DVRs and Netflix and Hulu. You watched what was on, and that was the end of it.

Those shows marked a golden age that wasn't repeated until NBC conquered Thursday night in the 90s. Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld, ER. Must see TV, they called it.

Warren Littlefield was the President of NBC Entertainment in the 90s, and he's out on the circuit pushing an oral history of the shows of Must See TV. You might have caught him on the radio or TV, talking about it. The Atlantic has a major interview by Kevin Fallon. Take the genesis of Will and Grace for instance, a show that might have a hard time getting on the air in 2012.

Management said, "What the hell are you doing? Why are you developing Will and Grace?" It's network television, and we have advertisers to answer to. Advertisers are not ready to embrace, at the core of a show, a relationship between a gay man and straight woman. What are you doing? To make matter worse, we're in business with these writers. We own them. They're under a deal to our company. So it's not like you're wasting somebody else's time and money. You're wasting ours.

Very inside baseball, but worth a read. The Death of Must See TV: A Former Executive on NBC's Rise and Fall.
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