TV by the Decade :: January 7•13

Wolf Entertainment

It was a pretty good week for new series premieres, with only two decades taking a break, and several series going on to long runs. 1953 had an unhistorical Western series based on a historical character that ran for three seasons. 1974 had a short-lived soap and a game show that had a short run and two revivals. 1994 had a revival of a campy 1960s crime series, a dismal sitcom starring the Fonz, and two reality series with multiple seasons to their credit. 2004 had another long-running reality competition series, and a popular teen comedy with multiple seasons and two TV movies. 2014 was the most successful of the decades during this week, producing three series that are still on the air today, with two three-season shows and three two-season shows. Scroll down the list to see what shows are celebrating anniversaries this week, and read some interesting facts about them. Are your favorites on the list?

1954

• January 9 – Annie Oakley (Syndication, Three seasons, 81 episodes)

Aside from depicting Annie Oakley’s phenomenal shooting skills, the TV series entirely ignores the historical facts of her life. While the series aired first-run in Syndication, ABC aired daytime reruns on Saturdays and Sundays from 1959-1960, and again in 1964-1965. As Annie, Gail Davis wore the same fringed cowgirl costume — which had at least 15 copies — for the duration of the series’ run. More episodes were planned after Season 3, but Jimmy Hawkins as Annie’s little brother, had a growth spurt and outgrew the role. The series was executive produced by country singer Gene Autry. Actor Dick Tufeld appeared on the show fifteen times in different roles.

1964

• No new series premiered this week in 1964.

1974

• January 7 – How to Survive a Marriage (NBC, Two seasons, 332 episodes)
• January 7 – Jackpot (NBC, Two seasons, 450 episodes)

How to Survive a Marriage was a daytime soap produced in-house by NBC with the working title From This Moment. The series originally featured veteran soap actress Rosemary Prinz, who agreed to stay with the show for a short time, receiving top billing and a three-day work week, and $1,000 per episode (a big salary for a soap actress in the 1970s). She departed the series after a six month run. Fran Brill received over a thousand letters of condolence from viewers when her character Fran Bachman was suddenly widowed. (Brill is best-known for her work on Sesame Street, performing the Muppet characters Zoe and Prairie Dawn from 1970-2014.) Other cast members included Ken Kercheval, F. Murray Abraham, Armand Assante and Brad Davis. The series never caught on mainly due to its attempts to be socially relevant, which soap viewers were not accustomed to at the time. It also faced stiff competition in two time periods — Match Game, Let’s Make a Deal, One Life to Live, As the World Turns — and suffered from the expansion to an hour of its lead-in, Another World, ending after sixteen months. With its time slot vacant, Days of Our Lives expanded to an hour the Monday after the show ended. More soaps expanded to an hour, cutting the availability of 30-minute time slots and minimizing the risk of a new half-hour soap failing to develop an audience in a timely manner. The Bold and the Beautiful is the only half-hour soap on the air today.

Game show Jackpot was taped in New York City. The show’s announcer was Don Pardo, known at the time for his voice work on Jeopardy!, until he was replaced with Wayne Howell in late 1975 making this the last NBC game show for which Pardo was the announcer. Pardo then became the announcer for Saturday Night Live in 1975 and remained with the show until his death in 2014. The series was hosted by Geoff Edwards, who was also hosting the Syndicated Treasure Hunt which taped in Los Angeles, making Edwards not only one of the first hosts to host more than one game show simultaneously, but the first to work bi-coastally as well. The show was revived with a slightly different format and host Mike Darow, taped in Canada, from 1985-1988 which aired on USA Network in the US and Global in Canada, and again in 1989-1990 in Syndication as Jackpot! with Edwards again hosting in Los Angeles.

1984

• No new series premiered this week in 1984.

1994

Spelling Television

• January 7 – Burke’s Law (CBS, Two seasons, 27 episodes)
• January 7 – Ancient Mysteries (A&E, Five seasons, 93 episodes)
• January 9 – America’s Castles (A&E, Nine seasons, about 61 episodes)
• January 11 – Monty (Fox, One season, 13 episodes, 7 unaired)

Burke’s Law was a revival of the 1963-1966 ABC series with Gene Barry reprising his role of cop Amos Burke, now a deputy chief instead of a captain, and assisted by his son Detective Peter Burke (Peter Barton). The show was regarded as being even more camp than the original. For a touch of nostalgia, many of Barry’s peers from 1960s crime dramas made guest appearances including Patrick Macnee (The Avengers) and Peter Graves (Mission: Impossible). Anne Francis also reprised her character Honey West, but renamed Honey Best for legal reasons.

Leonard Nimoy narrated all but two episodes of Ancient Mysteries.

Monty, originally developed at NBC, starred Henry Winkler, David Schwimmer and Kate Burton, and hoped to capitalize on the same family dynamic — right-leaning father, left-leaning son — that made All in the Family a hit in the 1970s.

2004

Schneider’s Bakery

• January 7 – The Apprentice (NBC, Fifteen seasons, 194 episodes to date)
• January 11 – Drake & Josh (Nickelodeon, Four seasons, 56 episodes)

The Apprentice taped in New York City for its first five seasons, then moved to Los Angeles with Season 6. NBC did not have the show on its 2007 schedule but ultimately did renew the series on July 16, 2007 with a sequel series, Celebrity Apprentice, which became the seventh season and all subsequent seasons featured celebrity contestants. The host was fired for making racially-charged remarks and was replaced with Arnold Schwarzenegger for the 15th season. There have been no additional seasons since then, but NBC has never formally cancelled the show. A single-season spin-off series was also produced with Martha Stewart.

During the run of Drake & Josh, the TV movie Drake & Josh Go Hollywood was broadcast in 2006. Following the end of the series in 2007, the TV movie Merry Christmas, Drake & Josh was broadcast in 2008. Guest stars on the show included Yvette Nicole Brown, Jerry Trainor, Julia Duffy and Roark Critchlow. The role of Walter Nichols was played by Stephen Furst in the unaired pilot. Furst was busy with another project when the series was greenlit and the role was recast with Jonathan Goldstein. Production was suspended in December 2005 after filming three episodes of Season 4 due to injuries suffered by Drake Bell in a car accident. Filming resumed in March 2006, and Nickelodeon ordered seven additional episodes for the season. The show ended by mutual decision with the creative forces behind the show. The family’s mother’s name and profession is never mentioned, however it was written into the series finale that her name was Audrey and she owned a catering business. The scene was filmed, but creator Dan Schneider decided to remove it during editing.

2014

Believe Pictures

• January 7 – 100 Days of Summer (Bravo, One season, 8 episodes)
• January 7 – Intelligence (CBS, One season, 13 episodes)
• January 7 – Killer Women (ABC, One season, 8 episodes, 2 unaired)
• January 7 – Escaping the Prophet (TLC, One season, 6 episodes)
• January 7 – Beat the House (HGTV, One season, 8 episodes)
• January 8 – Chicago P.D. (NBC, Ten seasons, 208 episodes to date)
• January 8 – Mind of a Man (Game Show Network, One season, 40 episodes)
• January 10 – Helix (Syfy, Two seasons, 26 episodes)
• January 10 – Enlisted (Fox, One season, 13 episodes)
• January 11 – Lucas Bros. Moving Co. (FOX/FXX, Two seasons, 17 episodes)
• January 11 – Golan the Insatiable (FOX, Two seasons, 12 episodes)
• January 11 – When Calls the Heart (Hallmark, Ten seasons, 107 episodes to date)
• January 12 – True Detective (HBO, Three seasons, 24 episodes)
• January 12 – 90 Day Fiance (TLC, Ten seasons, 126 episodes to date)
• January 13 – Bitten (Syfy, Three seasons, 33 episodes)
• January 13 – Chozen (FX, One season, 13 episodes, 3 unaired)
• January 13 – Don’t Trust Andrew Mayne (A&E, One season, 13 episodes)

Killer Women was based on the Argentine crime drama Mujeres Asesinas. Sofia Vergara was an executive producer. Eight episodes were ordered, but after low ratings for the first two episodes ABC cut the order to six, airing the seventh episode as the series finale because it provided a better ending with the granting of Molly’s divorce, leaving episodes 6 and 8 unaired.

Chicago P.D. is the second series in the Dick Wolf ‘Chicago’ franchise, now known as ‘One Chicago’. The eleventh season will premiere in January 2024. The series has had crossovers with Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago Justice, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and CBS’ FBI, also created by Wolf. The series is filmed entirely in Chicago. The exterior of the station house is the Old Maxwell Street Police Station, and is the same location that was used in the series Hill Street Blues. It is located about half a mile from the firehouse location of Chicago Fire.

Each episode of Helix represents a single day, so the two seasons represent less than a month of in-universe time. Instead of using flashbacks, which are typically presented as objectively true in other series, the viral infection made characters hallucinate, reliving past events, making those memories unreliable and do not match events as they actually occurred.

Despite good reviews, FOX pulled Enlisted from the schedule after nine weeks due to low ratings. The remaining four episodes were burned off in June 2014, Sundays at 7:00 PM. Fans and critics blamed a poor time slot (Friday at 9:30 for the first two weeks, then 9:00 PM for the next seven) and airing episodes out of order as a factor for the disappointing ratings.

Lucas Bros. Moving Co. originally aired as part of FOX’s late night Animation Domination High-Def block, then moved to FXX for its second season. The series was created by Kenny and Keith Lucas, who provided the voices for their characters, and was based on their own experiences as cable TV installers which was the original premise of the series. The vocation was changed to movers to avoid comparison to FOX’s The Cleveland Show.

Golan the Insatiable was also part of Animation Domination High-Def. As with Lucas Bros. Moving Co., the pilot episode aired on November 23, 2013 ahead of the series premiere in January 2014.

When Calls the Heart was inspired by Janette Oke’s book of the same name from her Canadian West series. The series grew out of a TV movie pilot that was broadcast in October 2013, with Maggie Grace as Elizabeth Thatcher, and Stephen Amell as North-West Mounted Police officer Wynn Delaney. Erin Krakow took the role of Elizabeth for the series while Wynn Delaney does not appear. The sixth season premiered as a two-hour Christmas special as part of Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas event, with the rest of the season to run beginning February 2019 but due to the college admissions scandal involving star Lori Loughlin, the premiere was delayed until May so the episodes could be retooled to remove all of Loughlin’s scenes. The series was originally to be filmed in Colorado but production was set up in Vancouver. Some of the set-pieces and a stage coach came from the AMC series Hell on Wheels. The series was renewed for an eleventh season on February 22, 2023.

True Detective is an anthology crime drama series with each season structured as a self-contained narrative with a different cast. A fourth season will premiere on HBO on January 14, 2024. The story for True Detective was meant to be a follow-up to author Nic Pizzolatto’s Galveston, but he felt it would be better suited to film. The first season was to film in Arkansas, but was moved to Louisiana because of the state’s generous tax incentives. Each episode was shot on 35mm film. Season 2 was filmed in California, with producers urged to avoid filming in Los Angeles, instead focusing on more obscure regions of the state. Season 3 did film in various locations around Arkansas. Season 2’s theme song was Leonard Cohen’s ‘Nevermind’, with the lyrics changing with every episode, incorporating different verses from the song.

90 Day Fiance has spawned more than 20 different spin-offs and has several international versions.

Bitten was based on the Women of the Otherworld series of books by author Kelley Armstrong. The series title came from the title of the first book in the series. The series was produced as an original for the Space network in Canada. The version aired in the US on Syfy was heavily edited, using different takes to replace any nudity. When the show aired on Space, it was the network’s highest rated original series of all time.

Chozen was originally commissioned for FX spin-off network FXX as its first original series, but was moved to FX to be a companion to the animated Archer. The voice cast included Bobby Moynihan, Hannibal Buress, Kathryn Hahn, Method Man, Danny McBride, Michael Peña, and Nick Swadson, with Grant Dekemion as the singing voice for Moynihan.