We're through three quarters of the league's first-ever 16-game season, and it's time to figure out what needs to happen for the Dolphins to go back to the playoffs and get back to winning all of the Super Bowls. Three division winners and two wild-card teams from each conference will advance to the playoffs, and here's how the AFC stacks up going into Week 13 action:
Steelers 10-2
Patriots 9-3
Raiders 8-4
Broncos 8-4
Oilers 8-4
Dolphins 8-4
Jets 6-6
Browns 6-6
Seahawks 6-6
Chargers 6-6
Colts 5-7
You're going to have to win at least eight games to make the playoffs from the AFC, so that means the Bills (3-9), Chiefs (2-10) and Bengals (1-11) are eliminated from postseason contention.
Now here's where the NFC stands in sussing out which team loses to the Dolphins in the Super Bowl:
Rams 10-2
Cowboys 8-4
Washington 8-4
Vikings 7-5
Packers 7-5
Eagles 7-5
Falcons 7-5
Giants 5-7
Buccaneers 5-7
Saints 5-7
Bears 4-8
Lions 4-8
Cardinals 4-8
The number is probably already even higher than this the way the rest of the schedule is set up, but, even on first blush, it's clear that at least seven wins will be necessary to make the playoffs from the NFC. So, sorry, 49ers (1-11). Also, it should be noted that the Saints cannot win the NFC West because the Rams already have more wins than New Orleans could get to.
As I settle in for Channel 12's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade coverage, I plan to get out the Street and Smith's and look at the scenarios with the schedule over these last four weeks.
Don't let the YouTube thumbnail there fool you; the real stars of this broadcast are CBS's New York hosts, Linda Lavin and Ron Leibman. Alice and Kaz air back-to-back on Channel 12 on Sunday nights in 1978, and the shows' titular stars are married in real life! What a powerhouse TV moment this broadcast was!
I liked Toni Tennille from the "Love Will Keep Us Together" start, and I have absolutely loved her once we saw her in "The Rainmaker" at Westport Playhouse in St. Louis, and now I am thrilled to discover again that she was on the mic for the national anthem on last night 1978's Game 1 of the World Series from beautiful Los Angeles ...
But the truth is that 1978 me was probably moving away from that perky show for my TV79 Friday nights, anyway. NBC has my 7/7:30 Central eye wandering with new sitcoms showcasing Broadway Joe and Chachi!
As GoHeath noted, TV79 is not going down as a proud-as-an-anything moment in NBC history.
But there's a pretty good chance I'll give Channel 6 the benefit of the doubt with its new entries bookending old-standby Rockford Files Season 5.
And if I lose the Channel 6 steam by Eddie Capra at 9, I will happily flip to Flying High on Channel 12. I caught the preview pilot the other night, and that thing feels like it is poised to deliver the absolute best kind of made-for-TV movie (no guns/killing, more laughs than drama, familiar faces, lots of love) every freaking Friday night.
But, just to be clear, none of us is watching any of that stuff on this particular Friday night in 1978.
Well, I guess 27 percent of us were watching something else at 7 Central Sept. 15, 1978. Per the Associated Press, "The biggest audience ever for a televised sporting event watched ABC’s broadcast of the heavyweight championship rematch between Muhammad Ali and Leon Spinks live from New Orleans. ABC estimated the audience for the 15-round fight at 90 million and said that meant 73 percent of the sets in use at the time were tuned to the fight."
Mom pitched camp in the kitchen Thursday nights in 1978. Her portable was absolutely locked in all prime time to Channel 12.
But, for me, it's more 7-9 p.m. Central sitcom domination by ABC.
The new show (a last-second shift from Monday nights) is the stud of the Channel 3 Thursday bunch. I found both Mindy and Mork to be adorable in their own ways.
And I'm satisfied to roll the next 90 minutes with What's Happening!! Season 3, Barney Miller Season 5 and Soap Season 2. Mom's Waltons/Hawaii Five-O/Barnaby Jones bender is helpful in this regard, as it is likely to keep her distracted from helicoptering the Channel 3 storylines on the portable in my bedroom.
I might opt for a Season 4 Quincy, M.E. on SelectaVision. Or, every other Thursday night, I might expand my horizons with some public broadcasting, as PBS is bringing to its national audience an appealing creation germinating from its Chicago affiliate.
However, there's just zero hope of any other network's breaking ABC's hold on me 7-9 Central Tuesday evenings.
Jumped-the-shark Happy Days is starting Season 6 with an hour-long visit to a Colorado dude ranch. I am embarrassed to admit that I failed to note that Laverne & Shirley Season 4 actually kicked off last week in 1978, so we will have to hope to catch the hour-long "Festival" extravaganza in rerun. As previously noted, Three's Company (Apartamento para Tres) Season 3 gets going with "Double Date." And, then, at 8:30, one of my favorite shows of all time debuts.
For my money, there is no better sitcom pilot than Taxi's first episode, which includes the following phenomenal scene in which the coworkers learn that the pay phone in the garage is broken in such a way that they can place calls anywhere and get their coins back. So Bobby calls the National Theatre of Great Britain; Tony tries to call a Bangkok masseuse whom he met on R&R during the Vietnam War, and Alex initially declines to call his estranged daughter. It's such a clever, clever way to introduce these characters' back stories and shared station in life, and the actors are so immediately lovable and believable.
But, more likely (sorry, Jack Albertson), I'm going to use that hour to catch up on Paper Chase or the last hour of the NBC special or CBS movie. Speaking of which, in the "Wednesday Nights" edition of this HP series, we'll take a look at some of the exciting-to-me movies that the networks have licensed for my pleasure in this dawning, glorious TV79.
The 6 p.m. Central Sunday block was almost always a disappointment to me. Occasionally, there was a Disney show or 60 Minutes segment that interested me, but, for the most part, I was always rooting for the late-afternoon NFL games to run late or wished this hour would've been given to the local affiliates to plug in old sitcom reruns and game shows.
But, at 7, now we're talking ...
It felt like every other 10-year-old boy in the United States was more into science fiction than I was in 1978, but, still, I was kind of into it. That's how huge science fiction was. I liked Star Wars. I really liked Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And I loved the toys. So while I almost certainly won't stick with it, I'll give Lorne Greene in space a go.
And I'm totally, totally down for Mary Tyler Moore getting a big Sunday-night variety showcase ...
I would've preferred that she just kept on making her sitcom, but this is good. CBS did a giant, self-congratulatory anniversary special over the course of a week this summer in 1978, and I really enjoyed that. Mary Tyler Moore ushered us through that whole deal, and she was just absolutely in command of the role.
So, I have high hopes for Mary, and, indeed, I don't envision myself tuning away from Channel 12 from 7 straight on through 9 on Sunday nights. I'm only OK with All in the Family, but I'll give it a fresh chance at 8 with the cast and story evolutions in light of the Stivics' move. I adore Alice, so I'm locked in there at 8:30.
Neither of the new shows at 9 p.m. grabs me ...
So that's probably when I'll fire up the ol' SelectaVision and a tape of that night's Battlestar Galactica or some NBC Big Event special. Speaking of which, here are the specials scheduled for the 1978-79 TV season that TV Guide has me especially juiced for:
TV Guide's 1978 fall-preview is out, and I'm thankful to have the distraction from both the 1978 and 2025 Dolphins.
I'm also thankful that VCRs are out so that I can record one of those 7/7:30 p.m. Central Saturday blocks of sitcoms. In fact, maybe I'll get a RCA SelectaVision and a Magnavox so that I can tape both the ABC and CBS shows while watching CHiPs. I like everything at 7 and 7:30, and, other than the occasional Love Boat, nothing much excites me from 8 on ...
CHiPs is one of the very, very few cultural artifacts of the day on which my father and I agreed and actually shared in proximity to one another.
Unlike so many homes of the day, my family did not gather around a single TV set. We had a big console color television in the living room, but it was out of commission (but still present) almost all of my childhood. Instead, we typically spread out among three black-and-white portable jobs. There was one in Mom and Dad's bedroom, one in the kitchen and--after my last older sibling moved out--one in my bedroom. Even if we were all watching the same game, news event or (very rarely) weekly program, Dad, Mom and I would often fan out among the three sets and just yell back and forth to each other across the house at commercial breaks or whatever.
But CHiPs was different. For some reason, Dad and I got into watching CHiPs together. It wasn't the favorite show for either of us. But we both liked it enough to watch it together, and we both found it non-engrossing enough to play Othello together as we watched. After supper, Dad and I would set up the Othello game on his and Mom's bed and play to the show on Channel 6, while Mom did whatever Mom did out in the kitchen and watched whatever she watched on some other channel.
I loved Carter Country and Rhoda, and I liked Good Times. And I also actually remember giving Apple Pie a chance (it didn't take) because of Jack Gilford, with whom Mom and I once rode an elevator at a Hilton in Arlington Heights, Illinois!
10 May 1978, Wed The Paducah Sun (Paducah, Kentucky) Newspapers.com
20 Apr 1978, Thu The Paducah Sun (Paducah, Kentucky) Newspapers.com
Just the other day, I was thinking how I might get rid of Peacock since we've now completed binging Modern Family, Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine--and no one else in my house is especially interested in doing Cheers or Roseanne. Man, I'm so glad now that I got distracted by something and forgot to cancel it!
Thank you, GoHeath, for the tip to the YouTube link for what is purported to be the first-ever episode of This Week In Baseball.
I’ve been excited about the debut of this show since there was a report on it in the March 13, 1977, edition of the Paducah Sun-Democrat “Channel Selector” pullout. Here’s Dan Lewis writing for the United Feature Syndicate:
At the recent National Association of Television Program Executives convention in Miami Beach, Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs great immortalized this year as the newest elected member to Baseball’s Hall of Fame, was on prominent display, letting people know about “This Week in Baseball.”
At the hotel pool, in major league baseball’s suite and at banquets, Banks moved around easily, letting the local program executives know that the commissioner’s office, the owners, an assortment of production companies, a distributor and an ad agency were partners in the TV venture …
Banks, who has remained wit the Chicago Cubs—the only team he ever played for during his major league career—in sales promotion, did his job well. The programmers were anxious to meet him and, in return, listened to his pitch on behalf of baseball.
Mel Allen, the one-time New York Yankees’ play-by-play announcer (for 23 years), will host the series, which will run for 26 weeks, starting April 16—the second of the season.
Pro football highlights are aired weekly by both NBC and CBS during the season on their respective Sunday sports specials that precede games on these networks. But although NBC carries a Saturday game and ABC the Monday night game in baseball, neither offers these highlights.
So the league is packaging its own show. These highlights, culled from the 100 to 150 games each week, will be edited by high-speed equipment and will be ready for airing by Friday. In many areas, it is expected they will be shown on the weekend, probably preceding local major league telecasts. In major league cities, channels that air the local teams will have first option.
It appears there were production delays, because Howard Smith of the Associated Press reports in a syndicated column turning up in papers June 23 and around then that the series is in its fourth week:
... and the reception has been great. In Boston, baseball writers can’t see it Saturday afternoons as a rule because they’re at the Red Sox game so they have requested a special showing. Club officials also are planning to show it on the scoreboard at Fenway Park prior to Saturday games.
The idea of a highlight show is not new. The National Football League has been doing it for years with success. But the NFL only has 14 games every weekend to deal with. There approximately are 70 baseball games every week and, until this year, it has not been economically feasible to produce a highlights show.
This year baseball has purchased a video cassette recorder for each ballpark. Of the 70 games played in a week, generally about 52 of them are televised somewhere. Baseball records the telecasts on the cassettes, ships the film to New York and the highlights are put together for the show. It sounds much easier than it is.
We recently vacationed in Montreal and Quebec City, and, wow, that was fun!
One reason that my family is pretty good at traveling together is that, once it gets dark, each of the three of us pretty much just wants to get back to a clean hotel room, drink a free cup of coffee, flip on a TV, catch up on messages and explore various YouTube larks. So we typically throw something up on big room TV that we are kind of in and out on, because mostly we are all doing our own things on our laptops. It's usually a pretty happy scene.
I always make the point that it used to be such an adventure when traveling to discover what was being televised in a different market (i.e., "Hey, they're getting My Three Sons and Hazel in the afternoons in Ruston!") but that now you get pretty much the same stuff everywhere but more channels of it. By the time I'm about midway through this sermon, the women, who've heard it probably 45 times over the last 15 years, have usually found the Golden Girls marathon on whichever of those junior-varsity cable networks that roll those every night. Golden Girls is good. It's not good enough for us to binge through the series at home in the way we have great Cosby Show, Gilmore Girls, Good Place, Modern Family, currently Brooklyn Nine-Nine, etc. But it's good--and even excellent for this particular type of in-and-out-with-it application.
On this Canada trip, however, we actually did more local programming just to feel exotic and fancy. Some of it even was in French! None of us speaks French, but the daughter Duolingo-ed her way in advance of the trip to being a pretty good interpreter for my wife and me. We watched some public-broadcasting stuff on First Nations people (I knew pretty much zero about any of that), and we looked some at a Canadian sitcom, Corner Gas. We watched a little curling.
We watched a lot of hockey. My daughter has never much gotten into sports other than rollerskating, but, if she happens to go to college way up north with a bunch of other liberal girls who dig boygenius, I could see her getting into intramural hockey at some rich school with a rink in its student-rec center. She's a pretty big and strong kid, and she likes the speed and the violence.
I was shocked to discover that the Montreal Canadiens had missed the playoffs the last couple of seasons because it still feels to me that Guy Lafleur and the garçons hoist the ol' Stanley Cup every other year or so. But the daughter deciphered enough of the French pregame April 2 to decipher that our newly beloved Habs were almost certainly soon to be eliminated from contention either that night or one of the next couple of games.
It looked bad early on that Tuesday evening as the Florida Panthers took 1-0 and then 2-1 leads at Centre Bell, about a two-kilometer walk from our Springhill Suites in Old Montreal. But then our main man from London (Ontario), Nick Suzuki, ripped the Panthers for two second-period goals, and the Canadiens never looked back, prevailing 5-3 (or 3-5 as the homies say).
Totally juiced by the whole experience, I became almost convinced that our Habs would be climbing out of the Atlantic Division cellar and into the playoffs to chase their 25th Stanley Cup championship in their 108th National Hockey League season. But by Thursday night, both the Canadians and we had ditched Montreal amid the city's biggest snowfall of the year--them down to Tampa and us up to Quebec City. The Canadiens were rocked by the Lightning, 7-4, on April 4 and eliminated from postseason contention; we, on the other hand, had a fantastic time.
So now the Stanley Cup playoffs are underway, and I'm back in the USA rooting for my usual favorites, the Washington Capitals (because they were red, white and blue on the first Topps hockey cards I bought after Innsbruck 1976), the Carolina Hurricanes (because of our happy days in the Triangle) and the Nashville Predators (because of I-24). (The Athletic says the Hurricanes have a chance!) Thank you, Wikipedia, for this bracket.
I guess I'm also kind of rooting for the Toronto Maple Leafs (because of John Candy).
Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs! When I searched "Kansas City Chiefs" on Google a second ago, fireworks flew across the screen of my laptop.
And deservedly so! For my money, not I of the previous LVII Super Bowls was any more entertaining than last night's event featuring the Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, Travis Kelce, Harrison Butker, Chris Jones and the rest of the victor Chiefs; the worthy San Francisco 49ers; Taylor Swift and (hopefully) her future in-laws; Jim Nantz and Tony Romo; Andra Day, Post Malone and Reba McEntire; Dan Marino; Usher and Alicia Keys, and the rest. Starting at about 5 Central, I watched with my family virtually every second of CBS's remaining five hours of TV coverage from Las Vegas, and, my gosh, I felt so thankful to have gotten to experience the thing.
Furthermore, the Chiefs have now won two Super Bowls in a row, played in four since 2019 (winning three) and now are now 4-2 in all-time Super Bowl appearances. All time, that's the sixth-most Super Bowl appearances and fifth-most victories (along with the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants) for Kansas City, which also won more AFL championships (three) than any other team. What a franchise!
Did you know that the Chiefs' defense from 1966 through 1971 was apparently nicknamed "The Redwood Forest?" I did not. In fact, I don't think I exactly knew that the Chiefs' offense from 2018 through 2021 was apparently nicknamed "The Legion of Doom." I remember hearing Nantz and others say "The Legion of Doom" when I happened to be watching football games off mute during that time period, but I guess I always figured they were just making something up out of thin air to promote some comic-book movie that was out at the time and never paid much attention. Anyway, I learned both of these notes this morning from the Chiefs' Wikipedia page, which I intend to read over the next several days as I think back over my favorite memories from my very fun Sunday night.
Of course, at my typical HP pace, that will likely take me right through to kickoff of the Miami Dolphins' victory in Super Bowl LIX (Feb. 9, 2025, in New Orleans). Hail to the Chiefs, and comments flow!
31 Dec 1976, Fri The Paducah Sun (Paducah, Kentucky) Newspapers.com
31 Dec 1976, Fri The Paducah Sun (Paducah, Kentucky) Newspapers.com
31 Dec 1976, Fri The Paducah Sun (Paducah, Kentucky) Newspapers.com
31 Dec 1976, Fri The Paducah Sun (Paducah, Kentucky) Newspapers.com
I really like establishing formulaic stuff at the HP (#freakinweekend, #ohky and so forth) to then set up a comments fields to play in as a nice distraction from work or whatever over the course of a week. We'll see how long this particular lark lasts.
Well, anyway, here are my background playlists for this week:
17 Oct 1976, Sun The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts) Newspapers.com
Well, until this very day in 2023, I believed the town in Massachusetts where the Patriots play was spelled "Foxboro," and it often is. Actually, though, it's "Foxborough," and, in my 1976 pretend, I'm planning to be there for tomorrow night's Jets-Patriots game.
On today, Oct. 17, 1976, however, fake me is hanging out in my Holiday Inn room in Worcester, flipping through the (fantastic!) Sunday Boston Globe and watching (glorious!) television. We've got the Week 6 of the NFL, Game 2 of the World Series and/or a highly promising made-for-TV movie to check out.
Of course, supper is looking pretty promising, too. We'll definitely be taking a break this evening from Borbon, Barbeau et al., to make a trip downstairs to the ol' Persian Room to eat.
My word, I adore newspapers. If I had lived in Philadelphia today in 1976, there's about a 101-percent chance that this page would've already been taped to my bedroom wall in advance of tonight's game ...
13 Jul 1976, Tue The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Newspapers.com
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