1978: What's on TV Wednesday Nights?

It honestly had never occurred to me until my year-by-year nostalgia slog at the HP just how hard I fell in love with newsrooms and newspeople through TV shows like Eight Is Enough and Lou Grant in the wake of Watergate and All the President's Men. In fact, I think Eight Is Enough might've been the most formative for me of all of the newspaper art of the 1970s. 

I really, really dug Dick Van Patten's Tom Bradford, an editor with a secretary and lots of professional respect--but a guy who ultimately seems to spend most of his time and emotional energy hanging out with with his wife, children and friends. Also, he's forever playing football or tennis or some sport. I see now that this dude was a total hero for me. I watched Eight Is Enough regularly when it was on; I skipped a lot of class in my first year or two at Western watching daytime reruns of the show on one of the two channels I could tune in on my dorm-room portable TV, and my wife and I even now and then put on an episode on Tubi (she liked/likes it, too).

So, Eight Is Enough Season 3 is my solid Wednesday-nights TV79 opener.

I don't know that I ever actually loved The Jeffersons, but I did come to love George, Louise and all of their family and friends, as I can't imagine that there's an episode that I haven't seen at least some of. So Jeffersons Season 5 is a likely SelectaVision situation for me at some point later in the evening.

The new shows? Meh.

I think it makes total sense that NBC in 1978 would take a flier on Dick Clark as ringmaster of an SNL for squares, but, in hindsight, it sure seems clear that the Ed Sullivan era was just solidly passed.

I watched a lot of the Vega$ pilot movie, and I found it surprisingly compelling. Still, I never watched that show when I was a kid; it's just not the kind of fun I'm usually looking for from TV. I'm not holding space for it.

Of course, 1978 me will give the new Channel 12 sitcom, In the Beginning, a go. It's clear CBS had high hopes for this Norman Lear sendup of Going My Way. Here is a very entertaining reel of promos that the network put together, apparently, for affiliates or advertisers or some B2B audience, and In the Beginning ("a different kind of comedy with impact for on both children and adults") is introduced as a big-tent Social Gospel meditation:

That back end of TV79 Wednesdays ultimately looks like movie territory for me, however. Here's what most grabbed me from the borrowed-from-box-office summary that TV Guide compiled for the new season:

• Airport '77
• Bad News Bears
• Black Sunday (just for the football parts)
• Blume in Love
• Fun with Dick and Jane
• Gone with the Wind
• Harry and Tonto
• Lady Sings the Blues
• Mother, Jugs and Speed
• Network
• Norman, Is That You?
• Orca
• Prisoner of Second Avenue
• Rocky
• Two-Minute Warning (again, football parts)