Television Shows Of The 1970s

At the start of the 1970s, television programming changed dramatically with the first airing of topics that were considered taboo in earlier decades. Mary Tyler Moore, which premiered in 1970, was a breakthrough for leading female characters in television. It's main character was a single woman that was over 30 years old who was not widowed, divorced or even looking for a man to support her. News on television showed the horrors of the war in Vietnam to American homes thus intensifying anti war sentiments. Television news also showed live broadcasts of the Senate Watergate hearings which resulted in the downfall of President Richard Nixon. The face of the sitcom also changed with the end of sitcoms such as Ozzie and Harriet and the start of The Brady Bunch; which ran for five seasons. Even though the Brady Bunch was regarded as the quintessential family of the decade, a new kind of programming emerged to portray a less than perfect life of other families. Producer Norman Lear observed how American life was like in the 70s and the problems that people were facing. With his observations, Lear spearheaded a genre that called "social consciousness" programming. With his adaptation of the British television series Till Death Us Do Part, All In The Family  broke down television barriers. Showing a disclaimer when it first aired, the season premiered in 1971 and Americans heard ethnic slurs for the first time on television. All In The Family also had many controversial issues in it's plots such as race, politics, women's rights and homosexuality. Just as Archie Bunker was bigoted, ultra conservative, urban blue collar character, Maude, Archie's wife's (Edith) cousin was the exact opposite. Maude was a "flawed liberal" who was married to her fourth husband living in upstate New York with her divorced daughter. The  tall "tell-it-like-it-is", "take-no-crap-from-the system" character Maude, broke the mold of the small-and-sweet situation comedy mother and therefore brought about more controversy than her rival, Archie.  The show Good Times, was a spin off of Maude that remade the character of Maude's maid Florida Evans. Instead of the show being set in New York, it was set in a very poor Chicago inner city neighborhood. Florida and her husband, James, try raise their three kids in the midst of poverty.  Issues such as poverty, gangs, guns, bullies, busing, black on black crime and prejudice  and even the death of James (in the middle of the shows's run), were addressed in the episodes. It showed how a close, strong African American family, such as the Evans, were able to face those tough issues. The family's interaction with each other often provided the humor in the episodes. Norman Lear also produced a couple more  shows in 1975; One was a spin off of All In The Family called the Jeffersons. The Jeffersons were about Archie's African American neighbors who became a success with their business and moved to a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Another show, One Day At A Time, was about a about a divorced mother raising her two teenage daughters in Indianapolis.

By the middle of the decade, audiences yearned for a lighter side to television programming. Television shows such as Happy Days which followed the lives of a group of fifties-era teenagers, and Leverne and Shirley, which followed the lives of two single women living in an apartment in the fifties, gave viewers the feel of nostalgia. Little House On The Prairie was a show that was based on a set of children's books that told the life of their author, Laura Ingals Wilder. The Waltons was also a show about a close knit family; unlike Little House, which was set in the 19th century, the Waltons were about a large family living in Virginia during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The middle and later part of the 1970s also brought about new genres. A genre called Jiggle television centered around sexual gratification and bawdy humor and situations featured shows such as Charlie's Angels and Three's Company. The other was an escapist "fantasy" genre, which started in 1977 with the Love Boat and in 1978 with Fantasy Island. The variety show genre, which were popular in the 1950s and 1960s, had it's last run in the 1970s with shows such as The Carol Burnett Show, The Flip Wilson Show, Sonny and Cher, Tony Orlando and Dawn and Donny and Marie.