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The-CW

Some Saturday Suggestions

May 31, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Once upon a time, the TV networks gave a rats ass about Saturday nights. It almost seems apocryphal, but there was a fabled season long ago that had this Saturday night lineup: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show and The Carol Burnett Show. Three solid hours of comedy all-timers.

Slow-forward about 35 years, and what do we have on Saturday nights? As Al Swearengen might say, a huge bag of shit. Sports. Reality. Magazines. Not a single scripted comedy or drama. Saturday night has become a major TV casualty of the overabundance of entertainment choices, and the networks aren’t even bothering to address it.

But isn’t there *anything* they could do? Maybe. But it would involve taking a gamble on some programming concepts that they’ve been slow to embrace, and actually taking advantage of what I will dub “The Spinal Tap Paradox.”

[Read more…] about Some Saturday Suggestions

Filed Under: Mediacratic, Television Tagged With: ABC, Everwood, Lost, NBC, Saturday-Night-Live, Spinal-Tap, Studio-60-on-the-Sunset-Strip, Television, The-CW, veronica-mars

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