Sunday Night Television When I Was Growing Up

For much of television history, Sunday has been the most-watched night of broadcast network television. Over the year several highly successful shows have aired on Sunday night, including The Ed Sullivan Show, Bonanza, NBC Mystery Movie, and Murder, She Wrote. It should be little wonder that Sunday nights number among my fondest memories of watching television when I was growing up, alongside Saturday morning cartoons.

My earliest memories of watching television on Sunday nights come from the late Sixties. On any typical Sunday night my family would watch Lassie, followed by Walt Disney's Wonderful World Colour, the last half of The Ed Sullivan Show, and Bonanza. I don't know what my parents watched after Bonanza, as my brother and I were generally in bed by then. It is notable that all of these shows were long running. Lassie debuted in 1954 and ran for 19 seasons, although the its last two were in first-run syndication. Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Colour had debuted as Disneyland on ABC and while still on that network would undergo a name change to Walt Disney Presents. It moved to NBC in 1961 and underwent another name change to Walt Disney's Wonderful of Color. Under various names and changes in network, the Disney anthology show would run 29 years without interruption. It has been revived several times since. The Ed Sullivan Show debuted in 1948 under the title Toast of the Town. Informally called "The Ed Sullivan Show" for years, it officially took that name in 1955. It ultimately ran for 24 seasons. As to Bonanza, it was a ratings behemoth. Starting with its third season, Bonanza ranked in the top ten shows of the season for the next nine seasons, three of those seasons spent at the number one spot. Bonanza lasted for 14 seasons, making it the second longest running TV Westerns after Gunsmoke.

Of course, television schedules change and shows go off the air. By the mid-Seventies Lassie, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Bonanza were gone from Sunday nights. Only the Walt Disney anthology series (now called The Wonderful World of Disney) remained. Even so there were still shows I remember fondly from the Sunday nights during the era. The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie was an umbrella series with various rotating shows. Among these shows were ones that I enjoyed a good deal: Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife. On ABC there was The ABC Sunday Night Movie, one of the many movies anthologies in the Seventies that showed feature films. This was where I would first see many of the James Bond movies.

By the late Seventies I did not enjoy Sunday night television as much as I did when I was younger. The Wonderful World of Disney remained, but The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie was gone. Still, there were shows I enjoyed from this time period. All in the Family, One Day at a Time, and Alice all aired on CBS.

By the early Eighties I was entering adulthood. While I realize we tend to look back on things from our childhood more fondly than things from other ages, it seems to me that Sunday night television was not quite as special as it was in the Sixties and Seventies. The Wonderful World of Disney was gone from Sunday night. The two shows I remember fondly from this era are Murder, She Wrote and Trapper John, M.D. At no point since I have become an adult has Sunday night television been quite as special as when I was a kid, even though some great shows have aired since then (for example, Mad Men).