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(Pictured: Gina Lollobrigida in 1968. Va va va voom, as they said back then.)

There’s a list at Wikipedia that shows weekly TV ratings from 1948 through 2014. The page shows the top-rated show of most weeks and links to a source with a more detailed list. Alas, a lot of the links go to paywalled sites (which renders the page less than completely useful as a research tool), but as a high-level look at what we were watching over time, it’s pretty interesting.

In 1977, the TV season ended in April. (The May ratings sweeps that extended the season did not exist yet.) In any summer, until the new season began in September, the vast majority of primetime network programming would be reruns. Sometimes, popular episodes of the top shows would be similarly popular in reruns—with no home video or streaming, reruns were the only place to catch episodes you missed—but oddballs would often break through, too. The 1977 summer ratings winners were quite the smorgasbord. Some observations follow:

—Before the wide availability of premium cable and the advent of home video, network television was the only place to see Hollywood movies once they left theaters. (Few were important enough to get theatrical re-releases.) The network TV debuts of Gone With the Wind in 1976 and The Godfather in 1977 were enormous cultural events, but lesser theatrical films regularly drew big numbers, sometimes big enough to win the week. In the summer of 1977, the weekly ratings were topped at various times by High Plains Drifter, The Cheyenne Social Club, The Scalphunters, Breakout, and Buona Sera Mrs. Campbell—three westerns, an adventure set in Mexico, and, oddly, a 1968 Italian comedy starring Gina Lollobrigida. (The latter looks to have won almost by default during one of the lowest-rated weeks of the entire summer.) Theatrical movies would never again win as many summer weeks as they did in 1977.

—Muhammad Ali was at the peak of his boxing fame in 1977 and was a big-enough TV star to win the ratings. In May, he won a unanimous decision over Alfredo Evangelista, a fight so dreadful—Ali out of shape and barely trying, Evangelista basically a tomato can—that Howard Cosell apologized to the ABC audience during the broadcast for having shown it. Nevertheless, it drew 17.7 million viewers to rate #1. In September, Ali would have the #1 show on TV again, winning his last successful title defense against Earnie Shavers, a fight Shavers very nearly won.

—Although a lot is made every year about the terrible ratings for the baseball All-Star Game, NBA Finals, and World Series when compared to past years, such games still tend to rate well compared to the other stuff on network TV in any given week. (This year, the All Star Game ranked third for the week, behind two NBA Finals games.) So it was in the 70s, when the All-Star Game was routinely the #1 show of the week, as it was in 1977.

—Charlie’s Angels had premiered in the fall of 1976, but it didn’t reach #1 in the weekly ratings until the summer of 1977, when it was the most-watched show of the week seven times. Its 1977 season premiere in September also won the ratings race, but it would hit #1 only one more time, with its 1979 season premiere.

—The oddest show to top the ratings in the summer of 1977 was Man From Atlantis starring Patrick Duffy. The show had premiered in the spring as a series of TV movies. The fourth movie was #1 for the week of June 20, 1977—a first-run program bobbing to the top in a sea of reruns. The movies were successful enough that Man From Atlantis was permitted to dock on NBC’s regular fall schedule, but it soon sank without a trace.

Somebody else will have to do a scholarly examination of ratings and trends—I’m just poking through the wreckage of the 1970s looking for shiny stuff. So there are completely different posts I could write. For example, in 1975, reruns of All in the Family were #1 in most weeks, just as the first-run episodes had been during the regular season. Stuff that barely registers today was must-see TV: in 1975, 1976, and 1978, the Miss Universe pageant was the #1 show the week it was broadcast, beating even the All-Star Game in 1975.

In a gazillion-channel universe, with cable and streamers and YouTube, you go looking for something to watch and you generally find it. In the three-channel universe, we watched whatever was on, and if that turned out to be two hours of Gina Lollobrigida, then hell yeah.

Watch this space for more summer-of-1977 content later this week. Also: a new Sidepiece went out this morning. Check your spam filter. 

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(Pictured: the Beatles pose with their cartoon selves in November 1964.)

I have written occasionally over the years about the Beatles’ 1960s cartoon series. The most extensive history of the project I’ve seen to date is in the new book Fab Fools: The Last Ever Untold Beatles Story by Jem Roberts, which discusses the Beatles as comedians, in the context of British comedy on radio, TV, and film from the 50s to the new millennium.

Producer Al Brodax of King Features made a deal with Brian Epstein for an animated series the day after the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show. The scripts were written by showbiz veterans whose credits, among other things, included scripts for Gilligan’s Island and jokes for Milton Berle. Although a detailed bible was written explaining how to animate each Beatle to express his character, the look of the animation is fairly cheap; King Features, which had made Casper the Friendly Ghost and Popeye cartoons, farmed out the work, and sharp-eyed viewers would occasionally notice that various Beatles were sometimes missing various extremities. (Roberts says, “the animators always insisted on reshooting sequences with missing heads, no matter what the cost.”) Actual Beatles songs were used, although the wrong Beatle was sometimes shown singing, and songs were abruptly edited.

The Beatles wanted only to sign a contract and cash the checks; they were not interested in providing the voices for their animated selves. But it’s possible that ABC, the network buying the show, might not have wanted them. As natives of Liverpool, they had a very specific accent that sounded foreign even in their own country; there’d been talk of captioning A Hard Day’s Night to make them more understandable. ABC also feared that American viewers would find Liverpudlian accents unintelligible. So Brodax turned to English comic actor Lance Percival to do the voices of Paul and Ringo. When Paul first saw the show, he didn’t recognize what was supposed to be his voice; nevertheless, the Paul and Ringo voices are closer to the originals than those of John and George. Veteran voice actor Paul Frees, who had done radio drama, Disney cartoons, and The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, didn’t capture either man, and didn’t really try. Roberts says, “Harrison ended up with a strange kind of squeaky, Irish-cum-Mexican brogue, while Lennon’s famous tones were replaced with Frees’ stab at a Rex Harrison impersonation.… the complete misunderstanding of what made John John to this day utterly undoes all the things the animators strove to get right.”

Epstein hated what Brodax and King Features had wrought (although in later years, John and George had kind words for it). He intervened directly with British TV channels to keep it off the air in the UK. It was a hit in the States, however, from its premiere in September 1965. No new episodes were produced after 1967, although the show ran on ABC until 1969. It aired on local channels after that, on MTV in the 80s, and eventually in Britain.

(By 1967, the Beatles’ more psychedelic sound and look didn’t fit the TV mold anymore. It did, however, transfer to the big screen: Yellow Submarine, produced by Brodax with a larger budget and a better voice cast, fulfilled the Beatles’ three-picture deal with United Artists in 1968.)

Today, episodes of The Beatles can be found at YouTube and Dailymotion, although they come and go. Apple owns the rights to the series, but Roberts says it’s filled with “staggeringly crass and offensive cultural and racial depictions throughout,” and suggests that the series would generate complaints today “from those of a Chinese background—and Japanese, Italian, German, Romany, Native American, Hispanic, Indian, British, Extra-Terrestrial … and so on.” While a restored release is high on the wishlist of many Beatles fans, it seems unlikely.

Fab Fools is a great idea for a book; part of what made the Beatles so appealing was their sense of humor. Their humor came from some very specific inspirations in post-World War II Britain, however, and an American reader who knows little about the place and the period will get lost now and then. Similarly, there is much about the comedians and the humor that inspired the Beatles that does not translate; an American reader sometimes just isn’t going to understand why some stuff is supposed to funny. (Also, what’s funny when it’s performed on stage frequently loses something on the page.) Nevertheless, Beatles-as-comedians is a unique angle, and the book is worth your time.

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(Pictured: Steve McGarrett, played by Jack Lord, interrogates witnesses played by Susan Kay Logan and Carole Kai in a 1968 episode of Hawaii Five-O.)

Hawaii Five-O is one of the most remarkable franchises in entertainment history: 12 seasons in its original run and 10 more in its new-millennium reboot. I last rewatched the whole original series in 2013; this time around, I find myself paying less attention to the stories and more to the seams that show.

Television production was less sophisticated back then. The show was filmed entirely in Hawaii, and many locations are endearingly scruffy. If a sign for some identifiable national business appeared in a scene, they left it in; today they’d either shoot the scene so it didn’t appear, or take it out in post-production. Crowds milling in the background of certain scenes are not extras, but bystanders who came to watch the filming. I enjoy the casual way the characters use Hawaiian slang without explaining it: telling someone to hurry by saying “wiki wiki,” or one man referring to another as “bruddah.”

Spotting familiar faces is one of the great pleasures of 70s TV, and Hawaii Five-O has them in droves. A guest role meant that an actor got to spend a couple of weeks in Hawaii at someone else’s expense, so why wouldn’t you want the job? After a while, it also becomes easy to spot members of the show’s company of regulars, several dozen local people who appeared in countless small roles, sometimes different roles in back-to-back episodes.

The show began in the fall of 1968 at a remarkably high level. There are few weak episodes in the first seven or eight seasons; it’s only around season nine that the quality slips noticeably, and it falls off a cliff starting in season 11. That said, my favorite episode of the series came in that year: a two-parter called “Number One With a Bullet.” I wrote about it back in 2013.

It’s about a local singer hoping to make it big, and her brother, whose popular Honolulu disco becomes ground zero for a war between Hawaiian and mainland mobsters. The singer, played by Yvonne Elliman, has a songwriting partner, played by James Darren, who involves himself with the mob guys and promptly gets greased right after he and Yvonne confess their love for one another.

There’s a ton of disco-era color in the episode, with a couple of long scenes set in the club. When the episodes were originally broadcast (part 1 on December 28, 1978, and part 2 on January 4, 1979), the disco scenes featured songs from Saturday Night Fever, although they have been replaced on the Netflix versions. The replaced music sometimes makes it seem as though the dancers are suffering from some sort of arrhythmia, but everybody looks great. . . .

I’m watching on Paramount Plus this time and the replacements are still there, but the original Saturday Night Fever songs, the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” and David Shire’s instrumental “Manhattan Skyline,” are on the DVD release.

(Weeks later, another episode, “The Execution File,” used a re-recorded version of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” as a major part of its soundtrack, just as the original record was completing its run at #1. It has been entirely replaced for streaming and DVDs by generic funk music. Mike Quigley’s fabulously comprehensive Hawaii Five-O fansite has a comparison of the original and replaced music here. But I digress.)

Elliman is eminently believable as the struggling local girl hoping to make it big—she’s not glamorous, and by modern standards she’d be plus-sized. She sings the Danny Kortchmar song “In a Stranger’s Arms,” which was on her then-current album Night Flight, and “I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind,” which doesn’t appear to have charted anywhere, although I swear I can remember playing it on the radio. The episode closes with the latter, filmed during a real Elliman concert in Hawaii with several Five-O cast members in the audience, including Jack Lord, who almost never made public appearances anywhere.

Steve McGarrett is one of the most iconic characters in all of television, but what makes Jack Lord’s contribution to TV history even more impressive is that after the show’s creator, Leonard Freeman, died in 1974, Lord took over as an uncredited showrunner through the end of the series.

TV isn’t real life. It isn’t today, and it wasn’t in the 1970s, either. But 70s TV is a congenial world to visit, especially for a resident of the 21st century. It’s a place where somebody like McGarrett is always looking out for us, and the bad guys always get what they deserve.

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(Pictured: Red Skelton, 1970.)

I have mentioned here before that when we were kids, The Red Skelton Hour was one of the highlights of week. In the home video era, I have not sought out Red’s shows—in fact, Red kept them out of circulation for years to spite CBS for canceling him in 1970, and actually threatened to destroy the tapes at one point. Their long scarcity has something to do with why Skelton, for 30 years a giant of American comedy, someone who inspired the likes of Steve Martin and Richard Pryor, is largely forgotten today. But some late-60s episodes of his CBS show have recently been added to Amazon Prime, and I have watched a few.

Skelton considered himself his own best writer and an expert on what was funny, and he did not have much respect for the writers he employed. Our friend Wesley, who’s written a book on Red’s show, told me:

[W]riters for his show tended not to last long either on their own volition or on Red’s whims. In the spring of 1967, when his show came close to beating Bonanza as the number one show on TV, Red unceremoniously fired Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, the men who contributed to I Love Lucy and would later work on The Carol Burnett Show, The Flip Wilson Show and Maude. Some slouches, eh? Anyway, the men talked to LA Times columnist Hal Humphreys frankly about Red’s tendency to use tried material rather than their new work and how the result was spotty at best, not to mention how many writers had revolved through the successful show. Irritated by what they said, Red decided he would get back at them by performing their last script word-for-word with no ad-libs, confident that the show would die. The final taping ran eight minutes over due to audience laughter.

Skelton’s disdain for scripts—or maybe it’s just a lack of discipline—is on full display in the episode of October 31, 1967. In “Hippie Days Are Here Again,” Red’s character, the hobo Freddie the Freeloader, meets a group of hippies in a park. There’s potential in the idea because Tim Conway is playing the hippie leader. Partway through the sketch, Red abandons the script entirely, breaking the fourth wall, talking to the backstage crew, and spouting non-sequiturs. Conway is a master of making it up on the fly, but Skelton’s ad libs are so insular that they leave Conway with nowhere to go. Red wants every laugh for himself, and he doesn’t care if his co-star never gets one.

Something similar happened on January 14, 1969. “The Best Thing to Get Out of Marriage Is to Get Out of Marriage” co-stars Audrey Meadows, famed for playing Alice Kramden on The Honeymooners, as Clara Appleby, the henpecking wife of Skelton’s recurring character George Appleby. Partway through, Skelton once again starts ad-libbing furiously. Meadows gets a laugh with a scripted zinger, but Skelton has to top her: “No wonder Ralph Kramden divorced you.”

Wesley again:

Guests soon learned this is how he operated, which is why most of CBS’s other big comedy stars like Lucille Ball didn’t do his show, precisely because he’d go off script and get irritated if you got more laughs than he did. Harvey Korman’s son Chris Korman told me Red banned his father from the show for getting laughs in one minor role and Red thought he was stealing the spotlight from him.

(The January 14, 1969, show is the one on which Red delivered his monologue about the Pledge of Allegiance, which became a middling radio hit a few months later.)

The Red Skelton Hour and The Carol Burnett Show overlapped on CBS for three seasons starting in 1967, and the differences are instructive. As Wesley wrote in his book, The Carol Burnett Show never saw itself as a vehicle for Carol alone. She was happy to give the laughs to others. Her cast broke character plenty, but instead of tossing the script and flailing for jokes, they always stayed close to the core of the sketch. And partly because of a reputation for making guests look good, Carol was able to get practically anyone she wanted to appear on her show.

A half-century removed from watching Red on Tuesday nights, I think that what younger me responded to was Red’s silliness, and that just ain’t funny to me any more. A half-century later, all I can say is “Red, thanks for the laughs when I was eight, but we’re done now.”