Events
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| January 3 | The USA Network was founded. |
| January 9 | The Music for UNICEF Concert is performed in New York City. The televised special airs the following night on NBC in the United States. |
| February 11 | In the US, 43 million viewers watch Elvis, a made for TV movie starring Kurt Russell as Elvis Presley, on ABC. |
| March 6 | Another World becomes the first (and, to date, the only) soap opera to air regularly scheduled ninety-minute telecasts. The time extension coincides with the death of long-running character John Randolph (played by Michael M. Ryan) in a house fire. The show goes back to 60-minute episodes in August 1980. |
| Villain Roger Thorpe (played by Michael Zaslow) rapes his wife Holly (Maureen Garrett) on Guiding Light, the first time spousal rape was shown on U.S. television. | |
| March 19 | C-SPAN, an American television channel focusing on government and public affairs, is launched. |
| April 1 | Nickelodeon, an American cable channel focusing on children's programming, is launched. |
| April 22 | Friendly Fire, a TV movie starring Carol Burnett as a mother who wants to know how her son died in Vietnam, airs on ABC. |
| April 23 | The Price is Right on CBS moves to 11:00 A.M. EST and remains in that slot to this day. |
| August 27 | WTCG was renamed into WTBS in Atlanta. |
| September 7 | ESPN begins broadcasting sports 24/7 and was the first cable TV channel to be launched as a 24-hour channel. |
| September 19 | On the two-hour TV-movie season premiere event on Eight is Enough, both David and Susan Bradford married their respective loves in a double ceremony. The premiere grabbed a 40 share across the two hours. |
| November 4 | Jaws was broadcast on television for the first time on ABC. |
| December 1 | The Movie Channel, an American premium cable channel, begins broadcasting movies 24/7. |
| General Hospital tops the yearly daytime television ratings for the first time. |
Read more about this topic: 1979 In American Television
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)