Events
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| January 25 | Black Entertainment Television launches in the United States as a block of programming on the Nickelodeon TV Network; it wouldn't be until 1983 that BET becomes a full fledged channel. |
| February 1 | After 29 years on the air, the soap opera Love of Life airs its last episode on CBS. |
| February 3 & 10 | Bob Hope's Overseas Christmas Tours, a two-part six-hour retrospective of Bob Hope's more than 30 years of entertaining at military bases and hospitals in the U.S. and abroad, airs on NBC. |
| February 14 | Walter Cronkite announces his retirement from the CBS Evening News, which takes effect in March 1981. |
| March 16 | The first regularly scheduled use of closed captioning on American network television occurs, with captions of spoken dialogue added to programming received through a decoding unit attached to a standard TV set. |
| March 21 | On the season finale of Dallas, J. R. Ewing is shot by an unseen assailant leading to the catchphrase "Who shot J.R.?". |
| April 7 | The Oldest Living Graduate, a live drama on NBC, is broadcast; the network hadn't aired a program like it since 1962. The production is aired from Southern Methodist University and stars Henry Fonda, George Grizzard, and Cloris Leachman. |
| May 6 | Ron Howard and Donny Most leave the cast of Happy Days as regulars, following the episode "Ralph's Family Problem". |
| May 24 | The Not Ready For Prime Time Players appear in their final episode on NBC's Saturday Night Live, and many feel it is the end of an era for the venerable series. |
| June 1 | The Cable News Network (CNN) begins broadcasting. |
| June 20 | Hollywood Squares presents its 3,536th and final network telecast on NBC, ending a 14 year daytime run; it remains the second-longest-running daytime game show in the network's history, behind the original 1958–1973 run of Concentration. Two other NBC game shows, High Rollers and Chain Reaction end their runs on this date as well. |
| June 23 | The David Letterman Show debuts on NBC. Letterman's humor doesn't go over well with a morning audience, and the show is cancelled in October. Letterman would stay at NBC and go on to host a late night show on the network 2 years later. |
| June 30 | The ABC game show Family Feud moves from airing at 11:30 am/ET to 12:00 noon. It is one of the few network daytime shows to survive at noon, a time slot where many stations preempt network fare for local news broadcasts. |
| July | The Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA launch a 3-month strike against TV and movie studios. The strike greatly delays US networks' fall seasons (some shows don't see their fall debuts until late October or November, if not much later), and prompts a union boycott of the 1980 Emmy Awards in September. The unions would ratify a new deal on October 25 to officially end the strike. |
| August 1 | Ending a failed experiment, the soap opera Another World airs its last regularly scheduled ninety-minute episode. The show returns to sixty minutes on August 4, allowing room for a spin-off, Texas, based around Beverlee Mckinsey's Another World character, Iris Cory Carrington. |
| The 24/7 cable movie network Cinemax launches. | |
| November 2 | Archie Bunker's Place begins its season with the episode "Edith's Death", in which Archie Bunker grieves over the death of wife Edith (prompted by Jean Stapleton's departure from the series). Carroll O'Connor's performance in this episode earns him a Peabody Award. |
| November 15 | Saturday Night Live starts its new season with a new cast and new writers under the reins of new Executive Producer Jean Doumanian. |
| November 18 | Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters, starring Barbara, Louise and Irlene Mandrell makes its premiere on NBC, with a special guest appearance by Dolly Parton. The show was the last successful variety show on network TV. With 40 million viewers. |
| November 21 | The mystery of "Who Shot J.R.?" is solved on Dallas; the revelation that Sue Ellen's sister Kristin (played by Mary Crosby) did the deed) draws a record number of viewers. |
| November 22 | Eddie Murphy makes his first Saturday Night Live appearance, appearing in a non-speaking role in the sketch, "In Search Of The Negro Republican" |
| December 8 | Howard Cosell announces the murder of former Beatle John Lennon in the closing seconds of a Monday Night Football game. |
| December 30 | After 26 years on the air, 20 of which were on NBC, the network announces that the long-running anthology Disney's Wonderful World will not be on its fall 1981 schedule; the show will, however, be picked up by CBS. |
Read more about this topic: 1980 In American Television
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden into history, it is the stories we didn’t write, the questions we didn’t ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
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“That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)