Events
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| January 9 | Wendy's "Fluffy Bun" ad first airs, which propels Clara Peller and her "Where's the beef?" catchphrase to national prominence. |
| Something About Amelia, a powerful, sensitive look at incest, airs on ABC. Glenn Close, Ted Danson, and Roxana Zal are the stars. | |
| January 22 | During CBS' broadcast of Super Bowl XVIII, Apple Computer heralds the launch of its Apple Macintosh with the famous ad "1984", the only time it airs on national television. |
| January 23 | Hulk Hogan defeats The Iron Sheik to win his first World Wrestling Federation championship at Madison Square Garden; the match was televised on the MSG Network. |
| January 27 | Michael Jackson's hair catches fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. |
| February 28 | At the 26th Grammy Awards telecast on CBS, Michael Jackson wins a record-breaking eight Grammys. |
| May 18 | Bobby Ewing finds himself in the crossfire as a rival tries to gun down his brother J.R. on the season finale of Dallas. |
| May 19 | CBS tapes the Michael Larson episodes of Press Your Luck in which Larson wins $110,237 in cash and prizes. |
| July 14 | In what was known as Black Saturday, Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation takes over Superstation WTBS' Saturday evening time slot once occupied by Georgia Championship Wrestling. |
| September 10 | Jeopardy! returns to television in daily syndication with new host Alex Trebek. |
| September 14 | Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler host the first MTV Video Music Awards at New York's Radio City Music Hall, an event punctuated by Madonna's performance of "Like a Virgin." |
| September 24 | Super Password premieres on NBC at 12:00 Noon EST. The new incarnation of the classic game show is one of the few shows to survive at a time slot that normally broadcasts news on any of the three major networks, running for 4 1/2 years. |
| October 1 | Montana, the last state in the Union without its own PBS station, finally launches Montana PBS. |
| October 8 | NBC airs The Burning Bed, which stars Farrah Fawcett as a woman who kills her abusive husband. The fact-based film is the highest-rated entertainment event of the 1984-1985 season. |
| October 27 | Turner Broadcasting System launches the Cable Music Channel in the U.S., only to shutter it one month later. |
| November 12 | Theresa Saldana appears as herself in the NBC film Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story, a retelling of her 1982 stabbing incident and its aftermath. |
| December 17 | George C. Scott plays Ebenezer Scrooge in a new version of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, airing on CBS. |
| ABC purchases a majority stake of ESPN from Getty Oil. |
Read more about this topic: 1984 In American Television
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“The prime lesson the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences is just this: that it is necessary to press on to find the positive conditions under which desired events take place, and that these can be just as scientifically investigated as can instances of negative correlation. This problem is beyond relativity.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire—thinner than the paper on which it is printed—then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)