Events
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| January 5 | Remington Steele returns to NBC after a six-month hiatus during which series star Pierce Brosnan won the film role of James Bond, only to lose it when NBC unexpectedly renewed the series. Steele adopts a TV-movie length format but only runs for a few installments before being cancelled for good. |
| January 22 | R. Budd Dwyer shoots and kills himself at a televised press conference. The decision by some broadcasters to air the footage leads to a debate over boundaries in journalism. |
| February 2 | PBS broadcasts the critically acclaimed Eyes on the Prize series. |
| February 8 | The miniseries Amerika, showing life ten years after the United States is defeated and occupied by the USSR, is broadcast on ABC. |
| February 15 | The television movie event The Facts of Life Down Under airs on NBC. |
| March 19 | Televangelist Jim Bakker is involved in a sex scandal, which causes him to step down as the host of The PTL Club. |
| March 27 | The Price is Right surpasses Concentration as the longest running daytime game show in history. |
| March 30 | 227 star Jackée Harry changes her name to "Jackée," which she goes by until 1994. |
| April 5 | The Fox TV network makes its prime-time debut, marking the first time since 1955 that four networks filled the US prime-time television landscape. The network debuts 2 shows, Married... with Children and The Tracey Ullman Show, which air 3 times each during the night so that viewers watching other networks can switch over and sample the shows. |
| April 19 | Matt Groening's The Simpsons debuts as a series of short animated segments on The Tracey Ullman Show. |
| May | The sitcom Mr. Belvedere is canceled after three seasons. Heavy backlash causes ABC executives to rethink the decision and bring the show back. Since the fall programming schedules were already written, Mr. Belvedere doesn't premiere until late October. |
| May 15 | Pamela Ewing's car speeds out of control, crashes into a tanker, and explodes on the season finale of Dallas. |
| June 4 | CBS becomes the last American network to cease a chime intonation at the beginning of telecasts; satellite feeds have made the tones obsolete (their job was to signal to the affiliates to start airing the network feed in sync with everyone else). |
| June 30 | US daytime television is interrupted for the Iran-Contra hearings. |
| July 15 | Genie Francis, of General Hospital fame, starts a new soap role as Diana Colville on Days of our Lives, which she will play until 1989. |
| July 31 | Launch of the movie-based channel Movietime. |
| September 5 | Dick Clark's American Bandstand airs for the 2,751st and last time on ABC, after 30 years on the network. It lives on in syndication for 2 more years. |
| September 11 | Dan Rather of the CBS Evening News stomps out of the newscast when a televised tennis match runs two minutes over. He is missing for six minutes. |
| October 12 | Valerie Harper files a lawsuit against NBC and Lorimar for breach of contract after being fired from her sitcom Valerie. |
| October 15 | Bob Barker, host of The Price Is Right, stops dyeing his hair brown and appears on-stage for the first time with white hair. He is given a minute-long standing ovation by the audience. |
| November 13 | Sonny & Cher reunite for a performance on Late Night with David Letterman. |
| November 22 | During a showing of the Doctor Who story "Horror of Fang Rock", Chicago PBS station WTTW-TV Channel 11 is interrupted for 88 seconds by a pirate television transmitter overriding the station's transmission signal to broadcast a video of himself in a Max Headroom mask being spanked. This incident has subsequently gained a degree of cult myth about it. |
Read more about this topic: 1987 In American Television
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape ... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.”
—Marilyn French (b. 1929)