Television Films - Origins and History

Origins and History

An early television movie was Talk Faster, Mister, which aired on WABD on December 18, 1944, and was produced by RKO. Though not exactly labelled as such, there were early precedents for "television movies", such as the 1957 The Pied Piper of Hamelin, based on the poem by Robert Browning, and starring Van Johnson, one of the first filmed "family musicals" made directly for television. It was made in Technicolor, a first for television, which ordinarily used color processes originated by specific networks. (Most "family musicals" of the time, such as Peter Pan, were not filmed but broadcast live and preserved on kinescope. A kinescope is a recording of a television program made by filming the picture from a video monitor. This was the only way to record a television show until the invention of videotape.)

Television films had a rough start when the idea was first presented in the 1950s to major networks. The production for the films was an unstable business with certain challenges facing early participants. Many television networks were hostile toward film programming, fearing that it would loosen the network's arrangements with sponsors and affiliates by encouraging television station managers to make independent deals with advertisers and film producers.

Television networks were in control of the most valuable prime-time slots available for programming, so syndicators of independent television films had to settle for fewer television markets and less desirable time periods. This meant much smaller advertising revenues and license fees compared with network-supplied programming.

The term "made-for-TV movie" was coined in the United States in the early 1960s as an incentive for movie audiences to stay home and watch what was promoted as the equivalent of a first-run theatrical film. Beginning in 1961 with NBC Saturday Night at the Movies, a prime time network showing of a television premiere of major studio film, the other networks soon copied the format, with each of the networks having several Night At The Movies which led to a shortage of movie studio product. The first of these made-for-TV movies is generally acknowledged to be See How They Run, which debuted on NBC on 7 October 1964. A previous film, The Killers, starring Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan, was filmed as a TV-movie, although NBC decided it was too violent for television and it was released theatrically instead.

Considered the second television movie, Don Siegel's The Hanged Man, was broadcast by NBC on November 18, 1964.

These features originally filled a 90-minute broadcast programming time slot (including television commercials), later expanded to two hours, and were usually broadcast as a weekly anthology television series (for example, the ABC Movie of the Week). Many early TV movies featured major stars, and some were accorded higher budgets than standard series television programs of the same length, including the major dramatic anthology programs which they came to replace.