TV pilot season, 1978-style
Time magazine • May 15, 1978
In the “Television” section of this week’s Time, we learn about pilot season — the time-honored TV rite of spring that sort of no longer exists. We get a mini-profile of one of 70s TV’s masters, Fred Silverman, whom NBC had just hired away from ABC to be its president and CEO. Silverman had brought shows like All in the Family, The Waltons and Charlie’s Angels to TV.
In his three years at NBC, Silverman would create Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Gimme a Break! and Hill Street Blues. He also put David Letterman on the air for the first time.
Pilots, we’re told, can cost “as much as $600,000.” Some of the pilots — as analyzed for Time by Dancer Fitzgerald Sample (the ad agency Lou Avery left to replace Don Draper as SC&P’s creative director in Mad Men) for the Fall 1978 season:
California Girls (NBC):
A bikini-clad comedy about two 18-year-old girls who want to be lifeguards. One, sarcastic with a good body; the other, a free spirit, well tanned and not unattractive.
Cheerleaders (NBC):
A half-hour “gang comedy” about life through the ever active perspective of the pom-pom girls.
Dog Patrol (ABC):
An 8 o’clock-type adventure show featuring three police dogs and their human counterparts.
El Paso Pussycats (CBS):
A comedy series based on the adventures and experiences of a cheerleading squad not unlike the Dallas Cowgirls.
On the Loose (NBC):
About three girls who share a Honolulu condominium. In the pilot, a nursery school teacher falls for a priest she meets in a bar.
She (CBS):
A female James Bond. The project embraces both action and cheesecake without laying heavy on sex and violence.
Stitches (ABC):
Medical students inhabit a coed dorm in this comedy, which blends doctoring with prankish college enthusiasm.
The Three Wives of David Wheeler (NBC):
A man and his gorgeous ex-wife run a photographic business that employs another ex-wife, a young model. The half-hour comedy depicts how he and his current wife deal with his former spouses.
