The Eighties

Anyone who likes TV series must have seen at least the first episode from this and previous series (The Sixties, The Seventies) that are always devoted entirely to TV, or at least that's my idea. In the first episode of "The Eighties" called "Raised on Television" it is stated, among other things, that the influence of a TV series on its viewers has never been greater than it was in March 1980. In addition, one particular episode was released within 24 hours. hour of world news and captivated an entire generation of viewers for almost 9 months. After the episode of "Dallas" in which JR was shot, TV would never be the same again and the episode that finally ended its denouement in November 1980 is one of the most watched episodes of all time with almost 83 million direct television viewers! Doubling the previous record from 1965 when the last episode of "The Fugitive" was watched by 41 million people. In America's 1980 presidential election, fewer people went to the polls than there had been viewers for that one episode of "Dallas." By the way, the last episode of "MASH" in 1983 broke the record of "Dallas" with an unlikely 123 million viewers! Another eighties "game changer" was "Hill Street Blues" which broke with the usual procedural police shows in which one or more protagonists solve a different case every week. "Hill Street Blues" was the first series in the genre in which both business and relationships could overlap for several weeks and episodes and even entire seasons. But besides that, the eighties were important in several other areas for the television landscape that was somewhat redesigned. For example, the main events in the news were suddenly brought directly into the living rooms by CNN 24 hours a day from all over the world instead of at fixed times as was previously usual. With MTV the very first (music) channel that was fully geared to the youth, they started with "late night" and "late late night" shows at times where you could only watch test images at the same hours and the first real ones did not come scripted reality shows like "Cops" where they simply sent a film crew out with a police patrol in the hope that something exciting would happen.