I programmed the Packard Campus Theater in April, and rather than pick my “favorite” films and television shows, I chose titles that have some deeper personal significance in my life and career. For example, we’re showing Orphans of the Storm (1921) on April 11 because that’s the first silent film I ever saw, two Les Blank documentaries about my home state of Louisiana on April 16, and Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful Notorious (1946) on April 24 because it’s one of the first “grown-up” films with which my now 20-year-old daughter connected.
I’m starting the month with three nights of television programs that were a great deal of fun to choose. When I was a Masters student in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, one of my class assignments was to write a paper about of one night of primetime programming, assessing it in terms of narrative “flow,” how the stories being told connected to one another in interesting and unexpected ways. Later, I wrote a longer paper about television programming between 1950 and 1955, which eventually served as the basis for my Doctoral dissertation at the University of Maryland.
Those papers gave me an appreciation for the art of TV scheduling. Clearly, shows don’t land next to each other by happenstance; many a television executive has won or lost a job due to his or her skill at approving shows and then placing them somewhere in a three hour block where the most people–or the right demographic–is likely to find them. So, I want to pay tribute to three nights of TV programming when everything came together: good shows, smart placement, and high ratings.
Thursday, April 2, 2015 (7:30 pm)
NBC Thursday: “Must See TV” (1982-2006)