Hart to Hart started the 79/80 season Sat @10 following Love Boat where it did well. But Fantasy Island was dying Fri @8 so ABC quickly moved it back to follow Love Boat.

Meanwhile ABC"s hit Tuesday line-up was suffering at 10pm where Lou Gosset's medical drama Lazarus Syndrome was squandering the Three's Company/Taxi lead-in. So Hart to Hart was moved there, the numbers went up and Bob & Stephanie became a Tuesday night stalwart.

MASH debuted in 72 on Sunday night b/w Anna & The King (TV version of King And ! and Sandy Duncan, one of the oddest lineups ever. MASH struggled but fared better when Dick Van Dyke became the lead in and Mannix the lead out.

Then in Fall 73 it moved to Sat after All in The Family. Needless to say that worked - and MASH finished #4 for the season.

Wasn’t Cagney and Lacey moved after being cancelled twice? The ratings started to improve before the famous letter writing campaign saved it fully(and Tyne Daly’s Emmy win that season helped)? It moved to Mondays and that third season finally made them a top 10 show.

On 4/29/2026 at 4:00 PM, Khan said:

And also, a sign of the times. "Taxi" was like "M*A*S*H" and "WKRP in Cincinnati": a '70's sitcom trying to survive in the Very Special Episode '80's

That is such a great way to describe that era. Even as a kid I remember watching WKRP reruns and thinking it felt modern enough to be airing then instead of having been cancelled for almost a decade. The 80’s had some great, witty and well made sitcoms that could also pull off depth like Cheers, The Cosby Show, Golden Girls, Designing Women, etc. It also had a lot of middle of the road kind of stuff like Who’s the Boss, Webster, Growing Pains, Full House, etc. And I watched those shows too when they aired, but they don’t hit the same way and they are often really basic.

48 minutes ago, titan1978 said:

Even as a kid I remember watching WKRP reruns and thinking it felt modern enough to be airing then instead of having been cancelled for almost a decade. The 80’s had some great, witty and well made sitcoms that could also pull off depth like Cheers, The Cosby Show, Golden Girls, Designing Women, etc. It also had a lot of middle of the road kind of stuff like Who’s the Boss, Webster, Growing Pains, Full House, etc. And I watched those shows too when they aired, but they don’t hit the same way and they are often really basic.

I feel the same way. Ironically, I think it's the more MOR stuff that has performed better overall in reruns, even though very little of it holds up today.

I was born in '79, but I consider myself a Gen-X'er or Xennial, because I absorbed a lot of television in the '80's and '90's. (Not to brag or anything, but I still recall watching "Happy Days" and "Three's Company" as a child - not as reruns on some local station, but on ABC). And I definitely felt the same way as you about WKRP: that it was "modern" for late '80's or early '90's, even though CBS cancelled it when I was about two. That might be why the show performed much better in syndication than it ever did on the network. (Well, that, and because, people actually could find it for once, lol).

For me, when it comes to half-hour comedies, there's Before "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and After. Before MTM, I watched a lot of great television - "Cheers," "Cosby," "Roseanne," GG, DW, "Murphy Brown," etc. - and I watched a lot of bad. But MTM was the half-hour show - which I started watching by accident one Sunday morning on a local station, because it was early and I always woke up early on Saturdays and Sundays for some reason - that rearranged how I saw the genre. I realized that you didn't have to place characters in "wacky" situations that stretched credibility in order to tell jokes and make people laugh. Sometimes, all you had to do was just exploit the characters' very real, very common foibles; and in fact, the laughs will be deeper, because the characters and their predicaments will be more relatable. (By the way, the episode I watched was the one where Mary attempted to help her former cellmate, played by Barbara Colby, find a new line of work after spending years on the streets as a prostitute).

I often compare that experience of watching MTM for the first time with how John Cusack described seeing "Apocalypse Now" for the first time: it was as if someone had blown off the back of my head with a shotgun. I knew afterward that my life as a TV viewer would not be the same, and it wasn't.

43 minutes ago, Khan said:

I realized that you didn't have to place characters in "wacky" situations that stretched credibility in order to tell jokes and make people laugh. Sometimes, all you had to do was just exploit the characters' very real, very common foibles

We are basically the same age. My sister was a teenager when I was a few years old, so I was along for the ride on a lot of TV from that era, including early MTV. And I agree, MTM was special and did show that if you had well defined characters with a good mix between them you could always have stories.

Part of why Golden Girls and Designing Women worked better in their original versions vs spin offs and replacements was that the characters were so well defined and well suited for the structure of their stories. You needed Dorothy’s more acerbic sarcasm and Suzanne’s ignorance to make the humor work for the show’s points of view.

I watched a few Disney shows over the years with my younger family members. And it really struck me how much they were like those bland sitcoms that were prevalent back then, except they were relegated to kid and teen programming instead of primetime network.

12 minutes ago, titan1978 said:

I watched a few Disney shows over the years with my younger family members. And it really struck me how much they were like those bland sitcoms that were prevalent back then, except they were relegated to kid and teen programming instead of primetime network.

ICAM! Yet, there was a time when the Disney and Nickelodeon shows were keeping alive the concept of a half-hour comedy that was filmed/taped in front of a live studio audience, as all the networks had basically abandoned the practice for the kind of one-camera shows that were originally popular in the '60's!

3 hours ago, titan1978 said:

Wasn’t Cagney and Lacey moved after being cancelled twice? The ratings started to improve before the famous letter writing campaign saved it fully(and Tyne Daly’s Emmy win that season helped)? It moved to Mondays and that third season finally made them a top 10 show.

C & L started as a TV movie that was a hit. CBS commissioned a series but Loretta Swit was still tied to MASH, so Meg Foster took her role. CBS slotted it after Magnum on Thursday, but it didn't take off and they dropped it and replaced it with Simon & Simon which took off.

CBS scheduled an episode Sun @10 which was a success and caused them to re-evaluate and order another series. Meg Foster was dropped (the infamous 'too dykey' comment from a CBS exec) and replaced by Sharon Gless. But again C&L didn't do well enough Mon @10 and was dropped. There was a huge outcry and the next season, after Emerald Point failed, C&L again played Mon @10 and finally took off.

Apparently, C&L's producer, Barney Rosenzweig, had wanted Sharon Gless for the series from the start, but she was still under contract at Universal. He had to wait for CBS to cancel "House Calls," where Gless had replaced Lynn Redgrave, and for her contractual obligations with Universal to expire before he could offer her the C&L gig.

9 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

CBS scheduled an episode Sun @10 which was a success and caused them to re-evaluate and order another series. Meg Foster was dropped (the infamous 'too dykey' comment from a CBS exec) and replaced by Sharon Gless. But again C&L didn't do well enough Mon @10 and was dropped. There was a huge outcry and the next season, after Emerald Point failed, C&L again played Mon @10 and finally took off.

They just don’t give shows that kind of chance anymore, haven’t for a long time. It ended up dominating the Emmy’s, especially best actress for most of its run. Won best drama a couple of times too.

16 minutes ago, titan1978 said:

Won best drama a couple of times too.

Yep - and they did that at a time, too, when "Hill Street Blues" was still supposed to be the Emmys' darling.