When Band of Brothers premiered in 2001 it was the most expensive miniseries ever made, coming in at $125 million for 10 episodes.
MERLIN PROJECT RUNWAY SERIES
Any discussion of the place of miniseries in the television landscape must begin with the series that made the format a success.īand of Brothers, HBO, September 29 to November 4, 2001 It also won a Peabody Award, and spawned a sequel miniseries and made-for-tv movie. Roots was nominated for 37 Emmy Awards in 1977, still a record for most nominations for a single program in a single year, and won nine, a record that held up until 2004. Ironically, according to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, this was done by ABC programming chief Fred Silverman to cut losses with the series, and get it off the air before sweeps. While limited series had previously existed, Roots was among the first to air in the consecutive-night layout. Its role is clear, however, on miniseries in American television. There is no way to determine Roots’ direct impact on race relations it aired nearly 10 years after Martin Luther King was assassinated, and a year before the Supreme Court affirmed the use of affirmative action. This brought about an all-star cast including Emmy winners, Oscar winners, Tony winners, Pulitzer nominees, Brady patriarchs, Rainbow Readers, and Heisman-winning felons. The cast was star-studded as explained on Pioneers of Television (the first 30 minutes of this episode deal with Roots, and I highly recommend them to anyone with interest in the history of the series and miniseries in general), African-Americans were drawn to the meaty parts, while, as Ed Asner explained, white actors were trampling over each other to get involved. Based on Alex Haley’s 1976 novel “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” Roots tells the story of generations of slaves in Haley’s family. Every single episode is one of Nielsen’s top 100 rated programs of all time, including Super Bowls (at least as of 2009, and I’m 99.99% sure it’s still true).īut Roots is more than a crowd favorite in fact, given the potency of its material it is astounding that it was produced and aired on a major broadcast network, let alone watched by tens of millions of people. It’s far and away the most watched miniseries of all time, with the final episode being the third highest rated entertainment (aka non-Super Bowl) program in television history. I’m no Richard Dawson or Louie Anderson or John O’Hurley or whoever hosts Family Feud nowadays, but I’d bet a good deal that if you asked 100 people to name any miniseries in television history, at least two-thirds would name Roots.
Roots, ABC, January 23 to January 30, 1977 We do not accept this argument, and any programs that are nominated here must have been conceived as close-ended stories with a limited run, and the category wasn’t placed on them retroactively. In recent years programs like Missing and The River have taken advantage of their one-season-and-out runs to submit as miniseries during Emmy time, and programs like American Horror Story have tweaked their format just enough that they slot themselves as “anthology” programs despite going onto what most people would classify as another season. This category also has an additional qualifier, in that any program that is nominated as a miniseries has to have been a miniseries from its inception. As with all of our nominees the five-year eligibility qualifier counts, and nominees will be inducted if they receive more than 60 percent of the vote. Which of these limited-run series deserve the most remembrance and recognition? That’s what we’re hoping to find out with these ballots. But the miniseries has a long and storied history in television, and many of the high-quality cable dramas today owe a debt to the epic scope and storytelling the format pioneered. Or more appropriately, miniseries-that once great format of television that has fallen into the dustbin in recent years, as an increasingly competitive market demands long-running programming that can build brand awareness and justify advertising investment. Henry Winkler, who we imagine is now sulking at a table with Marilu Henner, Tom Baker, Veronica Hamel, George Clooney, Linda Cardellini and Ian McShane plotting vengeance against us for their exclusion.) As always, we thank you for your votes and your attention.įor this month, we’re taking a break from our performance-centric ballots and getting back to series. Welcome back to This Was Television’s Hall of Fame! Once again, we’re coming off a great month as our Lead Actor in a Comedy ballots generated considerable attention and a strong crop of nominees, almost all of whom made it in.
By Les Chappell, Emma Fraser, Whitney McIntosh, Andrew Rabin, and Anthony Strand
0 kommentar(er)
