Classic Television - Prime Time

ABC Movie of the Week

Original Channel

ABC

Orginal  Run

September 1969 - August 1972

The ABC Movie of the Week is a weekly television anthology series, featuring made-for-TV movies, that aired on the ABC network in various permutations from 1969 to 1976.

The series was the brainchild of young executive Barry Diller, then head of prime time programming at ABC (and later a co-founder of the Fox network). Operating on a small budget but featuring the work of talented producers like Aaron Spelling and David Wolper (both of whom later developed hit series of their own), the Movie of the Week helped energize the made-for-TV movie format with fresh story concepts, veteran TV actors and potent production values. The attention-grabbing opening titles were designed and animated by Harry Marks using the same groundbreaking slit-scan process, or "star gate effect," that had been pioneered by Douglas Trumbull for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Movie of the Week provided ABC (long a distant third in the ratings) with a bona fide hit and, along with Monday Night Football, helped establish the network as a legitimate competitor to rivals CBS and NBC. The films themselves varied in quality and were often escapist or sensationalistic in nature (suspense, horror and melodrama were staples), but some were critically well received. For example, Duel (1971), based on a Richard Matheson short story from Playboy, was director Steven Spielberg's first feature film, catapulting his career and enabling him to move from television to theatrical films.

The "alphabet network" earned five Emmys, a prestigious Peabody Award and citations from the NAACP and American Cancer Society for an airing of Brian's Song in 1972. The 1971-1972 season of the series finished as the fifth highest rated series of the year.

The Movie of the Week originally aired on Tuesday nights at 8:30 pm ET. Beginning with the 1971 season, ABC added a second Movie of the Week on Saturday night and adjusted the titles of the shows to the Movie of the Week and Movie of the Weekend. The following season, the Saturday installment was moved to Wednesday night, and the titles were adjusted to Tuesday Movie of the Week and Wednesday Movie of the Week. The opening for the Saturday Movie of the Weekend featured footage of a silhouetted "rotating cameraman" operating a 35 mm movie camera. This footage would later be incorporated into the opening of ABC's New York City television station WABC-TV's various movie umbrellas beginning around 1972-1973, including and especially their weekday afternoon movie showcase The 4:30 Movie.

During the 1973-74 season, ABC added another movie on Saturday nights to their schedule, this time titled the ABC Suspense Movie, and usually consisting of thriller, mystery and horror type films (some of which were reruns of movies which originally aired as Movies of the Week).

The Movie of the Week theme music was an orchestral version of "Nikki", a song composed by Burt Bacharach and named for his daughter. The theme was arranged and performed by Harry Betts.

The series was often used as a platform to show pilots for possible series for the network. Shows such as The Six Million Dollar Man, Starsky and Hutch, Longstreet, Alias Smith and Jones and Marcus Welby, M.D. premiered here.

The series proper ended in 1976. After that, ABC's made-for-TV movies were either aired as stand-alone specials or shown in series that included both original and theatrical movie presentations. The Tuesday Movie of the Week would later be incorporated as part of ABC Late Night, a replacement of ABC's Wide World of Entertainment that ran from 1976 to 1982; the late-night version would mainly feature repeats of movies, both made for television and traditional theatrical releases, that were previously seen on ABC and other networks. The series was documented by Michael Karol in his 2005 book, The ABC Movie of the Week Companion, which was updated in 2008.