Believe it or not, very early in the history of national American broadcast television, almost no show lasted longer than 30 minutes. In fact, many early shows aired installments no longer than fifteen minutes and some were as short of five minutes!
The brevity of these programs were both a carryover from radio—where many programs were often, too, in the 15-30 minutes range—but also an assumption on the part of early TV programmers and executives. They wondered if TV audiences could actually be sustained for long periods of time. Unlike radio, where audiences were free to move around the room while they listened or even take on other tasks while they listened, television (it was assumed) demanded a viewer’s constant attention and focus. And, they wondered at the time, would people really sit still for longer than half an hour to watch a TV program?
Well, for many of us who have fully binged eight (or more!) episodes in a single weekend or a day, I think that we proved that, yes, we will! (Whether we should be proud of that fact or not, I will leave to others to debate.)
With time, of course, the presentation of former theatrical movies, TV specials, concerts and live sporting events over television eventually began to show the honchos at the networks that, yes, audience attention could be held for an hour or even for two hours or even more! And it also proved that audiences could be held over, and not just in episodic forms of television (i.e. those little hour-long bite-size pieced doled out on a weekly basis), but, in fact, held over for several hours and for consecutive nights!
Thus, I give you the “mini-series.”
Still, it took a couple of decades—in fact, all the way up to the 1970s—for true long-form TV programming to fully take a hold.
Like almost all TV “firsts,” determining the exact originator of the miniseries genre is a little complicated.
Technically, 1973’s “The Blue Knight,” based on a book by Joseph Wambaugh, and starring William Holden in his small screen debut, could be considered the first “mini-series.” This Lorimar-produced program was four hours long and NBC aired it in four one-hour installments for four nights in a row—November 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th.
The story of a 20-year veteran of the LAPD, “Knight” had an impressive cast that also included Lee Remick, Sam Elliott, Anne Archer and Eileen Brennan. Holden would go on to win an Emmy for his performance.
As “Knight” neared its debut date, the network was very clear about how it was going to air and that this series/story was finite. It was four hours only. Over. Done. (Though, later, the success of the original Holden series would inspire another TV movie-cum-TV pilot, also titled “The Blue Knight,” but this time starring George Kennedy in the lead. That movie beget a series that aired from 1975 to 1976 over CBS.)
The deployment of these four installments in this four-night manner was a rating success and proved that this new type of programming strategy could work. (Though, yes, some previous series like “Batman” and “Peyton Place” had already broken the one-ep-a-week norm.)
Still, this method of showing a program didn’t seem to inspire any immediate imitators though, today, it does seem to prefigure how many streaming-based series—from “Stranger Things” to “The Hunting Wives” and so many others—are today shared over such platforms as Netflix, Peacock, and Hulu, et.al. (Though, usually in those cases, those services drop all four, eight or 10 episodes at one time leaving it up to the viewer to choose to binge or not to binge.)
Then…less than a year later, the mini-series as we would eventually come to know it debuted.
In early 1974, ABC launched their six and one-half our “QB VII.”
In his recently published memoir, “Who Knew,” Barry Diller, who helped midwife the genre know as the “Movie of the Week” during his time with the ABC network, talks about his early desire to bring this type of long-form storytelling to the broadcast airwaves. He writes, “It seemed so natural to me, and I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been tried, other than it did break all the conventional rules…. I just barged ahead with that I provisionally called the ‘novel for television.’”
Diller had just read and enjoyed the Leon Uris novel “QB VII” and believed it would work perfectly as a test case. He added, however, “…I bought it as our first project…no one would sell me anything else. At that time, all successful books were sold to movie studios. No television network ever bought a novel.”
Though “QB VIII,” was a critically-acclaimed and best-selling book, it was hardly on a feel-good topic. It addressed various aspects of the Jewish Holocaust of WWII which might explain why it didn’t immediately get bought up by any of the major film studios.
Nevertheless, Diller and his network did press on and the six and one-half our production of the book was created and aired over two consecutive nights: April 29 and 30, 1974.
The program—which included a stellar cast of Ben Gazzara, Anthony Hopkins, Leslie Caron and, interestingly, Lee Remick—was a rating success and, later, got showered with Emmy nominations and wins.
The mini-series was born.
And though, perhaps, while both “The Blue Knight” and “QB VIII” have both of faded from our memories and histories, the mini-series soon became truly emboldened by two subsequent series produced shortly after: 1976’s “Rich Man, Poor Man” and 1977’s “Roots.” Both were also aired over ABC and, here too, both were adapted from well-respected written works. Their success, with critics and audiences, soon emboldened the mini-series genre.
Written works would go on to remain the most common source on which mini-series would be based. Sometimes they were taken from high-brow literary titles like “The Winds of War” or “The Thorne Birds,” while others came from other more pulpy novels by such glam authors as Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz. Mini-series became such audience grabbers that they were often held for airing during the networks’ all-important “sweeps months” when the nets wanted to gain their biggest ratings. (There was even, once, an all-comedy mini-series, a send up of the nighttime soaps called “Fresno”; it aired starred Carol Burnett among others and was broadcast in 1986.)
In time as well, the length and budgets of many mini-series became so extreme that calling them “mini-series” at all seemed like a misnomer. When “The Winds of War” (which clocked in at 14 hours of programming spread over seven nights) debuted in 1983, “People” magazine said it was less a “mini-series” than a “mega-movie.”
Though some network mini-series continued on until into the 1990s, as cable took off and streaming services began, and audiences splintered, those multi-night primetime Events (“Events” with a capital “E”) became fewer and fewer, crippled by diminishing viewers and their ever-increasing budgets.
Still, for many years, mini-series often presented the very best that TV had to offer. Later, vitally important titles within the genre included “Holocaust,” “Kennedy,” “Lonesome Dove,” the first “Shogun” and “Winds of War” sequel, “War and Remembrance.” Collectively they proved that good things can come in big packages.
