Almost literally world-shaking: 1989 World Series Game 2!
The Best of Both Worlds Part I: I saw this back in 1990 and it was one of those monumental moments when tv serves as a landmark in one's life. To this day I am still in awe of it. It also deserves special praise because television series every season since then has been doing those season finale cliffhangers and they've all tried outdoing it but never being able to. And shows like Family Guy have paid homage to it.
I don't know about that one. Season finale cliffhangers were big in the '80s after "Who shot J.R.?" TNG was not even in the top 30 tv programs, it wasn't really on the radar for mainstream viewers. As I recall, "Who killed Laura Palmer?" was a bigger deal in the media that summer, and even that wasn't worth big ratings numbers.
I can remember many news and sports events that generated a lot of talk (Nixon walking out to the helicopter, the Iran hostages and "Nightline", the 1980 "miracle" Olympic hockey game, Joe Thiesmann's leg breaking on Monday Night Football, the Challenger, OJ's low-speed chase...) but I'm having trouble coming up with pivotal single moments in fictional tv, like Sammy and Archie in the OP. But here are a few thoughts.
Roots not only made the mini-series into a commercial and critical force to be reckoned with, it also personalized the African-American experience in a way that many in the US would never have been exposed to otherwise. It stripped away some of the
Gone With the Wind-type gloss over slavery and revealed it for the de-humanizing practice it was. I remember my grandparents, who had lived all their lives in all-white western small towns, being riveted and very moved by the series.
I think David Letterman really changed tv in the '80s, but most people didn't know it at the time because his show was on so late, and there wasn't much talk about it. His attitude was basically "The entertainment business is phony, everybody knows it, so why even pretend it's not phony?" This seems like an obvious approach today, but it was really a change at the time and deflated a lot of the show biz aura of respectability that was still attached to television.
The Larry Sanders Show, The Daily Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm and other programs where celebrities are the butt of jokes that the audience are in on owe a lot to
Late Night With David Letterman. If there was a moment that marked the change, it might be Letterman's disruption (by megaphone) of an outdoor
Today Show taping, which started a long feud with Bryant Gumbel.
I believe the "NBC pilot" story arc on
Seinfeld, especially pitching a "show about nothing," got the audience to look behind the scenes think about what could be done with mainstream television comedy, and started a move away from the standard formulaic "family, wisecracking kid and wacky neighbor" sitcoms, which were still huge at the time. Seinfeld was the last really big "water cooler" show in my experience.
The Sopranos, toward the end, came close, but tv is so much more fragmented than it was in the early '90s.
One show that I often refer to is
Hill Street Blues. Its 1981 pilot episode is a masterpiece, and it was serving notice: This is a different kind of cop show. It looked different, with shaky handheld cameras and documentary-style, sometimes dim lighting. It sounded different, with overlapping and passing dialogue competing with phones, typewriters, and the babble of a busy — almost chaotic — squadroom. Instead of squared-away crime solving professionals like on some cop shows, the detectives wore cheap and rumpled wardrobes and looked like they hadn't had enough sleep. Instead of being a smoothly operating crime-fighting machine, the people in this police station disagree with each other and don't mind saying so. The captain was obviously competent, but then his ex-wife showed up and started yelling at him because his child support check bounced. But the moment that really made an impact was when the young, likable patrol partners who had been featured throughout the episode were gunned down in cold blood for simply walking into the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, that show didn't make a dent in the US tv audience, in fact it was the lowest-rated plot NBC ever picked up. But when HSB dominated the next Emmy awards, people began to notice. Not mainstream viewers, maybe, but anyone who knew anything about writing for tv.
Homicide, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Deadwood and many others are the descendants of that one hour of television.
--Justin
I will list only one show........
BUT saying "Best of Both worlds" shook the world of tv is silly. I wasnt around during All in The Family when it was breaking barriers but Im still well aware of it. Next Gen was not on any major network and not in all markets. It was not seen by as many. Yeah it may have shook our private fan world but I dont think thats the intention of the OP.
