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TV Moments that Shook the World

Sheesh most of the moments listed have happened int he last 10 years. How old is everyone here 25? Most of the really shocking stuff happened well before that. You guys arent trying hard enough, except for Masteroforion.:lol: I will list only one show........

-All in the Family, this show dealt with Rape, menopause, bigotry etc. That show alone shook the world its first couple seasons. It broke alot of tv barriers in the very early 70's. It most definitely shook the world.
 
Sheesh most of the moments listed have happened int he last 10 years. How old is everyone here 25? Most of the really shocking stuff happened well before that. You guys arent trying hard enough, except for Masteroforion.:lol: I will list only one show........

-All in the Family, this show dealt with Rape, menopause, bigotry etc. That show alone shook the world its first couple seasons. It broke alot of tv barriers in the very early 70's. It most definitely shook the world.

Excellent-just what I was aiming for!
 
I was thinking about this thread while doing the washing up (the way you do). And it occurred to me that Sex and the City might actually deserve a mention as an important cultural moment.

I'm not a huge fan of the show, and think it has some major problems, but it got millions of women unabashedly talking about sex, and gave them a vocabulary in which to do it without having to hedge hopelessly about with euphemisms. I reckon that's worth something.

Good point. I don't watch it but it did do what you said.
 
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
 
What's wrong with being 25?

:(



Nothing. But much of the "Shook the world moments" of tv happened way before you were born. You guys are listing stuff that wasnt ground breaking or world shaking. "Best of Both Worlds" for example was great but it didnt shake the foundations of the general tv viewing public. Many people of your generation and even mine have never seen it. But All in The Family was seen by my generation (though I was only 1 when it first aired) the previous generation and even yours now. Its widely know.
 
Sure, the moon landing was (for example, among many, many others) a moment that shook the world. But it didn't shake my world. I wasn't even alive then. Better to have someone else list and describe it than to accept my secondhand (or thirdhand) report of how it was important.

As to your query about age, I suspect a good portion of the posters here are under 25, as I am. But don't worry, I'll be old soon enough. :p
 
Sure, the moon landing was (for example, among many, many others) a moment that shook the world. But it didn't shake my world. I wasn't even alive then. Better to have someone else list and describe it than to accept my secondhand (or thirdhand) report of how it was important.

As to your query about age, I suspect a good portion of the posters here are under 25, as I am. But don't worry, I'll be old soon enough. :p



Again Im not ripping on you guys for being 25 or younger.:) 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.:lol: Find something that shook your world in your time, yes, but just not a small contingent of fans of a tv show.

I will say this about TNG thouigh, yes it was regarded as having good special effects and stories, yes it was mentioned on shows like Saturday Night Live. But It still seems to me that the only people who really watched the show religously were TREK fans. I dont remember anyone back in the day watching it who wasnt a Trek fan and talking about 'Best of Both Worlds" the next day.
 
On a more personal note (I'm sure this didn't really "change the world") but seeing Thomas Magnum, my childhood hero, shoot Ivan in cold blood (because the bastard REALLY deserved it) was really shocking to then-school-kid me. Awesome as HELL, but...shocking.

You beat me to Magnum. Didn't change the world but sure as hell changed the way I looked at TV. Totally shocking and totally in charactor for one of my favorite TV guys. And also brilliant writing that really took guts from the writers/producers.

TV Moments really shock the world are probably pretty limited.

TV Coverage of Vietnam.
JFK's assasination, and then Lee Harvey Oswald's murder


TV Moments That Shock My World is a different story.

Watching political conventions on TV back when they were more than coronations of nominations alreday in the bag.

Magnum and Ivan as noted.

Challenger disaster.

Death of Henry on MASH.

Newhart. Best Show Ending EVER.
 
Has Larry David ever apologized for the awful way he ended Seinfeld? That was seriously an awful way to end a show of that stature.
 
I'm going to add an odd one : TNG's Redemption cliffhanger, when taken together with the attempt that same summer by Soviet hard-liners to overthrow Gorbachev. While US-Russia is still tense now, instead of the renewal of that Cold War, it proved to be its denouement, as the coup simply fell apart, much as Lursa and Be'tor's did, about a month later. ST had predicted the future before, but this was like a Spaceballs 'Now'.
 
Don't remember the first commercial to do this, but mentioning a competitor.

It simply WASN'T DONE on television for the first 20 years. You NEVER mentioned other brand names.

#1 must be the moonlanding.

In fictional television:

Henry's death on M*A*S*H.

The Maude abortion episode when she makes her decision.

Everyone (except Ted) getting fired on the last episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Killing off the father (John Amos) on Good Times.

The first appearance of Mork from Ork on Happy Days.

Will think of more later.

--Ted
 
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