| Date | Event |
|---|
| January 12 |
The television series Dynasty begins a nine-year run on the ABC network. The prime time soap opera, described by New York Times television critic Tom Buckley as "An embarrassingly obvious knockoff of Dallas",[1] stars John Forsythe as Blake Carrington. Dynasty would be the #1 rated television program in the United States during the 1983–84 television season.[2] |
| January 15 |
Hill Street Blues, described as "one of the most innovative and critically acclaimed television shows in recent television history"[3] and a program that "set an entirely new standard for television drama"[4] debuts on NBC at 10:00 pm EST. |
| January 20 |
Former actor and governor Ronald Reagan is sworn in as President of the United States. It is the most watched presidential inauguration in American history.[5][6] |
| February 6 |
The cast of The Brady Bunch reunites for the television movie The Brady Girls Get Married. Although scheduled to be shown in its original full-length movie format, NBC at the last minute divides it into half-hour segments. NBC shows one part per week for three weeks, and the fourth week debuts a spin-off sitcom, titled The Brady Brides. This proves to be the only time the entire cast worked together on a single project, following the cancellation of the original series. |
| February 14 |
Funky 4 + 1 performs "That's the Joint" on NBC's Saturday Night Live. This makes them the first hip hop act to perform on primetime (late night) television. Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry hosts (and performs on) this episode, shortly after the release of "Rapture", which later hits the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, thus becoming the first number-one song to feature rap vocals. |
| February 20 |
Comedian Andy Kaufman disrupts sketches and starts a brawl while broadcasting during ABC's sketch series Fridays, an occurrence that was later disclosed to have been entirely staged.[7] |
| February 21 |
During an improvised segment at the end of a Saturday Night Live telecast on NBC, hosted by actress Charlene Tilton, Charles Rocket uses the word "fuck". As a result of the ensuing controversy, he is later fired, along with producer Jean Doumanian and most of his fellow cast members, bringing an early end to a season that had been heavily criticized and sunk in the ratings.[8] |
| February 27 |
The made-for-television film The Munsters' Revenge is broadcast on NBC. Based on 1964–1966 sitcom The Munsters, the film reunites original cast members Fred Gwynne, Yvonne De Carlo, and Al Lewis. This was the last production to be made with most of the original actors from the 1960s television series. |
| March 1 |
Miracle on Ice, a hastily made docudrama about the United States men's national ice hockey team's gold medal victory in the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York from the year prior, airs on ABC. The film stars Karl Malden as head coach Herb Brooks, Steve Guttenberg as goaltender Jim Craig, and Andrew Stevens as captain Mike Eruzione. This would not be the last time that the event, known as the "Miracle on Ice", would be depicted in a film. Twenty-three years later, Disney would release Miracle, which would star this time Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks. |
| March 4 |
CBS Sports pays $48,000,000 for the rights to broadcast the NCAA men's basketball tournament for three years, outbidding the NBC network, which had built the popularity of the playoffs since 1969. Bryant Gumbel would later comment, "I thought, How weird. We make the tournament a big deal and basically give it away."[9] |
| March 6 |
After a nineteen-year run, Walter Cronkite resigns as main anchorman of The CBS Evening News, and is succeeded the next Monday by Dan Rather. |
| March 9 |
Dan Rather begins a nearly twenty-four-year tenure as lead anchorman for the CBS Evening News, lasting until he would be pressured to retire on March 9, 2005.[10] |
| March 17 |
Norman Fell and Audra Lindley make their final appearances as Stanley and Helen Roper on the ABC sitcom Three's Company. |
| March 18 |
Independent television station KGCT-TV signs on the air in Tulsa, Oklahoma.[11] |
| The television show The Greatest American Hero premieres on ABC, starring William Katt as Ralph Hinkley, an ordinary teacher who is given super powers, but not the knowledge of how to control them. Less than two weeks later, after John Hinckley Jr. shot U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the character would be renamed "Ralph Hanley" for episodes already filmed, and then "Mr. H." for the rest of the season. The show's theme song, "Believe It or Not" (sung by Joey Scarbury) later became a hit single, rising to No. 2 on the Billboard Top 40. |
| March 20 |
The sitcom Dennis the Menace begins its first transmission in Ireland, when the series goes on the air on RTÉ Television. |
| March 30 |
An assassination attempt against President Ronald Reagan in Washington, DC, in which the President and several other people would be wounded, interrupts daytime soap operas on the three major networks (One Life to Live on ABC, As the World Turns (the same soap which was interrupted to announce the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963) on CBS and Another World on NBC) and CNN by 3 pm. Millions of viewers then witness footage of the shooting and the chaos that followed. ABC News is flooded with unconfirmed reports, which pesters the chief anchor Frank Reynolds, one of which falsely states that the President's press secretary James Brady had died in the shooting. This is also reported by Dan Rather at CBS News. Coverage of the assassination attempt continues for hours on the big three networks, and for two days on CNN. As a result, programmes such as General Hospital (then at its height of popularity) and The Edge of Night on ABC, Guiding Light, a daytime rerun of One Day at a Time, and a rerun of primetime series The White Shadow on CBS, and Texas on NBC are preempted for the day, while the Academy Awards would be postponed for a day. |
| NBC broadcasts its final NCAA Division I Basketball Championship Game, having done so since 1969. The tournament then moves to CBS the following year. Dick Enberg, Billy Packer, and Al McGuire called that game for NBC. |
| April 1 |
Berlinda Tolbert and Michael Jonas Evans makes their final appearances as Lionel and Jenny Willis Jefferson on the CBS sitcom The Jeffersons as series regulars. |
| A videotape is shown on CNN, reportedly made during a January 6, 1981 broadcast of The Dick Maurice Show, showing psychic Tamara Rand's appearance on the talk show seen on KTNV in Las Vegas, and her prediction of a March 30, 1981 event. On the tape, shown again the next day on NBC's Today and ABC's Good Morning America, Rand is seen telling Maurice that "the last few days of March or early April" would be "a crisis time" for U.S. President Ronald Reagan; that when she had the vision she felt "a thud" in her chest but that she also perceived "gunshots all over the place". Rand then added that "It has to do with somebody young and radical... The only thing I can attach to it is Humbley, and maybe Jack, or something like that."[12] Five days later, after the authenticity of the tape came into dispute, Rand and Maurice admits that the prediction sequence had been taped the day after the March 30 attempted assassination of Reagan by John W. Hinckley, Jr.[13][14][15][16][17] |
| April 11 |
Van Halen's lead guitarist Eddie Van Halen marries actress Valerie Bertinelli, who appears on the CBS sitcom One Day at a Time. |
| April 12 |
The Alpha Repertory Television Service (also known as ARTS) launches, right after the Nickelodeon time period. |
| April 21 |
"Weird Al" Yankovic makes his first television appearance on NBC's The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. |
| May 1 |
The season-four finale of Dallas, entitled "Ewing-Gate", airs on CBS. |
| May 5–14 |
The NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and Houston Rockets is broadcast on CBS. This is the last NBA Finals to be broadcast on tape-delay, with weeknight games airing after the late local news in most cities except in Boston and Houston. Games 3 and 4 are played back-to-back on Saturday and Sunday, May 9 and 10, to give CBS two live Finals games. Game 3 is the last Finals contest played on a Saturday until Game 5 in 2021. Game 4 tipps off at noon Central (1 pm Eastern/10 am Pacific) on Mother's Day for CBS to telecast golf following the game. Had Game 7 been played, it would have tipped off at 1 pm Eastern. All in all, the Finals drews a 6.7 rating, according to Nielsen Media Research. Consequently, this is the lowest-rated NBA Finals in history prior to 2003. |
| May 7 |
Stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld, of Massapequa, New York, performs for a national audience for the first time, introduced by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on NBC. His routine, taped in the evening, airs an hour into that night's show. Seinfeld's national television debut had been in 1980 on three episodes of sitcom Benson.[18] |
| May 15 |
The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island, the third and final made-for-television film that reunited the cast of the 1964–1967 sitcom Gilligan's Island, airs on NBC. |
| June 2 |
On ABC's 20/20, Barbara Walters asks Katharine Hepburn, "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" |
| June 24 |
The series finale of Charlie's Angels airs on ABC. |
| June 30 |
Fred Silverman is dismissed as president of NBC, after failing to improve that network's third-place rating, and is replaced by Grant Tinker. |
| July 4 |
Showtime ends its part-time status and inaugurates a 24/7 schedule. |
| July 10 |
The final episode of Sanford is broadcast on NBC. A sequel to the original 1972–1977 sitcom Sanford and Son, this officially marks the end of Redd Foxx's run as Fred G. Sanford. |
| July 29 |
A worldwide television audience of over 750 million people watches the Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul's Cathedral in London.[19] |
| August 1 |
The MTV network debuts on cable television, playing music videos 24 hours a day. "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles is the first video broadcast on the network. |
| August 9 |
Following a two-month-long players strike, Major League Baseball resums with the All-Star Game, from Cleveland on NBC. During the strike (which began on June 12 and lasted through July 31),[20] NBC used its Saturday Game of the Week time-slot to show a 20-minute strike update, followed by a sports anthology series hosted by Bruce Jenner[21] called NBC Sports: The Summer Season.[22][23] |
| August 14 |
The NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives broadcasts its 4,000th episode.[24] |
| August 15 |
The Eternal Word Television Network, devoted to spreading the Roman Catholic faith in the United States and founded by Mother Angelica, makes its cable television debut at 6:00 p.m. Central Time, on the date of the Feast of the Assumption. Based in Irondale, Alabama, EWTN would later become the largest religious cable network in the world by 2000, shown on 1,500 systems in 38 nations.[25] |
| August 30 |
In Baltimore, Maryland, CBS affiliate WMAR-TV swaps affiliations with NBC affiliate WBAL-TV, marking the first affiliation switch in that city. CBS cites weak ratings for WMAR-TV's newscasts and heavy pre-emptions of network programming for programs of local interest as the reason they chose to switch affiliations. (However, the NBC affiliation would return to WBAL-TV on January 2, 1995, with WMAR-TV switching to ABC, and WJZ-TV, which had been the city's only ABC affiliate at this point, switching to CBS.) |
| September 7 |
During the course of the year, several soap operas produced by Procter & Gamble changes title sequences and theme songs. On this day, new title sequences debuts for Another World on NBC and Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow, both on CBS. |
| The People's Court makes its syndicated television debut on thirty-nine television stations in the United States. Created by producer Ralph Edwards, the show presents real small claims court cases, with the litigants agreeing to dismiss court proceedings and to go before retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Joseph A. Wapner. Of the $800 provided by the producers for each case, the amount not awarded to the plaintiff ($750 maximum) would be divided evenly between both sides. The series' first case sees a landlady receive an award of $614.[26] |
| September 11 |
The Pee-wee Herman Show, a stage show starring Paul Reubens as his fictional comic character, Pee-wee Herman airs as a special on HBO. Taped at the Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, California, this marks one of the first significant appearances of the Pee-wee Herman character. The nightclub show notably has more adult humor than the later children's television series Pee-wee's Playhouse. |
| September 12 |
The Smurfs begins a nine-season run on NBC Saturday morning television.[27] |
| September 13 |
The 33rd Primetime Emmy Awards is broadcast on CBS. For the third consecutive year, the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series went to Taxi. The top show on the drama side was Hill Street Blues which, in its first season, tied the record for most major nominations (14) and wins (6) by a non-miniseries. NBC's Shōgun received eight major nominations, but only won one, for Outstanding Limited Series. Also, history was made when Isabel Sanford, star of The Jeffersons, became the first black woman to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. |
| September 14 |
Entertainment Tonight makes its syndicated debut in various television markets.[28] |
| September 26 |
Elvira's Movie Macabre, hosted by Cassandra Peterson, airs for the first time on KHJ-TV in Los Angeles. |
| September 28 |
WRGB in Schenectady, New York, NBC's first television affiliate, ends its forty-two-year relationship with the network (dating back to its days as experimental station W2XB) and swaps affiliations with CBS affiliate WAST, which changed its call letters to the current WNYT to mark the new affiliation. |
| September 29 |
Spectrum is initiated. |
| October 6 |
Priscilla Barnes makes her first appearance as Terri Alden on the ABC sitcom Three's Company. Alden was brought in as the full-time replacement for Chrissy Snow, following the departure of Suzanne Somers. Barnes would stay on Three's Company through the end of its run in 1984. |
| CBS broadcasts Return of the Beverly Hillbillies, which reunites most of the surviving cast members of the 1962–1971 sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. |
| October 8 |
Cagney & Lacey is first telecast as a made-for-television movie on CBS, and attracts a Nielsen rating of 42.[29] |
| October 10 |
SIN broadcasts the final of the 4th National OTI-SIN Festival live from the Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel in Miami Beach. |
| October 12 |
CBS Cable is initiated. |
| October 19 |
WPBT's news program Nightly Business Report becomes national, launching on over 125 public television stations.[30] |
| October 29 |
The situation comedy Gimme a Break! begins a six-season run on NBC, as one of the few new hit shows of the 1981–82 season.[31] |
| October 30 |
John Carpenter's 1978 horror film Halloween makes its broadcast network television premiere on NBC (the same day that its first sequel is released in theaters and the day before star Donald Pleasence guest-hosted NBC's Saturday Night Live). To fill the two-hour time slot, Carpenter filmed 12 minutes of additional material during the production of Halloween II. The newly filmed scenes[32] include Dr. Loomis at a hospital board review of Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis talking to a then-6-year-old Michael at Smith's Grove, telling him, "You've fooled them, haven't you, Michael? But not me." Another extra scene featured Dr. Loomis at Smith's Grove examining Michael's abandoned cell after his escape and seeing the word "Sister" scratched into the door. Finally, a scene was added in which Lynda comes over to Laurie's house to borrow a silk blouse before Laurie leaves to babysit, just as Annie telephones asking to borrow the same blouse. The new scene had Laurie's hair hidden by a towel, since Jamie Lee Curtis was by then wearing a much shorter hairstyle than she had worn in 1978. |
| October 31 |
The punk rock band Fear's appearance on Saturday Night Live includes a group of slamdancers, among them John Belushi, Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat (and later Fugazi), Tesco Vee of the Meatmen, Harley Flanagan and John Joseph of the Cro-Mags, and John Brannon of Negative Approach. The show's director originally wanted to prevent the dancers from participating, so Belushi offered to be in the episode if the dancers were allowed to stay. The result is the shortening of Fear's appearance on television. Fear played "I Don't Care About You", "Beef Bologna", and "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones", and started to play "Let's Have a War" when the telecast faded into commercial. The slamdancers left ripe pumpkin remains on the set. Cameras, a piano, and other property were damaged. |
| November 1 |
The NBC soap opera The Doctors broadcasts its 5,000th episode. |
| November 2 |
The CBS soap opera As the World Turns debuts a new opening sequence and theme song for the first time in its twenty-five-year history. |
| November 8 |
ESPN televises its first live flag-to-flag NASCAR race, the Atlanta Journal 500, which was won by Neil Bonnett. |
| November 9 |
The Incredible Hulk is cancelled immediately, despite and executive producer Kenneth Johnson's attempts to convince CBS to buy six additional episodes to fill season five. |
| November 11 |
Joan Collins makes her first appearance as Alexis Carrington Colby on the ABC drama Dynasty. During her stint with the programme, Collins would briefly bring back the popularity of women's wear with padded shoulders. |
| November 16–17 |
Luke and Laura's wedding on the ABC soap opera General Hospital becomes one of the most-watched weddings in American television history, second only to the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. |
| November 30 |
Financial News Network goes on the air. |
| December 6 |
NBC affiliate KARD in West Monroe, Louisiana, and ABC affiliate KTVE in El Dorado, Arkansas swaps affiliations.[33] |
| Interviewed by satellite in Tripoli by the ABC News program This Week With David Brinkley, Libya's President Muammar Gaddafi denies a U.S. State Department report that he had sent a "hit squad" to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Speaking in English, Gaddafi said "We are sure we haven't sent any people to kill Reagan or any other people in the world... if they have evidence, we are ready to see this evidence." He added, "How you are silly people! You are superpower, how you are afraid? Oh, it is silly this administration, and this president."[34] Despite rumors that a 5, 10 or 14 member death squad had landed in the U.S. the previous weekend, nothing was ever confirmed and no person was ever arrested or detained.[35] |
| December 11 |
KJAA in Lubbock, Texas, signs on the air as an independent station. It adopted its current call letters KJTV in 1985 and became a charter Fox affiliate the next year. |
| December 14 |
WFTS-TV in Tampa Bay, Florida, signs on the air as an independent station.[36] It eventually became a Fox station in 1988,[37] and an ABC affiliate via an agreement with Scripps-Howard in 1994.[38] |
| December 18 |
Raleigh's first independent station WLFL-TV goes on the air.[39][40] It became a charter Fox affiliate in 1986,[41] moving to The WB in 1998,[42] and finally with The CW in 2006.[43] |
| Tom Brokaw signs off from the NBC morning program The Today Show. Bryant Gumbel would succeed him as anchor some weeks later. Brokaw would go on to anchor NBC Nightly News with Roger Mudd for most of 1982, before becoming sole anchor. |
| December 19 |
KVEO-TV in Brownsville, Texas, signs on the air, returning primary NBC service to the Rio Grande Valley market for the first time since KRGV-TV in Weslaco left the network in 1976 to become a full-time ABC affiliate. |
| December 24 |
HBO begins broadcasting 24 hours a day. |
| December 25 |
Chuck Woolery hosts his last episode of the NBC game show Wheel of Fortune, quitting after a salary dispute with series producer and creator Merv Griffin. The next Monday, December 28, Pat Sajak beings hosting. |
| December 31 |
Cable News Network 2, later called CNN Headline News and now HLN, first appears on American cable television.[44] |