The medium at its peak of attention
By 1967, television was the central entertainment of most households in the United States and Britain. In America, three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, shared a very large audience, and what was on prime time on a given evening was often what everyone talked about the next day. The programmes were wide-ranging: westerns, family comedies, spy adventures, variety hours and a growing amount of news and documentary. A steady switch to color television during the decade made the screen feel newer and more vivid, and by the autumn of 1967 most prime-time network programmes in the United States were in color.
Popular series of the year
Much of the schedule was gentle, and the biggest hits were often the most conventional. Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. were among the long-running successes of the period. Alongside them, a more adventurous strand developed.
I Spy, which paired Robert Culp with Bill Cosby, was notable for having a Black actor as a co-lead in a weekly drama, and Cosby won Emmy Awards for it. The Monkees, a comedy built around a manufactured pop group, won the Emmy for outstanding comedy series in 1967, and the Monkees television band also produced hit records. Mission: Impossible continued as a popular espionage series.
In science fiction, the original Star Trek entered its second season in September 1967. It did not draw huge ratings at the time and was in danger of cancellation, but its mixed crew and its willingness to use space adventure to discuss contemporary issues made it a talking point, and it later became one of the best-known series ever made.
A one-off event was the final episode of The Fugitive, broadcast on ABC on 29 August 1967. It revealed the identity of the man who had killed the hero’s wife, and it drew one of the largest television audiences in American history up to that time.
Britain and the wider world
In Britain, the BBC’s serial adaptation of The Forsyte Saga was a major success in early 1967, with many viewers arranging their Sunday evenings around it. BBC Two began regular colour broadcasting in July 1967, with the Wimbledon tennis championships among its first colour programmes. In September, ITV broadcast the first episode of The Prisoner, created by and starring Patrick McGoohan, a surreal thriller about a former secret agent held in a strange coastal village. It has since been analysed by critics as an allegory of individuality and surveillance, though audiences at the time were often baffled.
On 25 June 1967, the programme Our World linked broadcasters in many countries through satellites in what is generally described as the first live international television broadcast of its kind. The Beatles took part in it, singing “All You Need Is Love” before an audience estimated at several hundred million. For many viewers, it was the first time television felt genuinely global.
Variety shows and the limits of the networks
The most revealing conflict of the year came from comedy. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, hosted by Tom and Dick Smothers, premiered on CBS in February 1967, on Sunday evenings against NBC’s Bonanza. The brothers were folk-singing comics with a mild, sibling-squabbling act, and few at the network expected the show to challenge anyone. But within a few months, it was running sketches and inviting guests that touched on the war, drug use, race and the generation gap, and it became popular with younger viewers.
Trouble followed with the network’s censors, who objected to certain material. One well-known dispute concerned the folk singer Pete Seeger. He had been blacklisted from network television for years, and when he sang the anti-war song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” for the show in September 1967, CBS cut it. It was eventually broadcast in February 1968 after public argument. The relationship between the brothers and CBS continued to deteriorate, and the network cancelled the show in 1969. The affair is usually seen as an early public test of how much dissent a mass-audience network would allow.
Another variety format was the Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which broadcast a special in September 1967 before starting its regular run in early 1968. The Doors performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1967, and it is reportedly said that Jim Morrison sang a lyric he had been asked to change, though accounts vary on the details.
The war in the living room
Television news was changing too. The Vietnam War was the first major war to be shown regularly on American television, and commentators later spoke of a “living-room war.” In 1967, reporters filed from the field, and film of combat and its aftermath reached viewers within days. Coverage of the Vietnam War escalation was generally supportive of American aims in the early part of the year, but a growing minority of reports raised doubts, and the Tet Offensive of early 1968 sharpened them. Public opinion about the war was shaped by many things, and historians still debate how large television’s role was.
Another change came in November, when President Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, creating the framework that later produced public television and radio in the United States. It was a quieter event than the Fugitive finale, but it expanded what the medium could offer.
What these shows tell us
The classic television shows of 1967 show a medium that was cautious and ambitious at once. Familiar comedies and westerns still dominated, but a few programmes, whether by accident or design, began to talk to a younger audience about things the networks had often avoided. The tension between those two impulses defined much of the television of the following years.