| Date |
Event
|
| January 1
|
In Dayton, Ohio, the decade begins with an affiliation swap between NBC affiliate WDTN and ABC affiliate WKEF-TV; the swap is reversed in 2004.
|
| January 25
|
Black Entertainment Television launches in the United States as a block of programming on the USA Network; it won't be until 1983 that BET becomes a full-fledged channel.
|
| February 1
|
After 29 years on the air, the soap opera Love of Life airs its 7,316th and last episode on CBS.
|
| February 3
|
Bob Hope's Overseas Christmas Tours, a two-part six-hour retrospective of Bob Hope's more than 30 years of entertaining at military bases and hospitals in the U.S. and abroad, airs on NBC.
|
| February 4
|
On CBS, The Young and the Restless airs its first one-hour long episode.
|
| February 8
|
Eric Braeden makes his first appearance as Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless.
|
| February 11
|
CBS broadcasts a very special episode of the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati about the real life deadly gate-rushing incident that occurred at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati on December 3, 1979 prior to a performance by The Who.
|
| February 14
|
On CBS, Walter Cronkite announces his retirement from the CBS Evening News, which takes effect in March 1981.
|
| February 22
|
ABC Sports announcer Al Michaels delivers his now immortal line "Do you believe in miracles?! Yes!" in the closing moments of the Winter Olympic medal-round men's ice hockey game between the United States team and the heavily favored Soviet team.
|
| February 24
|
Polly Holliday makes her final appearance as Florence Jean "Flo" Castleberry on Alice. Holliday would continue playing Flo in the character's own spin-off, which aired on CBS for two seasons.
|
| March 16
|
The first regularly scheduled use of closed captioning on American network television occurs on ABC, with captions of spoken dialogue added to programming received through a decoding unit attached to a standard TV set.[1] The first broadcast to use it was the 1977 movie Semi-Tough.
|
| March 21
|
On the season finale of Dallas on CBS, J. R. Ewing is shot by an unseen assailant, leading to the catchphrase "Who shot J.R.?".
|
| March 24
|
The late night ABC News program The Iran Crisis–America Held Hostage is officially rechristened as Nightline.
|
| March 24
|
WCGV-TV signs on the air as an independent station in Milwaukee. It went on to affiliate first with Fox in 1987, then to UPN in 1995 and finally MyNetworkTV in 2006. It was shut down in 2018.
|
| March 31
|
In Jacksonville, Florida, NBC affiliate WTLV, in search of stronger programming, swaps affiliations with ABC affiliate WJKS. The swap will be reversed in 1988.
|
| April 5
|
Hawaii Five-O airs its series finale on CBS.
|
| April 7
|
The Oldest Living Graduate, a live drama on NBC, is broadcast; the first such program on the network since 1962. The production is aired from Southern Methodist University and stars Henry Fonda, George Grizzard, and Cloris Leachman.
|
| April 9
|
The Madison Square Garden Sports Network is officially rechristened as the USA Network.
|
| April 11
|
WMDT in Salisbury, Maryland signs on, giving the Delmarva Peninsula market its first full-time ABC affiliate. It also takes WBOC-TV's secondary NBC affiliation, leaving WBOC-TV as a full-time CBS affiliate.
|
| April 19
|
Actor Strother Martin guest hosts an episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live in what turns out to be his final television appearance prior to his death on August 1, 1980.
|
| April 29
|
The NFL draft is televised for the first time on ESPN.
|
| May 6
|
Ron Howard (Richie Cunningham) and Donny Most (Ralph Malph) leave the cast of ABC's Happy Days as regulars, following the episode "Ralph's Family Problem". When Happy Days returns in the fall, Henry Winkler (The Fonz) is given top billing in the opening credits.
|
| May 10
|
Al Franken delivers his "A Limo for a Lame-O" commentary on Saturday Night Live. During the Weekend Update segment, Franken attacked network president Fred Silverman for NBC's poor showing in the Nielsen ratings during his tenure.
|
| May 11
|
The Return of the King, an animated adaptation of the third and final volume of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, airs on ABC after a legal challenge filed by the Tolkien Estate and Fantasy Films was settled.[2]
|
| May 24
|
NBC airs The Not Ready For Prime Time Players' final episode on Saturday Night Live, after five seasons.
|
| CBS broadcasts Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals[3] between the Philadelphia Flyers and the New York Islanders.[4][5] The Saturday afternoon game is the first full American network telecast of an NHL game since Game 5 of the 1975 Stanley Cup Finals aired on NBC, and the last NHL game on American network television until NBC televises the 1990 All-Star Game.[6][7]
|
| June 1
|
The Cable News Network (CNN) begins broadcasting.
|
| June 20
|
Hollywood Squares presents its 3,536th and final network telecast on NBC, ending a 14-year daytime run; it remains the second-longest-running daytime game show in the network's history, behind the original 1958–73 run of Concentration. Two other NBC game shows, High Rollers and Chain Reaction, end their runs on this date as well.
|
| Vanna White makes her first appearance on a game show via The Price Is Right, in which she was among the first four contestants.[8][9] She did not make it onstage, but the clip of her running to Contestants' Row was rebroadcast as part of The Price Is Right 25th Anniversary Special in August 1996[10] and also was featured on the special broadcast Game Show Moments Gone Bananas.
|
| June 23
|
The David Letterman Show debuts on NBC. Letterman's humor does not go over well with a morning audience, and the show is canceled in October. Letterman would stay at NBC and go on to host a late night show on the network two years later.
|
| June 30
|
The ABC game show Family Feud moves from airing at 11:30 am ET to 12:00 noon. It is one of the few network daytime shows to survive at noon, a time slot where many stations preempt network fare for local news broadcasts.
|
| July 4
|
The Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA launch a three-month strike against television and movie studios. The strike greatly delays US networks' fall seasons (some shows don't see their fall debuts until late October or November, if not much later), and prompts a union boycott of the 1980 Emmy Awards in September. The unions would ratify a new deal on October 25 to officially end the strike.
|
| August 1
|
Ending a failed experiment, the NBC soap opera Another World airs its last regularly scheduled ninety-minute episode. The show returns to sixty minutes on August 4, allowing room for a spin-off, Texas, based around Beverlee Mckinsey's Another World character, Iris Cory Carrington.
|
| The 24/7 cable movie network Cinemax launches.
|
| August 28
|
Joan Lunden makes her debut as co-host of ABC's Good Morning America alongside David Hartman. Lunden, who was succeeding Sandy Hill, would remain on the program through 1997.
|
| September 1
|
In Atlanta, Georgia, long-time NBC affiliate WSB-TV swaps affiliations with ABC affiliate WXIA-TV, citing a stronger affiliation (at the time, NBC is in last place among the three major networks). Over the summer, in preparation for the switch, both stations had conducted an experiment unusual for a market Atlanta's size: WXIA-TV aired NBC's daytime programs in the morning and ABC's afternoon programs, and vice versa for WSB-TV.
|
| September 7
|
The Primetime Emmy Awards air on NBC. The ceremony was held while a strike by members of the Screen Actors Guild was in progress; in a show of support for their union, 51 of the 52 nominated performers boycotted the event.[11] Powers Boothe was the only nominated actor to attend.
|
| September 15–19
|
The five–part historical drama miniseries Shōgun is broadcast on NBC.
|
| September 28
|
The PBS documentary Cosmos, hosted by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, premieres. It deals with scientific topics like biology, chemistry, and linguistics, but primarily focuses on astronomy, Sagan's field of study.
|
| October 4
|
Bob Costas[12][13] makes his debut calling Major League Baseball games for NBC. It was a backup game (the primary game involved the Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos) involving the New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers from Yankee Stadium.
|
| October 20
|
Piedmont Triad independent station WGNN-TV changes its name to WJTM-TV following its purchase by TVX Broadcast Group, to avoid confusion with WGN-TV.
|
| October 26
|
KOKI-TV signs on the air as an independent station in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
|
| October 28
|
Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter participate in their sole presidential debate. It was the most watched presidential debate until 2016.
|
| November 2
|
The CBS comedy Archie Bunker's Place begins its season with the episode "Archie Alone", in which Archie Bunker grieves over the death of wife Edith (prompted by Jean Stapleton's departure from the series). Carroll O'Connor's performance in this episode earns him a Peabody Award.
|
| November 15
|
Saturday Night Live premiers its sixth season on NBC with a new cast and new writers under the reins of Lorne Michaels' replacement Jean Doumanian, to widespread negative reviews.
|
| November 18
|
Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters (Barbara, Louise and Irlene Mandrell) makes its debut on NBC, with a special guest appearance by Dolly Parton. The show was the last variety show on network TV with over 40 million viewers.
|
| The start of Season 6 of the ABC sitcom Laverne & Shirley sees the titular characters relocating from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Burbank, California after losing their brewery jobs.
|
| Suzanne Somers makes her final "full" appearance in an episode of the ABC sitcom Three's Company. Her remaining seven appearances would be cameos in the episode's closing tag in which Chrissy would call from her parents' home in Fresno to speak with Jack or Janet, who would sometimes fill Chrissy in on what happened in the episode.
|
| November 19
|
CBS bans a controversial Brooke Shields Calvin Klein Jeans ad because, according to CBS, the commercial was ‘too suggestive.’ The ad featured the 15-year-old Shields saying: ‘You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.’
|
| Nancy McKeon makes her debut as Jo Polniaczek in the Season 2 premiere of The Facts of Life on NBC.
|
| November 20
|
Donna Mills makes her first appearance as the villainous Abby Cunningham on the CBS prime time soap opera Knots Landing.
|
| November 21
|
The mystery of "Who Shot J.R.?" is solved on Dallas; the revelation that Sue Ellen Ewing's sister Kristin Shepard (played by Mary Crosby) was responsible draws a record number of viewers.
|
| November 22
|
Eddie Murphy made his first Saturday Night Live appearance, appearing in a non-speaking role in the sketch "In Search Of The Negro Republican".
|
| WPDE-TV in Florence, South Carolina signs on, giving the Pee Dee market its first full-time ABC affiliate.
|
| November 30
|
Tanya Roberts joins the cast of Charlie's Angels (replacing the departed Shelley Hack) for what would be its final season.
|
| December 8
|
On ABC, Howard Cosell announces the murder of former Beatle John Lennon in the closing seconds of a Monday Night Football game between the Miami Dolphins and New England Patriots. NBC also reports the murder of Lennon, interrupting The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for a news bulletin.
|
| December 20
|
NBC Sports broadcasts the New York Jets 24–17 season-ending victory over the Miami Dolphins without announcers, the only time that has ever been done with an NFL game.
|
| December 24
|
WVGA in Valdosta, Georgia signs-on the air and targets the neighboring Albany market, giving that market its first full-time ABC affiliate.
|
| December 30
|
After 26 years on the air, 20 of which were on NBC, the network announces that the long-running anthology Disney's Wonderful World will not be on its fall 1981 schedule; however, the show will be picked up by CBS.
|
