Events
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| January 9 | Wendy's "Fluffy Bun" ad first airs, which propels Clara Peller and her "Where's the beef?" catchphrase to national prominence. |
| Something About Amelia, a powerful, sensitive look at incest, airs on ABC. Glenn Close, Ted Danson, and Roxana Zal are the stars. | |
| January 22 | During CBS' broadcast of Super Bowl XVIII, Apple Computer heralds the launch of its Apple Macintosh with the famous ad "1984", the only time it airs on national television. |
| January 23 | Hulk Hogan defeats The Iron Sheik to win his first World Wrestling Federation championship at Madison Square Garden; the match was televised on the MSG Network. |
| January 27 | Michael Jackson's hair catches fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. |
| February 28 | At the 26th Grammy Awards telecast on CBS, Michael Jackson wins a record-breaking eight Grammys. |
| May 18 | Bobby Ewing finds himself in the crossfire as a rival tries to gun down his brother J.R. on the season finale of Dallas. |
| May 19 | CBS tapes the Michael Larson episodes of Press Your Luck in which Larson wins $110,237 in cash and prizes. |
| July 14 | In what was known as Black Saturday, Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation takes over Superstation WTBS' Saturday evening time slot once occupied by Georgia Championship Wrestling. |
| September 10 | Jeopardy! returns to television in daily syndication with new host Alex Trebek. |
| September 14 | Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler host the first MTV Video Music Awards at New York's Radio City Music Hall, an event punctuated by Madonna's performance of "Like a Virgin." |
| September 24 | Super Password premieres on NBC at 12:00 Noon EST. The new incarnation of the classic game show is one of the few shows to survive at a time slot that normally broadcasts news on any of the three major networks, running for 4 1/2 years. |
| October 1 | Montana, the last state in the Union without its own PBS station, finally launches Montana PBS. |
| October 8 | NBC airs The Burning Bed, which stars Farrah Fawcett as a woman who kills her abusive husband. The fact-based film is the highest-rated entertainment event of the 1984-1985 season. |
| October 27 | Turner Broadcasting System launches the Cable Music Channel in the U.S., only to shutter it one month later. |
| November 12 | Theresa Saldana appears as herself in the NBC film Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story, a retelling of her 1982 stabbing incident and its aftermath. |
| December 17 | George C. Scott plays Ebenezer Scrooge in a new version of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, airing on CBS. |
| ABC purchases a majority stake of ESPN from Getty Oil. |
Read more about this topic: 1984 In American Television
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
““The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)