A television special is a television program which interrupts or temporarily programming normally scheduled for a given time slot. Sometimes, however, the term is given to a telecast of a theatrical film, such as The Wizard of Oz or The Ten Commandments, which is not part of a regular series of such anthology series as NBC Saturday Night at the Movies (1961–1978).
The term originally applied especially to major dramatized presentations of an hour or two which were broadcast during times normally occupied by episodes of one or more weekly television series, thus replacing the series for that specific week. In the 1960s, multi-part specials, over several days in a week, or on the same day for several weeks, evolved from this format, though these were more commonly called miniseries. The term "TV special" formerly applied more to dramas or musicals presented live or on videotape (such as Peter Pan) than to filmed presentations especially made for television, which were (and still are) designated as made-for-TV movies.
Other forms of TV specials are one-time comedy or musical events, one-shot seasonal programs (e.g. Christmas television specials), irregular sports events (e.g. the Olympic Games or the Super Bowl), live coverage of a popular cultural event (such as the Academy Awards or Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade) or spontaneous interruptions of active programming to cover an important news event (election coverage, however, is generally scheduled).
Famous quotes containing the words television and/or special:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“Navarette, a Chinese missionary, agrees with Leibniz and says that “It is the special providence of God that the Chinese did not know what was done in Christendom; for if they did, there would be never a man among them, but would spit in our faces.””
—Matthew Tindal (1653–1733)