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A few galleries were redesigned in the 1990s including the Indian, Japanese, Chinese, iron work, the main glass galleries and the main silverware gallery which was further enhanced in 2002 when some of the Victorian decoration was recreated. This included two of the ten columns having their ceramic decoration replaced ...
The central garden was redesigned by Kim Wilkie and opened as the John Madejski Garden, on 5 July 2005. The design is a subtle blend of the traditional and modern, the layout is formal; there is an elliptical water feature lined in stone with steps around the edge which may be drained to use the area for receptions, ga...
In 2004, the V&A alongside Royal Institute of British Architects opened the first permanent gallery in the UK covering the history of architecture with displays using models, photographs, elements from buildings and original drawings. With the opening of the new gallery, the RIBA Drawings and Archives Collection has be...
Not only are all the major British architects of the last four hundred years represented, but many European (especially Italian) and American architects' drawings are held in the collection. The RIBA's holdings of over 330 drawings by Andrea Palladio are the largest in the world, other Europeans well represented are Ja...
As well as period rooms, the collection includes parts of buildings, for example the two top stories of the facade of Sir Paul Pindar's house dated c1600 from Bishopsgate with elaborately carved wood work and leaded windows, a rare survivor of the Great Fire of London, there is a brick portal from a London house of the...
The V&A holds over 19,000 items from the Islamic world, ranging from the early Islamic period (the 7th century) to the early 20th century. The Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, opened in 2006, houses a representative display of 400 objects with the highlight being the Ardabil Carpet, the centrepiece of the gallery. The di...
The Museum's collections of South and South-East Asian art are the most comprehensive and important in the West comprising nearly 60,000 objects, including about 10,000 textiles and 6000 paintings, the range of the collection is immense. The Jawaharlal Nehru gallery of Indian art, opened in 1991, contains art from abou...
The Far Eastern collections include more than 70,000 works of art from the countries of East Asia: China, Japan and Korea. The T. T. Tsui Gallery of Chinese art opened in 1991, displaying a representative collection of the V&As approximately 16,000 objects from China, dating from the 4th millennium BC to the present da...
The Toshiba gallery of Japanese art opened in December 1986. The majority of exhibits date from 1550 to 1900, but one of the oldest pieces displayed is the 13th-century sculpture of Amida Nyorai. Examples of classic Japanese armour from the mid-19th century, steel sword blades (Katana), Inrō, lacquerware including the ...
The smaller galleries cover Korea, the Himalayan kingdoms and South East Asia. Korean displays include green-glazed ceramics, silk embroideries from officials' robes and gleaming boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl made between 500 AD and 2000. Himalayan items include important early Nepalese bronze sculptures, repoussé ...
One of the great treasures in the library is the Codex Forster, some of Leonardo da Vinci's note books. The Codex consists of three parchment-bound manuscripts, Forster I, Forster II, and Forster III, quite small in size, dated between 1490 and 1505. Their contents include a large collection of sketches and references ...
Writers whose papers are in the library are as diverse as Charles Dickens and Beatrix Potter. Illuminated manuscripts in the library dating from the 12th to 16th centuries include: the Eadwine Psalter[citation needed], Canterbury; Pocket Book of Hours, Reims; Missal from the Royal Abbey of Saint Denis, Paris; the Simon...
The National Art Library (also called Word and Image Department) at the Victoria and Albert Museum collection catalog used to be kept in different formats including printed exhibit catalogs, and card catalogs. A computer system called MODES cataloging system was used from the 1980s to the 1990s, but those electronic fi...
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Word and Image Department was under the same pressure being felt in archives around the world, to digitize their collection. A large scale digitization project began in 2007 in that department. That project was entitled the Factory Project to reference Andy Warhol and to create a factor...
Not only the work of British artists and craftspeople is on display, but also work produced by European artists that was purchased or commissioned by British patrons, as well as imports from Asia, including porcelain, cloth and wallpaper. Designers and artists whose work is on display in the galleries include Gian Lore...
The galleries also link design to wider trends in British culture. For instance, design in the Tudor period was influenced by the spread of printed books and the work of European artists and craftsmen employed in Britain. In the Stuart period, increasing trade, especially with Asia, enabled wider access to luxuries lik...
One of the most dramatic parts of the museum is the Cast Courts in the sculpture wing, comprising two large, skylighted rooms two storeys high housing hundreds of plaster casts of sculptures, friezes and tombs. One of these is dominated by a full-scale replica of Trajan's Column, cut in half in order to fit under the c...
Well represented in the collection is Meissen porcelain, from the first factory in Europe to discover the Chinese method of making porcelain. Among the finest examples are the Meissen Vulture from 1731 and the Möllendorff Dinner Service, designed in 1762 by Frederick II the Great. Ceramics from the Manufacture national...
Many famous potters, such as Josiah Wedgwood, William De Morgan and Bernard Leach as well as Mintons & Royal Doulton are represented in the collection. There is an extensive collection of Delftware produced in both Britain and Holland, which includes a circa 1695 flower pyramid over a metre in height. Bernard Palissy h...
The glass collection covers 4000 years of glass making, and has over 6000 items from Africa, Britain, Europe, America and Asia. The earliest glassware on display comes from Ancient Egypt and continues through the Ancient Roman, Medieval, Renaissance covering areas such as Venetian glass and Bohemian glass and more rece...
The main gallery was redesigned in 1994, the glass balustrade on the staircase and mezzanine are the work of Danny Lane, the gallery covering contemporary glass opened in 2004 and the sacred silver and stained-glass gallery in 2005. In this latter gallery stained glass is displayed alongside silverware starting in the ...
The collection of drawings includes over 10,000 British and 2,000 old master works, including works by: Dürer, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Bernardo Buontalenti, Rembrandt, Antonio Verrio, Paul Sandby, John Russell, Angelica Kauffman, John Flaxman, Hugh Douglas Hamilton, Thomas Rowlandson, William Kilburn, Thomas Gi...
The costume collection is the most comprehensive in Britain, containing over 14,000 outfits plus accessories, mainly dating from 1600 to the present. Costume sketches, design notebooks, and other works on paper are typically held by the Word and Image department. Because everyday clothing from previous eras has not gen...
In 2002, the Museum acquired the Costiff collection of 178 Vivienne Westwood costumes. Other famous designers with work in the collection include Coco Chanel, Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, Guy Laroche, Irene Galitzine, Mila Schön, Valentino Garavani, Norman Norell, Norman...
The Soulages collection of Italian and French Renaissance objects was acquired between 1859 and 1865, and includes several cassone. The John Jones Collection of French 18th-century art and furnishings was left to the museum in 1882, then valued at £250,000. One of the most important pieces in this collection is a marqu...
There are a set of beautiful inlaid doors, dated 1580 from Antwerp City Hall, attributed to Hans Vredeman de Vries. One of the finest pieces of continental furniture in the collection is the Rococo Augustus Rex Bureau Cabinet dated c1750 from Germany, with especially fine marquetry and ormolu mounts. One of the grandes...
The jewellery collection, containing over 6000 items is one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of jewellery in the world and includes works dating from Ancient Egypt to the present day, as well as jewellery designs on paper. The museum owns pieces by renowned jewelers Cartier, Jean Schlumberger, Peter Car...
There are over 10,000 objects made from silver or gold in the collection, the display (about 15% of the collection) is divided into secular and sacred covering both Christian (Roman Catholic, Anglican and Greek Orthodox) and Jewish liturgical vessels and items. The main silver gallery is divided into these areas: Briti...
One of the rarest items in the collection is the 58 cm high Gloucester Candlestick, dated to c1110, made from gilt bronze; with highly elaborate and intricate intertwining branches containing small figures and inscriptions, it is a tour de force of bronze casting. Also of importance is the Becket Casket dated c1180 to ...
The Musical Instruments gallery closed 25 February 2010, a decision which was highly controversial. An online petition of over 5,100 names on the Parliamentary website led to Chris Smith asking Parliament about the future of the collection. The answer, from Bryan Davies was that the museum intended to preserve and care...
The collection includes about 1130 British and 650 European oil paintings, 6800 British watercolours, pastels and 2000 miniatures, for which the museum holds the national collection. Also on loan to the museum, from Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II, are the Raphael Cartoons: the seven surviving (there were ten) full ...
In 1857 John Sheepshanks donated 233 paintings, mainly by contemporary British artists, and a similar number of drawings to the museum with the intention of forming a 'A National Gallery of British Art', a role since taken on by Tate Britain; artists represented are William Blake, James Barry, Henry Fuseli, Sir Edwin H...
Several French paintings entered the collection as part of the 260 paintings and miniatures (not all the works were French, for example Carlo Crivelli's Virgin and Child) that formed part of the Jones bequest of 1882 and as such are displayed in the galleries of continental art 1600–1800, including the portrait of Fran...
One of the more unusual collections is that of Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of Animal Locomotion of 1887, this consists of 781 plates. These sequences of photographs taken a fraction of a second apart capture images of different animals and humans performimg various actions. There are several of John Thomson's 1876...
The sculpture collection at the V&A is the most comprehensive holding of post-classical European sculpture in the world. There are approximately 22,000 objects in the collection that cover the period from about 400 AD to 1914. This covers among other periods Byzantine and Anglo Saxon ivory sculptures, British, French a...
The collection of Italian, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical sculpture (both original and in cast form) is unequalled outside of Italy. It includes Canova's The Three Graces, which the museum jointly owns with National Galleries of Scotland. Italian sculptors whose work is held by the museum include: Bart...
Rodin is represented by more than 20 works in the museum collection, making it one of the largest collections of the sculptor's work outside France; these were given to the museum by the sculptor in 1914, as acknowledgement of Britain's support of France in World War I, although the statue of St John the Baptist had be...
Sculptors both British and Europeans who were based in Britain and whose work is in the collection include Nicholas Stone, Caius Gabriel Cibber, Grinling Gibbons, John Michael Rysbrack, Louis-François Roubiliac, Peter Scheemakers, Sir Henry Cheere, Agostino Carlini, Thomas Banks, Joseph Nollekens, Joseph Wilton, John F...
With the opening of the Dorothy and Michael Hintze sculpture galleries in 2006 it was decided to extend the chronology of the works on display up to 1950; this has involved loans by other museums, including Tate Britain, so works by Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein along with other of their contemporaries are now on view....
The collection of textiles consists of more than 53,000 examples, mainly western European though all populated continents are represented, dating from the 1st century AD to the present, this is the largest such collection in the world. Techniques represented include weaving, printing, quilting embroidery, lace, tapestr...
The tapestry collection includes a fragment of the Cloth of St Gereon, the oldest known surviving European tapestry. A highlight of the collection is the four Devonshire Hunting Tapestries, very rare 15th-century tapestries, woven in the Netherlands, depicting the hunting of various animals; not just their age but thei...
One of the earliest surviving examples of European quilting, the late 14th-century Sicilian Tristan Quilt, is also held by the collection. The collection has numerous examples of various types of textiles designed by William Morris, including, embroidery, woven fabrics, tapestries (Including 'The Forest' tapestry of 18...
The V&A Theatre & Performance galleries, formerly the Theatre Museum, opened in March 2009. The collections are stored by the V&A, and are available for research, exhibitions and other shows. They hold the UK's biggest national collection of material about live performance in the UK since Shakespeare's day, covering dr...
Conservation is responsible for the long-term preservation of the collections, and covers all the collections held by the V&A and the V&A Museum of Childhood. The conservators specialise in particular areas of conservation. Areas covered by conservator's work include "preventive" conservation this includes: performing ...
The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) (stylized in its logo as abc since 1957) is an American commercial broadcast television network that is owned by the Disney–ABC Television Group, a subsidiary of Disney Media Networks division of The Walt Disney Company. The network is part of the Big Three television networks. T...
ABC originally launched on October 12, 1943 as a radio network, separated from and serving as the successor to the NBC Blue Network, which had been purchased by Edward J. Noble. It extended its operations to television in 1948, following in the footsteps of established broadcast networks CBS and NBC. In the mid-1950s, ...
The television network has eight owned-and-operated and over 232 affiliated television stations throughout the United States and its territories. Most Canadians have access to at least one U.S.-based ABC affiliate, either over-the-air (in areas located within proximity to the Canada–United States border) or through a c...
In the 1930s, radio in the United States was dominated by three companies: the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the Mutual Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). The last was owned by electronics manufacturer Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which owned two radio networks that each ran d...
In 1934, Mutual filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding its difficulties in establishing new stations, in a radio market that was already being saturated by NBC and CBS. In 1938, the FCC began a series of investigations into the practices of radio networks and published its report o...
Once Mutual's appeals against the FCC were rejected, RCA decided to sell NBC Blue in 1941, and gave the mandate to do so to Mark Woods. RCA converted the NBC Blue Network into an independent subsidiary, formally divorcing the operations of NBC Red and NBC Blue on January 8, 1942, with the Blue Network being referred to...
Edward John Noble, the owner of Life Savers candy, drugstore chain Rexall and New York City radio station WMCA, purchased the network for $8 million. Due to FCC ownership rules, the transaction, which was to include the purchase of three RCA stations by Noble, would require him to resell his station with the FCC's appr...
ABC became an aggressive competitor to NBC and CBS when, continuing NBC Blue's traditions of public service, it aired symphony performances conducted by Paul Whiteman, performances from the Metropolitan Opera, and jazz concerts aired as part of its broadcast of The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street announced ...
A second period of international expansion is linked to that of the ESPN network in the 1990s, and policies enacted in the 2000s by Disney Media Networks (which included the expansion of several of the company's U.S.-based cable networks including Disney Channel and its spinoffs Toon Disney, Playhouse Disney and Jetix;...
The idea was to create a network of wholly and partially owned channels, and affiliates to rebroadcast the network's programs. In 1959, this rerun activity was completed with program syndication, with ABC Films selling programs to networks not owned by ABC. The arrival of satellite television ended the need for ABC to ...
The first attempts to internationalize the ABC television network date back to the 1950s, after Leonard Goldenson, following the United Paramount Theatres model, tried to use on ABC the same strategies he had made in expanding UPT's theater operation to the international market. Leonard Goldenson said that ABC's first ...
ABC currently holds the broadcast rights to the Academy Awards, Emmy Awards (which are rotated across all four major networks on a year-to-year basis), American Music Awards, Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade, Tournament of Roses Parade, Country Music Association Awards and the CMA Music Festival. Since 2000, ABC has a...
Since 1974, ABC has generally aired Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve on New Year's Eve (hosted first by its creator Dick Clark, and later by his successor Ryan Seacrest); the only exception was in 1999, when ABC put it on a one-year hiatus to provide coverage of the international millennium festivities, though Clark...
ABC's daytime schedule currently features talk shows The View and The Chew, and the soap opera General Hospital, the latter of which is the longest-running entertainment program in the history of the ABC television network, having aired since 1963. ABC also broadcasts the morning news program Good Morning America and h...
Sports programming is also provided on some weekend afternoons at any time from 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time (9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Pacific) and, during college football season, during prime time on Saturday nights as part of the Saturday Night Football package. Due to the erratic and (outside of college football s...
While its radio network was undergoing reconstruction, ABC found it difficult to avoid falling behind on the new medium of television. To ensure a space, in 1947, ABC submitted five applications for television station licenses, one for each market where it owned and operated a radio station (New York City, Los Angeles,...
In the fall of 1949, ABC found itself in the position of an outsider, with less coverage than two of its competing networks, CBS and NBC, even though it was on par with them in some major cities and had a headstart over its third rival at the time, the DuMont Television Network. Before the freeze ended in 1952, there w...
At the end of 1949, movie theater operator United Paramount Theatres (UPT) was forced by the U.S. Supreme Court to become an independent entity, separating itself from Paramount Pictures. For its part, ABC was on the verge of bankruptcy, with only five owned-and-operated stations and nine full-time affiliates. Its reve...
Leonard Goldenson, the president of UPT (which sought to diversify itself at the time), approached Noble in 1951 on a proposal for UPT to purchase ABC. Noble received other offers, including one from CBS founder William S. Paley; however, a merger with CBS would have forced that network to sell its New York City and Lo...
In 1952, when the release of the FCC's Sixth Report and Order announced the end of its freeze on new station license applications, among the issues the Commission was slated to address was whether to approve the UPT-ABC merger. One FCC Commissioner saw the possibility of ABC, funded by UPT, becoming a viable and compet...
The network's flagship owned-and-operated station, WJZ-TV in New York City (later re-called WABC-TV), signed on the air on August 10, 1948, with its first broadcast running for two hours that evening. ABC's other owned-and-operated stations launched over the course of the next 13 months: WENR-TV in Chicago signed on th...
The 1960s would be marked by the rise of family-oriented series in an attempt by ABC to counterprogram its established competitors, but the decade was also marked by the network's gradual transition to color. On September 30, 1960, ABC premiered The Flintstones, another example of counterprogramming; although the anima...
In 1959, Walt Disney Productions, having improved its financial situation, had purchased ABC's shares in the Disneyland theme park for $7.5 million and initiated discussions to renew ABC's television contract for Walt Disney Presents, which was due to expire in 1961. Walt Disney was approached by NBC to produce color b...
In 2000, ABC launched a web-based promotional campaign focused around its circle logo, also called "the dot", in which comic book character Little Dot prompted visitors to "download the dot", a program which would cause the ABC logo to fly around the screen and settle in the bottom-right corner. The network hired the T...
In 1998, the network began using a minimalist graphical identity, designed by Pittard Sullivan, featuring a small black-and-white "ABC Circle" logo on a yellow background (promotions during this time also featured a sequence of still photos of the stars of its programs during the timeslot card as well as the schedule s...
In 1983, for the 40th anniversary of the network's founding, ID sequences had the logo appear in a gold CGI design on a blue background, accompanied by the slogan "That Special Feeling" in a script font. Ten years later, in 1993, the "ABC Circle" logo reverted to its classic white-on-black color scheme, but with gloss ...
The 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of many graphical imaging packages for the network in which based the logo's setting mainly on special lighting effects then under development including white, blue, pink, rainbow neon and glittering dotted lines. Among the "ABC Circle" logo's many variants was a 1977 ID sequence t...
In 1962, graphic designer Paul Rand redesigned the ABC logo into its best-known (and current) form, with the lowercase letters "abc" enclosed in a single black circle. The new logo debuted on-air for ABC's promos at the start of the 1963–64 season. The letters are strongly reminiscent of the Bauhaus typeface designed b...
Between May and September 2005, rumors circulated that Disney–ABC was considering a sale of ABC Radio, with Clear Channel Communications and Westwood One (which had earlier purchased NBC's radio division, as well as the distribution rights to CBS's, and the Mutual Broadcasting System during the 1990s) as potential buye...
In 2004, ABC's average viewership declined by ten ratings points, landing the network in fourth place, behind NBC, CBS and Fox (by the following year, the combined season-ending average audience share of ABC, NBC and CBS represented only 32% of U.S. households). However, during the 2004–05 season, the network experienc...
Networks affiliates approved a two-year affiliate agreement in 2002. In September, Disney Chairman/CEO Michael Eisner outlined a proposed realignment of the ABC broadcast network day parts with the similar unit in its cable channels: ABC Saturday mornings with Disney Channels (Toon & Playhouse), ABC daytime with Soapne...
On April 30, 2000, as a result of a carriage dispute with ABC, Time Warner Cable removed ABC owned-and-operated stations from the cable provider's systems in four markets (WABC-TV in New York City, KABC-TV in Los Angeles, KTRK in Houston and WTVD in Raleigh-Durham). The network had earlier reached an eleventh-hour deal...
In addition to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the network entered the 2000s with hits held over from the previous decade such as The Practice, NYPD Blue and The Wonderful World of Disney and new series such as My Wife and Kids and According to Jim, all of which managed to help ABC stay ahead of the competition in the r...
In August 1999, ABC premiered a special series event, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, a game show based on the British program of the same title. Hosted throughout its ABC tenure by Regis Philbin, the program became a major ratings success throughout its initial summer run, which led ABC to renew Millionaire as a regula...
On July 31, 1995, The Walt Disney Company announced an agreement to merge with Capital Cities/ABC for $19 billion. Disney shareholders approved the merger at a special conference in New York City on January 4, 1996, with the acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC being completed on February 9; following the sale, Disney ren...
It was not until the 1965–66 season that color became the dominant format for the three broadcast television networks. ABC, meanwhile, remained in third place and still needed money to grow itself into a major competitor. However, ABC's issues with its transition to color became secondary compared to the network's fina...
On May 1, 1953, ABC's New York City flagship stations – WJZ, WJZ-FM and WJZ-TV – changed their respective callsigns to WABC, WABC-FM and WABC-TV, and moved their operations to facilities at 7 West 66th Street, one block away from Central Park. The WABC call letters were previously used by the flagship station of CBS Ra...
However, a problem emerged regarding the directions taken by ABC and UPT. In 1950, Noble appointed Robert Kintner to be ABC's president while he himself served as its CEO, a position he would hold until his death in 1958. Despite the promise of non-interference between ABC and UPT, Goldenson had to intervene in ABC's d...
At the same time he made attempts to help grow ABC, Goldenson had been trying since mid-1953 to provide content for the network by contacting his old acquaintances in Hollywood, with whom he had worked when UPT was a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. ABC's merger with UPT led to the creation of relationships with Holly...
Warner tried with mixed success to adapt some of its most successful films as ABC television series, and showcase these adaptations as part of the wheel series Warner Bros. Presents. Airing during the 1955–56 season, it showcased television adaptations of the 1942 films Kings Row and Casablanca; Cheyenne (adapted from ...
Walt Disney and his brother Roy contacted Goldenson at the end of 1953 for ABC to agree to finance part of the Disneyland project in exchange for producing a television program for the network. Walt wanted ABC to invest $500,000 and accrued a guarantee of $4.5 million in additional loans, a third of the budget intended...
In July 1968, ABC Radio launched a special programming project for its FM stations, which was spearheaded by Allen Shaw, a former program manager at WCFL in Chicago who was approached by ABC Radio president Harold L. Neal to develop a format to compete with the new progressive rock and DJ-helmed stations. The new conce...
On the television side, in September 1969, ABC launched the Movie of the Week, a weekly showcase aimed at capitalizing on the growing success of made-for-TV movies since the early 1960s. The Movie of the Week broadcast feature-length dramatic films directed by such talented filmmakers as Aaron Spelling, David Wolper an...
In the early 1970s, ABC completed its transition to color; the decade as a whole would mark a turning point for ABC, as it began to pass CBS and NBC in the ratings to become the first place network. It also began to use behavioral and demographic data to better determine what types of sponsors to sell advertising slots...
In 1970, ABC debuted Monday Night Football as part of its Monday prime time schedule; the program became a hit for the network and served as the National Football League (NFL)'s premier game of the week until 2006, when Sunday Night Football, which moved to NBC that year as part of a broadcast deal that in turn saw MNF...
In 1970, the FCC voted to pass the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, a set of regulations aimed at preventing the major networks from monopolizing the broadcast landscape by barring them from owning any of the prime time programming that they broadcast. In 1972, the new rules resulted in the company's decision ...
In April 1970, Congress passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act which banned cigarette advertising from all television and radio networks, including ABC, when it took effect on January 2, 1971. Citing limited profitability of its cinemas, ABC Great States, the Central West division of ABC Theatres, was sold to H...
In the early 1970s, Michael Eisner, who joined ABC in 1966, became the network's program development manager. He helped bring about ideas for many series including Happy Days (which originated as a segment on the anthology series Love, American Style), as well as several soap operas; however, Eisner's main credit at AB...
In the spring of 1975, Fred Pierce, the newly appointed president of ABC Television, convinced Fred Silverman to become the first president and director of programming of the independent television production subsidiary ABC Entertainment, created from the network's namesake programming division. In 1974, ABC premiered ...
The 1970s were highlighted by several successful comedy, fantasy, action and superhero-themed series for the network including Kung Fu, The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, Starsky & Hutch, Charlie's Angels, The Bionic Woman, Fantasy Island and Battlestar Galactica. Many of these series were greenlit by Silverman,...
For its part, the television network produced a few new hits during 1977: January saw the premiere of Roots, a miniseries based on an Alex Haley novel that was published the previous year; in September, The Love Boat, a comedy-drama anthology series produced by Aaron Spelling which was based around the crew of a cruise...
Meanwhile, ABC News, which formed as a newly separate division, sought to become a global leader in television news. In 1977, Roone Arledge was named president of the new ABC News in addition to being president of ABC Sports. That same year, ABC launched a major expansion of its office facilities in New York City. The ...
In June 1978, Arledge created the newsmagazine 20/20; after its first episode received harshly negative reviews, the program – which debuted as a summer series, before becoming a year-round program in 1979 – was immediately revamped to feature a mix of in-depth stories and interviews, with Hugh Downs appointed as its a...
In order to compete with CNN, ABC proposed a 24-hour news channel called ABC Cable News, with plans to launch the network in 1995; however, the plan would ultimately be shelved by company management. ABC would reattempt such a concept in July 2004 with the launch of ABC News Now, a 24-hour news channel distributed for ...
The Writers Guild of America strike that halted production of network programs for much of the 2007–08 season affected the network in 2007–08 and 2008–09, as various ABC shows that premiered in 2007, such as Dirty Sexy Money, Pushing Daisies, Eli Stone and Samantha Who?, did not live to see a third season; other series...
In early 2009, Disney–ABC Television Group merged ABC Entertainment and ABC Studios into a new division, ABC Entertainment Group, which would be responsible for both its production and broadcasting operations. During this reorganization, the group announced that it would lay off 5% of its workforce. On April 2, 2009, C...