TV Guide

No, I don’t have a peg for this post beyond the fact that I have the information and couldn’t put it anywhere else. But I came across an article about a poll TV Guide took, back in the days when TV Guide was quite wonderful. The poll was of TV station program directors around the U.S., and the goal was to find out which movies were most popular on television – which ones played most often, which ones viewers liked to see over and over. Of course the results of a poll like this don’t absolutely reflect which movies viewers liked best, because the most popular movies were often the ones that didn’t play over and over; films like The Wizard of Oz and The Sound of Music aren’t on this list because they were valuable enough to be shown only once a year on the big networks. And some studios drove hard bargains even for black-and-white movies that were particularly popular (this would explain why none of the Universal monster movies are on the list; TV stations would definitely have wanted to show Frankenstein as often as they could, but it was probably more expensive than most). Still, the list does reflect what you were likely to see on TV at the time, and it explains why a number of these movies were constantly referenced by people who grew up in that era.

TV Guide has published its “Top 100 [U.S.] episodes of all time” list (you can see it reproduced here among other places; the official episode-by-episode countdown is going on at the official site). It’s kind of a depressing list, because most of it was clearly arrived at merely by taking the name of a very famous or popular show and picking the episode that the writers, and/or readers, were most likely to have heard of.